The Probability Broach, chapter 18
Win’s airship has arrived at the capitol city of the North American Confederacy:
Gallatinopolis, geographic and political center of North America, is a crusty little patch of buildings surrounded by an entire planet of wheat fields. A lone highway stretches from the south: Greenway 200, an emerald ribbon in a sea of gold departing northward until it’s covered with a springy mutated moss.
As they disembark, Win is in a gloomy mood. He and Lucy made it, but their friends Clarissa and Ed are gone, kidnapped by the bad guys en route. If they’re not already dead, they’re hostages, and Madison will be sure to use them as bargaining chips to sway the upcoming congressional meeting in his favor. (So much for “the hostage kills you“.)
This section recounts a little of the NAC’s fictional history. In its early days, as Americans expanded westward, the capitol moved with them, but not to a fixed location. It wandered all over the country for years, switching from one city to another. Often, wherever the president lived was treated as the capitol by default. Finally, it was “dumped” at a fixed location in the Dakota Territories, at the exact geographical center of the continent.
Given the huge skyscrapers and other advanced technology he’s seen in this world, Win was expecting something with more gravitas. But the NAC’s capitol looks like a primitive backwater town. It’s all rustic shacks and slapdash buildings, with few creature comforts:
I snorted. “This is progressive, modern, space-age Gallatinopolis?”
“This is miserable, backward, rustic Gallatinopolis. Ain’t it swell?”
I eventually learned not to look down at my feet: the city is preserved exactly as it was eighty-seven years ago—its chief and only industry the much-to-be-despised operation of occasional government. The place looks like a mining boom town: tarpaper shacks ready to burn given thirty seconds of warm weather and a mild breeze, streets narrow runnels of churned mud—but frozen, under two inches of transparent plastic.
Win asks Lucy why it’s in the middle of nowhere and why it looks like this:
“To make it just as inconvenient as possible to everyone! If Tucker’d had his way, the poxy thing’d be in Siberia! Government needs to be tiresome. Folks think twice before they agree to come up here. We’ve met only six times since the capital was moved. That’s six times too many, but anarchy takes practice.”
(“Tucker” is Benjamin Tucker, a socialist anarchist who served as president of the NAC in Smith’s alternate history.)
This isn’t an aside; it’s a key fact about L. Neil Smith’s political philosophy. The North American Confederacy is an anarchist society with only a vestigial government. It has a legislature, but it can’t make laws as we understand them, only recommendations with no coercive power. And even at that, Smith situates the capitol out in the boonies, far from all major population centers, so that it’s as inconvenient as possible for Congress to get together and meet.
This makes it difficult for the government to get tyrannical ideas and start oppressing people, which is presumably the point. However, it also means that in a crisis, there’s a built-in disincentive to action. If the NAC is facing a threat, it’s essentially impossible for it to respond in an organized way. As we’ll see, that’s exactly how things play out.
This doesn’t cross Smith’s mind, because it’s central to his ideology that there are evils that arise from too much government, but no evils that arise from too little. He says so in the fictional quote that opens this chapter:
I am less concerned with good and evil than with freedom and non-freedom. Good and evil may both exist within a free society, But given sufficient time, all that remains under tyranny is evil.
We seek only a consistent application of the principle of liberty, without exception, without excuse, without compromise. We do not promise infallibility, but are determined, against the trend of six thousand years of human history, to make our errors on the side of individual rights.
—Albert Gallatin
Rule of Reason
That sounds very noble and principled. But it runs smack into collective-action problems: situations in which, when each individual makes the self-interested choice, it produces bad consequences for everyone.
There are many examples of this, which I’ve been discussing as we go through the book. I previously wrote about quarantine to fight pandemics; about air and water pollution; about the Dust Bowl, which arose from destructive overfarming; and about irrigating the desert and how to settle the question of water rights.
Most of all, there’s the question of emergencies. If a natural disaster was bearing down on the NAC, or a hostile foreign power was massing its forces to invade, what would they do? How could they muster the organization to respond to a danger that threatened every citizen, when they’ve intentionally made it as difficult as possible to do so?
We never see any large-scale emergencies of that kind in this book. Smith stacks the deck in his favor, writing the plot so that his fictional society never faces a disaster beyond its ability to overcome.
But the real world isn’t so obliging. Nuclear reactors melt down and spread contamination; hurricanes and tsunamis flood coastal settlements; earthquakes shake the ground; volcanoes erupt and wildfires burn; and even the most peaceful country sometimes gets bombed or invaded by a larger, imperialist power through no fault of its own. At times like these, people – including libertarians – quickly rediscover the advantages of having a competent, efficient government to muster defenses, coordinate emergency responders, set up shelters, distribute aid, and take charge of evacuation.
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This is also an idea in L. Frank Baum’s Sky Island: the eponymous kingdom has a monarch with near-absolute power but they live in a miserable hovel without even servants so nobody wants the job.
It’s much more engaging an idea in a children’s book.
Sounds a lot like early descriptions of Washington DC. Built in a disease infested swamp because of a compromise, there were very few buildings in the beginning.
I mean, the general idea of making it difficult for the government to do things is a good one with a long history, although it also has a long history of being difficult to maintain it that way. The entire concept of the separation of the branches of government into executive, legislative, and judicial was to reduce the ability of the government to be tyrannical because any one branch could in theory be brought to heel by the other two. And I’ve commented in the past that, to all appearances, one of the primary functions of the Roman Senate back in the pre-Imperial days was to get all the rich families who thought they should be running things in one place so they’d be so busy arguing with each other that the day-to-day running of things could be left untouched.
That said, the Roman Republic also had an ‘appoint a temporary dictator’ setup to deal with emergencies. Which lasted until Julius Caesar used his coup to get himself appointed temporary dictator to deal with the general ’emergency’ of the structural problems the Republic had, problems which couldn’t actually be solved (especially not by any one man) without dismantling much of the Republic, and as a result his term as dictator didn’t end until he was killed, and things continued into decline after Octavian/Augustus decided to not even bother with the pretense that the position was going to remain temporary.
Government is not an easy problem to do right, because something like it is required at some level to deal with unexpected situations, but at the same time its existence is a way for people who actively seek power over others to obtain it. Any workable government has to be able to stymie anybody who’s just in it for themselves, but unfortunately that requires more than just rules (since there is no such thing as a set of rules that can’t be gamed), it requires most of the people in the government to actually be dedicated to making it work properly and being able to push back on problems, and that requires that the population in general not think of the government as ‘the other’, and that the barrier to entry for those getting into politics not be high. Everybody is a stakeholder in the government, and when your average person thinks their stake begins and ends with voting, and indeed often doesn’t even go that far, problems start.
The Reagan attitude of ‘the government is the problem’ is a self-fulfilling prophecy, because it helps prevent people who actually want to fix the problems from considering getting into the government as a potential solution.
And Reagan didn’t even apply it consistently or sincerely. Unelected bureaucrats were bad!!! except at the CIA and the FBI where the crimes that became common knowledge in the 1970s were no big deal, according to Reagan, we can trust those unelected bureaucrats for sure.
I mean, of course he didn’t apply it ‘consistently’ because ‘unelected bureaucrats are bad’ was never the actual guiding principle. The actual principle was closer to ‘unelected bureaucrats who do good things for people who aren’t us are bad’, with mildly varying definitions on who counted as ‘us’.
Well put
…and as a result [Julius Caesar’s] term as dictator didn’t end until he was killed, and things continued into decline after Octavian/Augustus decided to not even bother with the pretense that the position was going to remain temporary.
What do you mean by “decline” here? Rome never went back to being a Republic (not that it was really ever much of one); but as an empire it was still growing, long after Augustus died, and didn’t really start to “decline” in any way until some time after Marcus Aurelius or thereabouts.
That’s a really interesting point. I never made that connection before – when the barriers to entry for a political career are high, only the rich and well-connected can do it, and that makes ordinary people feel as if the government doesn’t represent them (because it probably doesn’t).
At least here in Toronto that’s a point that has been made explicitly at the municipal level: City Councilors are to be paid enough to take it as a full-time job without needing any other source of wealth or income. This was something that actually hit the news back when Rob Ford was running for mayor and on one of his rants about waste at City Hall and the various things that councilors got as benefits such as free transit passes (never mind that the amount of money spent on councilor offices is a tiny fraction of the city’s budget, or that giving incentives for people at City Hall to personally know what the transit system was like would be a good thing): we actually wanted many people to be able to be active politically. Nobody is going to get rich just by being a councilor either, but it’s a decently-paying job rather than something only the idle rich can do.
How well that sort of thing actually works is a different question, of course. (Rob Ford himself came from a rich family, hence why he could complain about other people’s expenses and declare that he wasn’t going to make use of any of the benefits without it being an imposition on him.) And in practice it rarely works on anything higher than the municipal level. But it is a stated goal of the system, at least in this particular metropolis.
This is a point that’s come up in a couple of city governments I’ve reported on. None of them make councilor a full time job but it’s been arguing more money would make it easier for a single parent who needs to pay babysitters to attend meetings (for example).
It seems to me that if you really distrust government, you might want to keep it in the open as much as possible, so that it’s under observation.
I recall a study that suggested that states with capitals in out of the way spots had more problems with graft than states with capitals in bigger cities.
Found it! Here’s a link https://journalistsresource.org/wp-content/uploads/2012/05/CorruptionStatesMay12merged.pdf
“We show that isolated capital cities are robustly associated with greater levels of corruption across US states. In particular, this is the case when we use the variation induced by the exogenous location of a state’s centroid to instrument for the concentration of population around the capital city. We then show that different mechanisms for holding state politicians accountable are also affected by the
spatial distribution of population: newspapers provide greater coverage of state politics when their audiences are more concentrated around the capital, and voter turnout in state elections is greater in places that are closer to the capital.”
Great find on that study!
I wonder if putting the seat of government in a distant region makes representatives feel as if they’re far from scrutiny, so they’re more willing to engage in corruption. Or, just skimming this study, it sounds like they’re arguing it actually disincentivizes journalists from traveling there to cover them, so it’s not a feeling of secrecy but a reality.
No problem. I love that kind of “natural experiment” study, so I remembered it. I think you’re right – the bad behavior is due to the reality of limited observation by the press.
Most countries – and most regional subdivisions of the largest countries – have only one or two major population centers (and sometimes an additional small city or two) which are nearly always located on the edges, either on the coast or whichever river/lake acts as one of the borders. The usual justification for moving the capital “out in the boonies” is, by putting it in a central location, it is capable of serving the entire country/state/province/whatever equally, rather than focusing mostly on the major metro area that it’s located in. In practice, often the only change is that whatever metro area it was originally located in gets neglected just as much as everywhere else. Which is, I suppose, part of what happened here.
(Since I should probably clarify: by “major population center” I mean a large city and its suburbs, and by “small city” I mean ones which are mostly or entirely separate from those big metros.)
In general, large cities are either on the coasts or on major rivers purely for transportation and access reasons. Got to get food and supplies in and crap out somehow.
In Canada, the national capital is in Ottawa specifically because it was on the border between Upper and Lower Canada (now Ontario and Quebec) and thus English and French Canada. That location was chosen purely for political reasons, in that putting the capital on the border was to make sure that the French minority could feel like they had access to the government. Of course, since the border between the two was the Ottawa River, a major river that drains into the St. Lawrence Seaway, it was easy to get access, and the Ottawa-Gatineau area has been pretty regularly either the fourth or fifth largest city in the country.
Honestly Canada is just plain weird from that sort of standpoint of how cities normally form and the sort of tree structure that usually links villages to local towns to big cities. Of the top ten cities (by metropolitan area), only two of them are on the coast: Vancouver at third and Quebec City at seventh. Five of them (Toronto at first, Montreal at second, Ottawa at fourth, Hamilton at ninth, and Kitchener-Waterloo-Cambridge at tenth) are along the Great Lakes-St. Lawrence Seaway or other rivers that drain directly into it. The two largest cities are both in the eastern half of the country and unusually close. Now some of this is politics (of the two largest cities, one is primarily English and the other primarily French, so that’s why they could each grow despite being relatively close) and some of it is geographical (Quebec City may be on the coast, but it’s also on a big cliff face and its primary use was as a choke point at the mouth of the St. Lawrence river to control trade upstream; Montreal had much better harbours as an island further up a very wide river) but Canada is still one of the countries that looks least like your mathematically ideal population growth pattern.
“To make it just as inconvenient as possible to everyone! If Tucker’d had his way, the poxy thing’d be in Siberia! Government needs to be tiresome…”
English kings made government as inconvenient as possible for local colonial officials. That was one of the Founders’ stated reasons for waging a war of independence in 1776. But now Smith is saying such incessant burdens are a GOOD thing? We’re in self-parody territory here, and there’s how many chapters left…?
Also, is moving the seat of NAC government to Siberia really an option? Siberia is famous for…Gulags — miserable hellhole prison camps where tyrants (Tsarist and Stalinist) sent dissidents to endure the same winters that wiped out French and German armies. Why would libbidy-loving anarchists consider sending their own (toothless) government to such a place? Maybe this was just kidding, but it’s hard to tell in a story like this. (Or maybe all their unregulated industries caused enough global warming that Siberia was a more pleasant place?)
I had no trouble taking that as a joke, even in this mess of a book.
The capital is preserved as it was 87 years ago. Does the book explain who pays for this anywhere? The original preservation would take some money and keeping it that way would take some from time to time, often increasing over time as building standards change and the originals get older.
Who enforces the preservation? To keep it preserved somebody would have to be in charge of deciding what changes, renovations and fixes are compatible with the preservation, which changes can’t be avoided and where the original should be kept even if inconvenient.
I have a sneaking suspicion that the “87 years” part is a bit of a joke, since 87 years is “Four Score and Seven” – a quote from a speech by one of Smith’s least favorite people