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.

New reviews of The Probability Broach will go up every Friday on my Patreon page. Sign up to see new posts early and other bonus stuff!

Other posts in this series:

• The Probability Broach