The Probability Broach: Search and seizure

An official (handwritten) court order

The Probability Broach, chapter 15

This chapter opens with another of Smith’s fictional quotes put in the mouths of real historical figures. This one is attributed to Sequoyah (who in real life was the inventor of the Cherokee syllabary, but wasn’t an anarchist political theorist as Smith labels him).

“Are two people healthier than one person? Are two wiser? Then why believe they have more rights? History’s sadness is that sanity, wisdom, justice—the very qualities that make us human—are not additive, while one’s brute animal ability to do another injury, is. Two people are, tragically, stronger than one. Stripped to naked truth, that is the basis for all government, dictatorial or democratic. Can we not do better?”

—Sequoyah Guess
Anarchism Understood

Can two people be wiser than one? Yes! Was that even controversial?

It can go either way, to be fair. There’s such a thing as mob mentality, but there’s also such a thing as the wisdom of crowds. As a libertarian, you’d think Smith would be in favor of that: it’s always been proposed as an explanation for why free markets work, how it can be true that individual ignorance combines to produce a collectively rational result.

The wisdom of crowds is also why nations are governed by legislative bodies rather than kings, and criminal trials have a jury rather than leaving the verdict in the hands of a single random individual. There’s always a risk that one person will make a bad decision because of bias, ignorance or some other idiosyncratic reason. With a larger group, it’s more likely that individual prejudices and whims cancel each other out to produce a reliable result.

Back to the plot: Ed, Win and Lucy have assembled at Lucy’s house (“I’d counted eight cats so far, one sleeping in Lucy’s bony lap, another making his way up the difficult north face of Ed’s shoulder. I was trying to keep a kitten from perching on my head”) to discuss their meeting with John Jay Madison, a.k.a. Manfred von Richthofen, the Red Baron. It turns out Lucy remembers him from the Prussian war—they fought on opposite sides:

“The Red Knight of Prussia himself,” Lucy declared. “‘Twas his Flying Circus put me afoot back in thirty-eight. Never forget it—there we were: The Pensacola an’ the Boise flankin’ my Fresno Lady, bearin’ northeast outa Cologne. They—”

“But that’d make him at least—”

“Ninety-six,” Ed said.

(Lucy, meanwhile, is 136. The North American Confederacy has life-extension technology, so no one finds this odd.)

Win wants to know why Madison was addressing Lucy as “Your Honor”. She admits that she helps mediate an argument now and then for “catfood money”:

“Pay attention,” Ed warned, “she’s being modest. Lucy’s a highly respected adjudicator and member of the Continental Congress.”

… “A distinction,” Lucy intoned, “utterly without distinction. Congress hasn’t met in thirty years, and I’m hopin’ like crazy it won’t ever have to again.”

Ed and Win are hatching a plan to break into Madison’s place and search for concrete proof of his world-domination scheme. Since Lucy holds an official position with the NAC, Win asks if she could get them a search warrant, so they can do this in an above-board way. But, of course, she can’t:

“Winnie, I got no official capacity. Nobody does, not even the president of the Confederacy. She only rides herd on the Continental Congress, if and when… What you and Ed are planning is unethical, immoral, and—”

“Fattening?”

“I was about to say, illegal—if we were the legislatin’ kind, which we ain’t. You two get shot up in there, nobody’s gonna say a thing. Madison’ll be within his rights. Or, he could sue you right down to your bellybutton lint.”

“Well, what are we supposed to do while he’s taking over the planet?”

“Son, we gave up preventive law enforcement long before we gave up law.”

What Lucy is saying is that in the NAC, even if you have knowledge that someone is plotting a crime, there’s nothing you can do but stand by and watch until they actually commit it. Attempted murder isn’t an offense; only murder is. (This world runs on Sideshow Bob logic.)

In our world, if you’re shot and narrowly survive, there’d be a police report. You could describe the vehicle that the shots were fired from, testify that one of the attackers named someone named Madison as the ringleader. Detectives would collect forensic evidence from the scene. All of this would provide probable cause for a judge to grant a search warrant, which could either turn up further evidence or clear the suspect’s name.

Also, if the police find evidence that someone is planning a serious crime—let’s say, holding secret meetings where they discuss a plot to kidnap and kill a sitting governor—they can be arrested for that. (That’s called criminal conspiracy.)

You don’t have to sit on your hands and wait for a would-be criminal to actually hurt someone before anyone takes any action. Smith denigrates this as “preventive law enforcement”, but isn’t that what we should want? Police who prevent crime from happening, rather than just punishing the perpetrators after the fact?

Meanwhile, in the NAC, the protagonists can’t legally do anything at all. A criminal can plot their crime in exacting detail without having to fear any consequences. Even to investigate a serious crime that’s already occurred, you have to break the law by trespassing in the suspect’s home. (When police are outlawed, only outlaws will be police!)

Their only chance, as Ed explains, is to break in to Madison’s house and find something that retroactively justifies their doing so. He can sue them for burglary, but they can countersue for a bigger crime. He’ll end up owing them way more money, and potentially getting exiled if he can’t pay. Win describes this as, “The end justifies the means”—all things considered, a frightening attitude for a cop to hold.

This goes to show that “total freedom” isn’t a political position that benefits everyone equally. It’s a much bigger advantage for those with evil intentions.

The way that L. Neil Smith writes his anarcho-capitalist world, it’s not just that they don’t have police or law enforcement; it’s that the legal system actively forbids these activities, even if carried out by private parties. The ordinary evidence-gathering and investigating that law enforcement would normally engage in are against the law here. Anyone who attempts them is risking death or a punishing lawsuit.

Meanwhile, activities that would be serious felonies in our world are perfectly legal and allowable. You can recruit conspirators, plot crimes, threaten people, stockpile weapons—and nobody can do anything to stop you.

This is a good argument for the importance of the Hobbesian social contract. We all agree to surrender some freedoms, in exchange for the protection of a state that’s supposed to keep us safe from those who’d do us harm. Ironically, the plot Smith wrote furnishes a good illustration of why this bargain of civilization is worth making.

Image credit: Library of Congress

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:

New on OnlySky: American brain drain

I have a new column this week on OnlySky. It’s about the scientific brain drain that’s overtaking America.

There’s an exodus of educated people currently taking place in the United States. Policy advisors and researchers with STEM degrees are leaving federal government jobs en masse, whether because of layoffs, budget cuts, or voluntarily quitting in protest of anti-scientific policies. Research scientists and professors are leaving the country entirely, heading for safer harbors like the EU, Canada or even China where they perceive they’ll find more stability and greater freedom for their work.

The consequences of this self-destructive politics will linger for a long time to come. Our policymaking will suffer for it, as the government loses its most qualified advisors. Scientific and technological progress won’t grind to a halt, but the U.S. will no longer be the place where it happens. Increasingly, we’ll be in the position of paying for discoveries made elsewhere, rather than being the ones to originate and profit from them.

Read the excerpt below, then click through to see the full piece. This column is free to read, but members of OnlySky also get special benefits, like member-only posts and a subscriber newsletter:

Whatever may happen in the future, the second Trump administration has done massive, long-lasting damage to the cause of science and technology in America. The federal government was once an ally to scientific research, but Trump and his cronies have turned it into an enemy.

They’ve turned anti-science wreckers loose at once-respectable institutions like the CDC, demolishing decades of evidence-based policy and rewriting scientific guidelines on a whim. They put a drug-addled sociopathic billionaire in charge of the federal workforce, firing thousands of workers according to his erratic whims. They’ve decimated budgets for basic research to give tax cuts to the rich and withheld federal grants to punish universities that don’t toe the line.

Last but certainly not least, Trump and his thuggish ICE stormtroopers are harassing and persecuting immigrants, and that includes immigrant scientists. Faced with the prospect of brutal arrests, violence and arbitrary detention, legal residents are making the rational choice to depart the country for safer harbors elsewhere.

Continue reading on OnlySky…

The Probability Broach: Who cares about the Bill of Rights?

A close-up of the founders' signatures on the Constitution

The Probability Broach, chapter 14

Win, Ed and Lucy are face-to-face with John Jay Madison, the mastermind who’s responsible for the repeated assassination attempts that Win has been dodging ever since he arrived in this world.

And Madison doesn’t care whether they know it or not. Although he offers rote denials that he had anything to do with the attacks, he leers at them with superficial politeness that disguises barely concealed malice. He relishes the chance to taunt them, knowing they have no proof:

He rose, thrust his hands in his pockets, and paced, almost talking to himself, his eyes intent on some other place, some other time. “Inevitably, your investigations will reveal that my real name isn’t John Jay Madison. I was born Manfred, Landgraf von Richthofen. Quite a mouthful, isn’t it? It was, at one time, a name and family of some influence in Prussia, and of not inconsiderable wealth. The War changed that, of course. So, with perhaps a false start or two, I came to America to repair my fortunes.”

He spread his arms. “As you can see, I have, to a certain extent, accomplished that. I changed my name because John Jay and James Madison were, in my view, men of merit, of historical importance to both my homeland and this organization—certainly very American, something I was determined to become and rather easier to pronounce.”

He remarks that he almost named himself after Alexander Hamilton, but decided against it:

“I should have adopted his name, had I dared. I assure you it is held in the esteem it deserves, elsewhere in the System—still, I must be able to buy groceries without arousing counterproductive passions…

Though you may disagree with what I believe, nevertheless I insist on being allowed to believe it, unmolested.”

There’s a tension here which Smith alludes to, but doesn’t resolve.

On the one hand, he’s insistent that in the North American Confederacy, people have total freedom. Everyone can believe, speak and act as they see fit, so long as they don’t harm others. No one is harassed or oppressed because of their opinions. The vast majority of NAC citizens respect these implicit rights, even though there’s no law forcing them to do so.

On the other hand, in this passage, he admits (reluctantly?) that you can be so unlikable that people will ostracize you and refuse to do business with you. And as he said earlier, that’s effectively a death sentence in a society with no safety nets of any kind.

This shows that, even if the author doesn’t want to admit it, an anarcho-capitalist world wouldn’t be a haven of unfettered free speech. It would have a strong drive toward conformity. Everyone would have a natural incentive to fall in line with the dominant opinions of their community, their landlord, or their employer. Whoever you’re dependent on to supply you with the stuff of life, that person would have immense power over you. Why risk pissing them off by being a gadfly?

Arguably, a world with a comprehensive state safety net is more free for this reason. People can say what they wish, safe in the knowledge that their survival doesn’t depend on pleasing the nearest rich guy. No one can snap their fingers and deprive you of food, housing or health care. If there’s a mob at your door, there are (at least theoretically) police you can call who will come and protect you, even if they dislike you.

Some countries, though not the U.S., go even farther in the pursuit of individual rights by instituting employment contracts which guarantee that an employer can only dismiss you for good cause. You can’t be fired just because your boss doesn’t like your face.

Ostensibly to prove he has nothing to hide, Madison gives them a tour of his house—an enormous, rambling mansion that’s more like a museum. There are artifacts from wars and other political events through the decades that the Hamiltonians played a part in. Win notices one especially significant exhibit:

In a sort of chapel, spread like a Bible in a helium-filled glass altar, lay the Constitution of the United States. “We, the People, in order to form a more perfect Union…”

There wasn’t any Bill of Rights.

This is a peculiar line for L. Neil Smith to include.

Obviously, readers are supposed to take this as further proof of Madison’s evil. He wants to conquer the world and impose centralized government, and he venerates the Constitution as symbolic of this. His (presumably deliberate) exclusion of the Bill of Rights shows that his hunger for power isn’t counterbalanced by any concern for people’s rights and freedoms.

But why does Smith think it makes any difference whether it’s there or not?

Lest we forget, Smith described the Constitution as a villainous conspiracy foisted upon an unconsenting nation. He denounced it as an intolerable infringement on freedom, so thoroughly corrupt that it couldn’t be reformed; it had to be scrapped and the country started over from scratch. Those who were responsible for writing it fared little better: George Washington was executed by firing squad, and Alexander Hamilton fled into disgraceful exile.

When you start from that perspective, why does it matter if there’s a Bill of Rights? He’s argued throughout this book that government is evil, full stop. But the fact that Madison, the actual villain of this novel, dislikes the Bill of Rights… doesn’t that imply that maybe the Constitution wasn’t as all-around bad as Smith wants us to think?

This is something he otherwise never concedes: that there can be degrees of government. Maybe, just maybe, it’s possible to have a government which actually values and protects its citizens’ rights, and this is preferable to a government which makes no such guarantees.

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:

New on OnlySky: Protecting secularism in religious enclaves

I have a new column this week on OnlySky. It’s about how we can protect church-state separation in areas dominated by one particular sect of believers.

As religion declines all around the world, the most determined faith groups are retreating into their own isolated enclaves where they try to live apart from everyone else. This isn’t inherently a problem if it’s truly voluntary, but when a particular sect is the majority in one place, they very often try to punish outsiders and dissenters and write their beliefs into law.

Two such cases are playing out in America right now. In one town, an orthodox sect is trying to dismantle the public school system and force taxpayers to pick up the tab, creating a legal nightmare that could take years to untangle. But progress is possible, as seen in another pair of towns where democracy has triumphed and formerly oppressed cult members are emerging from theocratic darkness into the light.

Read the excerpt below, then click through to see the full piece. This column is free to read, but members of OnlySky also get special benefits, like member-only posts and a subscriber newsletter:

The idea of the Benedict Option is that Christians should (metaphorically or literally) retreat into the wilderness. They should pull back from a secular culture that they’ve failed to conquer, and isolate themselves in their own enclaves where they can live and raise their children as they see fit.

They frame this as keeping their morals and values intact. But the none-too-subtle implication is that they want to control everything their children see and hear. They want to ensure they don’t have to compete with pesky differing viewpoints. In that sense, it’s an admission that fundamentalist views can’t survive contact with diversity.

Obviously, the Benedict Option was proposed in a particular Christian context. Not everyone is taking their cues from this idea. But conservative religious communities of all kinds are independently following similar lines of thinking.

Continue reading on OnlySky…

The Probability Broach: Meet the big bad

The "all seeing eye on the pyramid" from US dollar bills

The Probability Broach, chapter 14

Win’s investigation of the people trying to kill him has hit one dead end after another. The only remaining clue, extracted under torture from one of the hitmen, is that the ringleader is someone named Madison. He grumbles about this with his friends:

“Well,” I answered glumly, “how do we find this Madison character, put an ad in the paper?”

Deejay looked up from her steak. “That wouldn’t be John Jay Madison?”

“Dunno, honey,” Lucy replied. “All we know is he’s the brains behind Hamiltonianism here in Laporte. You know a Madison?”

“Not really, but there’s one giving weekly lectures in the History and Moral Philosophy Department. My engineers were talking about it—something about the War in Europe from the Prussian point of view.”

It turns out Madison isn’t only not hiding, he’s in the phone book. His name and address are listed there, cross-referenced with the name of his group, the Alexander Hamilton Society (which we know is the evil organization behind the attacks on Win, because the assassins wore jewelry with the eye-in-the-pyramid logo). Somehow, not one but two detectives overlooked that incredibly obvious lead.

Win, Ed and Lucy go to pay Madison a visit:

So it happened that we glided up to the front gate of a mansion that made even Ed’s place look seedy, a Georgian monstrosity with a dozen sequoia-size columns and twice that number of marble steps leading to the door. We were greeted by a huge uniformed servant with close-cropped steel-gray hair and the accent of a comic psychiatrist. “Herr Madizon vill meed you in d’Ogtagon Hroom. Bleaze vollow me.”

You’d think Madison’s unpopular views would make him a pariah (naming your group the “Alexander Hamilton Society” in this anarchist society is like naming your group the “Adolf Hitler Society” in our world), but that’s not the case. Somehow, he owns a mansion even larger and more extravagant than the ones Win has already seen, and he has actual servants.

Maybe Smith thought that it would risk making his villain sympathetic if he lived alone in a small, decrepit shack. Are we supposed to infer that the way he flaunts his riches is a sign of moral depravity, even in an uber-capitalist world like this?

Madison is a huge man, tall and muscular, with a nasty scar down one side of his face. Despite himself, Win finds him charming: “it was impossible to hate this man” despite the “blood on his charming, well-manicured hands”.

He greets them politely and asks what he can do for them, to which Ed bluntly replies: “We’re more interested in discussing what you’ve already done. Two of your people were killed attacking my house night before last, and another killed himself yesterday morning.”

Madison seems amused, saying that even if it happened, it had nothing to do with him or with the Alexander Hamilton Society: “We’re simply an institution for the discussion and debate of political philosophy.”

Lucy rejoins that if that’s true, it’d be the first time Hamiltonians confined themselves to debate. Madison is offended:

“My dear Judge Kropotkin. You’re remembering, perhaps, our brief tenure in the Kingdom of Hawaii—brought to an untimely end by the Antarctican unpleasantness? Or the savagery with which our proposed reforms were met on the Moon, afterward?” He looked at her more closely. “Or, if I’m not being indiscreet, perhaps even the Prussian War? Your Honor, all of that was long ago, and your concerns now are unjustified on several counts.”

Madison says that it’s true the Hamiltonians have waged war in the past, but they’ve learned their lesson from their defeats and now only seek to bring about peaceful change. He laments that there’s so much prejudice against them:

“[A]t various times in history, demagogues have required scapegoats. Unfortunately, we Hamiltonians have been handy on such occasions. It’s easy to condemn unworldly philosophers who have no ready means of reply. Since the Whiskey Rebellion, my fellows have been among the most unpopular in the world. What could we possibly say that would make people listen? How could we counter accusations graven in conventionally accepted history? Our views on economics and politics severely oppose the popular wisdom. Tell me, is that proof that we are wrong? To the contrary, it’s usually the other way around, isn’t it?”

“Very clever,” Ed said.

“And also very true. We believe that the good of society—in fact, the good of the individual—rests with recognizing and imposing an obligation to the state. We take what measures we can to transmit our views, hence this educational organization, my guest lectures at the university. But it goes very slowly: prejudice has such inertia.”

That’s true, of course. Conventional wisdom is often faulty and stubbornly resistant to change. Most people are set in their ways and refuse to be swayed by rational argument. While society as a whole does tend toward moral progress, it takes generations for new ideas to win out over old prejudices.

That makes it all the more bizarre that L. Neil Smith expects us to believe that Thomas Jefferson single-handedly talked the entire country into freeing the slaves, or that racism and sexism disappeared overnight when the federal government was abolished.

It seems that, in this book, prejudice only has inertia when it’s convenient for plot purposes. Whenever it would make his utopia look bad (say, for slavery to persist in an anarcho-capitalist paradise), people happily discard their bad beliefs as soon as they’re asked.

Remember, in the North American Confederacy, slavery is legal—not in the sense of “a written law says I can do this”, but in the sense of “if I’m powerful enough to do this, no one’s going to stop me”.

What if humans could be bought and sold in this world, just like any other commodity, and it was the Hamiltonians who were making the case to abolish it? What if they argued that we needed a centralized government to make and enforce laws protecting common people’s rights from the depredations of the extremely wealthy? (Which, needless to say, is exactly how abolition happened in the real world.)

That would be a genuinely interesting political debate for a novel set in an anarchist society. But it would create a level of moral complexity that Smith and other libertarians could never abide. Like Ayn Rand, he can only have a black-and-white political parable, where one side is solely made up of good guys who believe in freedom, and the other side is all mustache-twirling villains who want to create a brutal dictatorship.

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:

New on OnlySky: American autocracy

I have a new column this week on OnlySky. It’s about the war that the U.S. government is waging on its own people, and what we can do about it.

Trump’s second term is every bit as bad as progressives warned it would be. He’s flouting the law, trashing the Constitution, terrorizing and brutalizing immigrants and citizens alike, trying to subjugate cities under a reign of terror from masked Gestapo. It’s real and genuine authoritarianism, and it’s arrived in the United States.

How did we get here, and what should we do about it?

We’re not the first nation to go through this. Other countries, like South Korea and Brazil, have suffered through periods of dictatorship and eventually triumphed and restored democracy. Their experience gives us a guide on what to do next.

Read the excerpt below, then click through to see the full piece. This column is free to read, but members of OnlySky also get special benefits, like member-only posts and a subscriber newsletter:

It’s important to know that Trumpism didn’t come out of nowhere. Although a few conservative politicians have offered feeble protests, for the most part, Trump’s rise to power and subsequent abuse and subversion of democracy has happened with the full consent and approval of the Republican party.

There’s a reason for this, as Professor Steven Levitsky says. Republicans willingly acquiesced to authoritarian rule because they were facing what, for them, was an existential threat: a future where rich white Christian men no longer wield sole power.

Conservatives were terrified by this. They saw it not as the realization of a long-deferred promise, but as a zero-sum game they were losing. They tried to stop it by any means necessary.

They engaged in systematic gerrymandering, drawing jigsaw-puzzle-like congressional districts to thwart the will of the voters. In Congress, they abused the filibuster to stymie progressive legislation that had majority support. A conservative Supreme Court has repeatedly issued decisions that weakened unions, struck down civil rights-era voter protections, and removed restrictions on corporate funding of elections. Red-state legislatures have tried to ban books, outlaw DEI programs, and put a stop to anything else that promotes equality or diverse viewpoints.

When all their other power-grabs failed, Republican voters and politicians proved willing to junk democracy and install an autocrat rather than share power. This was always coming; if it hadn’t been Trump, it would have been someone like him.

Continue reading on OnlySky…

The Probability Broach: Shame, shame

Whiskey Insurrection in Pennsylvania - A man being tarred and feathered

The Probability Broach, chapter 14

In the last chapter, Win received some bad news. The explosion that hurled him into the North American Confederacy, caused by a government goon shorting out the portal while halfway through, was much bigger on the other side. Depending on how big, it could have been civilization-ending for Win’s world.

There’s only one way to know for sure. Win and his friends go to the university’s caved-in research shed in the park, where Win made his explosive arrival, and start digging to find out how much of his assailant’s body was left behind.

Ed, Win and Deejay, the scientist, take turns digging. Ed’s friends turn up while they work: Clarissa, because she’s a doctor and can help identify the body, and Lucy, Ed’s elderly war-hero neighbor, because she’s just nosy and wants to see what’s going on.

Eventually, they hit paydirt—the charred body of the thug who was chasing Win:

It wasn’t really so bad. I peeked through my fingers. From what the worms had left, we figured he’d been chopped off just below the knees. Oolorie, counting on her flippers, informed us that Bealls’s entire building was now a pile of secondhand cinder blocks. At any rate, we hadn’t destroyed the planet or invited it to be blown up by Strategic Air Command. I still had a place to go home to.

Tired and blistered from their exertions, they call it a day. Ed and Clarissa go home to rest, but Lucy persuades Win and Deejay to go out to dinner, where she spends her time making jokes and suggestive remarks:

“Great Albert’s Ghost, Winnie, it’s good to see you up and doing! Think of it: fresh outa sickbed, in as foreign a country as they come, and already you’re out with a pair of good-lookin’ women!” She winked at Deejay.

“Win, now that you know your world’s still in one piece, will you be going back? If we can get another Broach running, I mean.”

I thought about it. “Not until we’ve straightened this mess out. We’ve got to find whoever’s trying to kill me, and I hate to think of this beautiful place plastered with nuclear weapons. After that? I have a career back home, and nothing much to do here except get in the way and mooch off my friends.”

As previously established, they know the gang of bad guys chasing Win are “Federalists”—people who want to take over this anarcho-capitalist society and create a centralized government. But they have few leads to go on:

“Well, we need to find out more about these Federalists. How about it, Lucy, are they as dangerous as you all seem to think?”

“Dangerouser! No one with all his marbles’d listen to ’em, but they seem to find enough power-greedy dummies each generation to cause the rest of us a lot of trouble.”

This passage is notable because it’s one of the very few places that L. Neil Smith acknowledges something he otherwise ignores.

In an earlier chapter, we saw that—in spite of the author insisting the NAC is a utopia of freedom—some people are willing to join a terrorist organization that wants to overthrow it. Smith never explains why they’re so radically disgruntled (did they suffer some kind of grave injustice?). This is the closest he comes to addressing the subject, saying that there are always “power-greedy dummies” who crave rule over others.

This is ironic because Smith is confirming my argument about “free-market mafiosi“. The most probable failure mode of an anarchist society is that psychopaths, thugs and wannabe dictators would band together, form an army of their own, and take over a world which has no organized force capable of resisting them.

He acknowledges that this is a serious problem in the North American Confederacy. Moreover, it’s not just a fluke but a perennial threat which keeps recurring (“each generation”).

I’m sure this was entirely inadvertent. Smith just didn’t think through the implications of that line when he wrote it. Still, it’s ironic to see him admit that his anarcho-capitalist world is constantly endangered in exactly the way critics would say it is.

“If we find them, what can we do about it?”

“Depends on what they’re up to. Gonna be hard, ‘less we catch ’em settin’ fuses. It’s a free world: you can’t shoot people for havin’ stupid ideas.”

But, like… you can?

To repeat myself for the hundredth time, there’s no justice system in the North American Confederacy. You don’t need to prove anything to anyone, and even if you wanted to, there’s no official body where you can bring a case. (There are private arbitrators who hear disputes between parties, but it’s unclear what would happen if you tried to sue someone in that system and they refused to participate.)

You don’t need a search warrant or a smoking gun. If you know someone is planning something bad, even if you have no proof, you can just roll up and shoot them. There’s no third party you need to convince. Granted, their heirs might seek revenge on you, but they could do that in any case.

Lucy’s dialogue implies that the NAC has unwritten customs or guidelines which are similar to our notion of legally protected rights, and which the vast majority of people respect, even though nothing compels them to. That’s a very tolerant attitude, but how long would it last if the “Federalists” are as big a threat as she says?

Wouldn’t there eventually come a point where people get fed up with anyone espousing Federalist rhetoric? Even if killing them was seen as too extreme, it seems likely that angry mobs would tar and feather them on sight, or run them out of town on a rail, or do something else intimidating, painful and/or humiliating to shut them up or chase them away.

These kinds of public shaming rituals were very common in the past, and they’re still practiced in some places. They’re how small communities kept their residents in line (in both good and bad ways) in the absence of a formalized legal system. In an anarchist society with no laws, it’s very likely they’d become more prevalent, not less.

It’s a recent and modern innovation in ethics to hold that you can’t punish people for their opinions, no matter how offensive. Arguably, the U.S. Constitution’s First Amendment helped establish this idea—but Smith rejects the Constitution!

In his timeline, America rebelled against the Constitution and overthrew it violently. That being the case, wouldn’t they logically also reject everything that came with it? Why wouldn’t they adopt the older, colonial idea that speech can be censored to preserve public order? What court is going to tell them otherwise?

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: Backyard WMDs

A mushroom cloud on a tropical island

The Probability Broach, chapter 13

Deejay and Ooloorie, the human and dolphin (respectively) scientists who built the Probability Broach, fill in the details that Win Bear was seeking about how they came to be in contact with Vaughn Meiss, the murdered scientist from his own universe.

They explain that they wanted to establish contact with Win’s world. They needed help from someone on the other side to do it, because (obligatory technobabble!) “power consumption would fall ten thousandfold if we could establish a resonant field”.

However, they had some misgivings about this. From their perspective, Win’s world was populated by “primitives [who] will gladly murder anyone desiring independence from a coercive state”. Worse, as Oolorie says, “Your culture is ahead of ours only in its ability to wage nuclear war”.

The only exceptions they came across were Vaughn Meiss and his allies in the Propertarian Party, whom Win met early on in the book. Recognizing Meiss as a kindred spirit, they sent him a manuscript explaining the basics of the Probability Broach. Meiss, who’s a libertarian and therefore a supergenius, began constructing his own version.

There was one other thing that Deejay and Ooloorie worried about: namely, what happens if “the field collaps[es] on an occlusion”. To show Win and his friends what they mean, they demonstrate with a desktop-sized classroom model:

POP! A blue flash at the center of the contraption reminded me of high-school tricks with hydrogen. “What you saw,” Ooloorie lectured, “was a few air molecules interpenetrating the theoretical junction between two worlds. When the interface ceases to exist so do they—or try to.”

In other words, if the portal closes while something is halfway through, you don’t get a portal cut, as is common in sci-fi. You get an explosion. And the more mass there is in the portal, the bigger the bang. (Obligatory foreshadowing!)

But, again, they set safety considerations aside and continued their work. Meiss progressed with his experiments, and they were expecting to hear from him—until their side of the portal unexpectedly blew up.

That was due to Win’s interference, as they figure out. While he was examining Meiss’ lab as part of investigating his murder, the (obligatory!) jackbooted government thugs burst in with guns blazing. In the struggle, Win accidentally switched on the machine and stumbled through the portal. But when the goons tried to come after him, the field overloaded and collapsed.

That was the explosion that flung Win into the North American Confederacy, bloody and concussed. But Deejay and Oolorie have unwelcome news for him:

“And recall, my brilliant colleague,” said the fishbowl in the wheelchair, “that the effect is not symmetrical!”

Deejay paled. “Ooloorie, I hadn’t thought of that at all!”

“What are you talking about?” I demanded…

“Oh, Win, you were afraid your world might not still exist. Ooloorie’s saying that the force of the explosion isn’t symmetrical, it depends on the distribution of the interrupting mass… the little bang that tossed you over the hedge was part of a much bigger bang on the other side!”

Win, reasonably, demands to know just how much bigger. They do the math on what would happen if the Broach closed while a person was midway through. They say it depends on how much of his body was on which side of the portal:

“Suppose… it was just his feet?”

“About the same as our explosion here, one to five microtons—about two ounces of pistol powder,” Ooloorie estimated.

“And—uh—if only his head made it through?”

“A thousand megatons, possibly more.” Perhaps her thrashing was a sign that she was upset, too. If the original explosion hadn’t done the job, certainly NORAD would have interpreted it as an attack: World War III, the end of the Earth I knew.

A thousand megatons. For reference, Tsar Bomba, the biggest thermonuclear bomb ever detonated, had a yield of fifty megatons.

The Probability Broach isn’t a bridge for traveling between worlds. It’s a weapon of mass destruction.

The Manhattan Project to enrich uranium for the first atomic bomb was the biggest industrial operation in human history up till that point. It cost billions of dollars and required the labor of over 100,000 people. Even today, coordinated industrial effort on this scale is beyond the capabilities of most countries.

For purposes of his fiction, L. Neil Smith is postulating a far more destructive weapon. And not only is it one that a single individual can build by himself, it’s one that’s easily set off by accident.

This begs a question which Smith never considers: Shouldn’t there be someone whose job it is to be concerned about stuff like this?

Deejay and Ooloorie have built a civilization-ending doomsday device in their lab with zero oversight. Whoever’s funding their research either doesn’t know or doesn’t care. No one asks any questions about what they’re doing, no one raises any concerns, no one tries to stop them. No board of ethics is convened to decide what should or shouldn’t be done with this technology. No safety inspector checks if they’re being appropriately cautious, or if they’re cutting corners. (The only thing that does concern the higher-ups, apparently, is how much it costs to run.)

In our world, if you try to build a homebrew nuclear reactor in your backyard, very serious people are going to show up and ask some questions. In the NAC, there’s no government, so there’s no federal agency that can swoop in to shut you down if you’re doing an unacceptably dangerous experiment. Nor are there any laws dictating how something so destructive should be handled.

Apparently, the Broach is considered the property of the scientists who built it, and they can dispose of it how they see fit. If they want to sell it to the highest bidder, they can. If they want to hand out the blueprints to hobbyists and dilettantes who may or may not be able to copy it safely (which is essentially what they did), they can do that too.

I suspect L. Neil Smith just didn’t think through the implications of this, but it’s unintentionally fitting for his anarcho-capitalist world. In the North American Confederacy, anyone can build a WMD and do whatever they please with it. You can cook up chemical weapons, brew biological warfare agents, assemble pocket nukes, or cobble together mad-science superweapons.

Because there’s no oversight and no law enforcement, you just have to trust that everyone has only good intentions, knows what they’re doing, won’t compromise their ethics, and won’t make any serious mistakes. To which I say, have you met humans? It’s only by the grace of the author that this society hasn’t blown itself back to the stone age.

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:

New on OnlySky: Why the rent is too damn high

I have a new column this week on OnlySky. It’s about why the cost of living keeps rising, and a cause that may go deeper than simple greed, mismanagement or inefficiency.

In the last few decades, and especially the last few years, the cost of living in America and other developed countries has been rising faster and faster. In what seems like an especially cruel paradox, luxuries like electronics and fast fashion are cheaper than necessities, like rent, health care and education.

Is it because of capitalists hoarding all the wealth for themselves? Well, yes, but there’s another factor at work. It’s called “cost disease,” and it says that as our economy gets more automated and more efficient, the jobs remaining for humans to do should be getting more and more expensive. The question is what, if anything, we can do about it.

Read the excerpt below, then click through to see the full piece. This column is free to read, but members of OnlySky also get special benefits, like member-only posts and a subscriber newsletter:

Imagine the world before the Industrial Revolution. If you wanted to listen to music, you had to buy a ticket to hear a symphony. If you wanted new clothes, you had to pay a tailor or seamstress to sew them. If you wanted a new shovel, you had to pay a blacksmith to make it for you.

When everything was made by hand, there was fairly little difference in productivity, and therefore earning power, among these industries. One person could only produce one person-hour of work per hour, no matter what job they held.

But the march of technology has given rise to a divergence. Assembly lines, robotics, and other innovations have made some industries more efficient, meaning they can crank out more stuff faster for less money. With the rise of the internet, software companies can offer valuable products that aren’t made of anything physical at all. As we consume more and more, outsize rewards flow to these industries—mostly the owners of capital, but the workers as well.

However, jobs that require a human touch haven’t followed this trajectory…

Continue reading on OnlySky…

The Probability Broach: Non-state violence

Strikebreaking miners being escorted to work by Pinkerton agents, 1884

The Probability Broach, chapter 13

Having discovered a parallel universe (“our” universe), the North American Confederacy expands their efforts to learn about it:

In 198 A.L., Paratronics shelled out for a new reactor. Now a relatively stable hole could be punched through, and larger samples taken, but they told the same depressing story: an unknown, exclusively human, English-speaking people, wearing uniformly drab, tubular clothing, riding in poisonously primitive vehicles. A culture inexplicably bleak and impoverished.

Just as a note, this book was written in the 1970s—the height of disco and punk rock. Say what you will about that era, I don’t think everyone wore “uniformly drab” clothing.

While exploring this alternate Earth, the NAC researchers spot a newsstand that sells a “World Almanac & Book of Facts”:

They deposited a half-ounce silver disk on the counter one midnight, reached with carefully sterilized tongs through the newly widened Broach, remembering the wisdom of Poor Richard before he’d gone Federalist. They learned a great deal, none of it encouraging: the Revolution; the Whiskey Rebellion: a War of 1812?; Mexico; and, horror of horrors, a civil war—three-quarters of a million dead. Financial crises alternated with war, and no one seemed to notice the pattern. World War I; the Great Depression; World War II and the atomic bomb, Korea; Vietnam. And towering above it all, power politics: a state growing larger, more demanding every year, swallowing lives, fortunes, destroying sacred honor, screaming in its bloatedness for more, capable of any deed—no matter how corrupt and repulsive, swollen, crazed—staggering toward extinction.

Don’t hold back, man! Let us know how you really feel.

L. Neil Smith treats history as a catalogue of atrocities, and I can’t disagree with that. Where we clash is his belief that it’s simple and straightforward to put an end to all this bloodshed. Just get rid of the state, and a thousand flowers of peace bloom.

He insists, implausibly, that a lawless anarcho-capitalist society where everyone is heavily armed would be more peaceful than what we have now. It would have no large-scale conflicts and almost no crime or violence.

This is an extreme case of simplistic thinking. To his mind, states wage war—so if we get rid of the state, there’ll be no war, by definition.

Let’s consider a counterexample from American history.

In the early 20th century, coal powered the American industrial economy, and West Virginia was the heartland of coal production. But the miners who dug it out of the ground didn’t share in the prosperity. The mine owners forced workers to labor long hours, for little pay, in horrendously dangerous conditions where deadly accidents like explosions and cave-ins were constant occurrences.

Making it worse, workers in remote regions had little choice but to buy necessities from company stores, which faced no competition and could charge extortionate prices that dragged them down into debt slavery. They also had to live in company housing, where they could be immediately kicked out and made homeless if they didn’t obey orders from their bosses.

These conditions, by any reasonable accounting, were little better than slavery. It’s no surprise that coal miners sought to unionize so they could bargain for better pay and working conditions. (Mary Harris Jones, better known as Mother Jones, was one of the labor movement’s most indomitable organizers.)

When the mine owners got wind of this, they launched a brutal crackdown. They hired armed private guards from the Baldwin-Felts detective agency to serve as spies and strikebreakers. These hired goons forced striking miners and their families from their homes at gunpoint. There were beatings, armed skirmishes and shootouts. Most infamously, they rolled out the “Bull Moose Special“, an armored train with machine guns which they fired into a tent colony of striking miners, killing at least one.

The conflict between workers and owners kept on escalating until the point of open warfare, at the 1921 Battle of Blair Mountain—the largest armed uprising on American soil since the Civil War. Over ten thousand miners clashed with a private force of two thousand private militiamen. They exchanged gunfire for days, racking up dozens of casualties on both sides. The strikebreakers even hired private planes to drop bombs on the advancing miners.

The battle ended in a defeat for the unions when the U.S. government sent in federal troops to dispel the insurrection. But it wasn’t the state that forced the mine owners to treat their workers so cruelly in the first place. It was the predictable outcome of unchecked selfishness.

Smith doesn’t even gesture at an explanation for why this kind of violence doesn’t occur in the NAC all the time. Even if it were true, as he insists, that abolishing government makes us much wealthier… why wouldn’t the property-owning capitalist classes of that world just capture all that surplus for themselves while continuing to pay their workers poverty wages? Was it out of the goodness of their hearts?

Even more baffling is his claim that only our world, and not his anarcho-capitalist utopia, suffers “financial crises alternat[ing] with war”. There are no financial crises in a completely unregulated economy? No recessions? No depressions? No Ponzi schemes? No bubbles that inflate and burst? Does Smith think the state causes bank failures?

In reality, a laissez-faire market would regularly see bank runs, panics, busts and crashes. That’s supposed to be how it works in a free market—the good actors thrive and the bad ones go out of business. It’s just that, when you’re dealing with banks, “go out of business” means that people lose their life savings. That’s what the Great Depression was, so it’s puzzling that Smith treats it as something unique to our world.

The Battle of Blair Mountain and other anti-union violence (like the Ludlow Massacre) shows that not all violence can be blamed on the state. The capitalist class through history has been equally willing to shed blood in service of their real or perceived interests: working their employees to exhaustion and breakdown, forcing them to labor in deadly conditions without relief, and when they protest, hiring other men to kill them.

Even when it would be a trivial expense to treat their workforce better, they’ve repeatedly shown that their greed is limitless, and they’re willing to commit any evil to keep feeding it. As Smith puts it: “swallowing lives, fortunes, destroying sacred honor, screaming in its bloatedness for more, capable of any deed—no matter how corrupt and repulsive”.

Image: Pinkerton detectives escorting strikebreaking scab miners to work, via Wikimedia Commons

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: