New on OnlySky: Is there a quiet revival?

I have a new column this week on OnlySky. It’s about the alleged trend of young people going back to church, and whether there’s any substance to these claims.

America’s nonreligious population – the “nones” – grew rapidly in the first two decades of the millennium. But in the last five years or so, that previously red-hot growth seems to have slowed down, if not plateaued. Religious apologists have pounced on this, claiming that atheism has reached its limit and that Gen Zers are about to turn back to God in a massive, spontaneous religious revival. One published survey, the so-called Quiet Revival, claims that it’s already happening.

Is there any reason to believe this? You can probably guess.

Read the excerpt below, then click through to see the full piece. This column is members-only, so consider signing up! Members of OnlySky also get special benefits, like a subscriber newsletter:

After years of declining church attendance, aging and dwindling congregations, and a widespread falling away from faith, revival has come to the West. Faith is cool and countercultural again. More young people are rediscovering God, and they’re flocking back to church in droves. There’s going to be a new Great Awakening very soon.

At least, that’s what religious apologists want us to believe. They’ve written no end of stories insisting on it. For example, there’s this triumphal headline from the alt-right, anti-feminist magazine Evie, “God Is Back And Gen Z Is Leading The Revival”.

There’s plenty of room to debate why the growth of the nones might have leveled off. Are there natural limits—a core of American religiosity that can’t be overcome? Are there broader economic or cultural trends pushing people back to church—as an antidote to the loneliness epidemic, or people in search of a safety net? Was the New Atheist movement the catalyst, and now that it’s faded from prominence, the growth of the nones is stalling?

Continue reading on OnlySky…

The Probability Broach: Tangled in red tape

Yellow-and-black caution tape

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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The Probability Broach: Fire in a crowded theater

A poster showing a theater engulfed in flames

The Probability Broach, chapter 17

Ed and Win Bear are traveling via airship to the Continental Congress to inform this world of the Hamiltonian threat. En route, they learn that the villainous John Jay Madison has sent his thugs to kidnap their friends Clarissa and Lucy, to use as
leverage at the upcoming congressional session.

Win arrives too late to help Clarissa. So he hurries back to the theater where Lucy was watching a movie, hoping he’s in time to rendezvous with Ed:

Lucy was there, but I can’t say the same for the two thugs they’d hauled out of the theater. A small crowd had gathered around the cashier’s booth, along with a medic, two security attendants, and Lucy, arms folded, gun dangling from one finger.

… “Now madame,” one of the official contingent pleaded, “if you’d put that away, and tell us what happened here. We must have an explanation. It’s a company rule.”

“Stuff your company! If two punks wanna get hurt—I’m practically an innocent bystander!” She gestured sharply with a toe at the figures on the floor.

The medic looked up and scowled. “Come on, lady—you’ve already fractured his skull! Trying for some ribs, now?”

I’ll admit this scene is funny. There’s obvious comedy in Lucy, an old lady (albeit a war veteran), not just clobbering two thugs, but doing it so casually that she’s more annoyed about missing her show than by this attempted kidnapping.

But Ed was supposed to be coming to her rescue. Win asks Lucy where he is:

“Ed ain’t here. These”—she kicked at the bleeding form again—”…came in, sat on either side of me, and—” She aimed a kick at the other unconscious thug, but was restrained. “He had a hypo. They were gonna stick me! So I bopped ’em—couldn’t fire in a crowded theater. Taxation! They bent my front sight!” She peered along the barrel, the crowd in front melted discreetly away.

This is very responsible of Lucy, and I agree. Even in a self-defense situation, you can’t just whip out your gun and start shooting in a dark, crowded theater.

In that environment, if gunfire suddenly erupted, no one would know who was shooting at whom. People would panic. It’s virtually guaranteed that at least some people would leap to the conclusion that it was a mass-shooting spree, draw their own guns, and start firing at whoever they think the shooter is. In this heavily armed society, that would provoke a deadly chain reaction, as yet more people panic and return fire at that person, presuming them to be the attacker—and so on.

You can imagine the pandemonium. People would be shot by pure accident, or knocked down and trampled in the sudden crowd crush as everyone tried to escape at the same time. It would be a horrific mass casualty event. The theater would be carpeted with bodies by the time it was all over.

So yes, I can commend Lucy for staying cool-headed in the heat of the moment. Here’s the problem: Does everyone in this society exercise the same level of self-control?

Because for the North American Confederacy to work, that has to be the case.

Otherwise, every public place and every crowded scene would be susceptible to sudden explosions of violence. When everyone is armed at all times, it only takes one angry, unstable, or panic-prone person to overreact to a real or imagined threat. (And how many disturbed people might there be on the street, in a society where there’s no such thing as court-ordered treatment or involuntary commitment for even the most severe cases of mental illness?)

This goes to show that firearms don’t protect people from all possible danger, as gun nuts believe. Indeed, they make everyday life far more dangerous. That chain reaction of panic and carnage I described would be sure to ensue in any situation where a mystery bullet is fired.

Those mass casualty events should be a regular feature of life in the NAC. L. Neil Smith doesn’t have any explanation for why they’re not, other than to assume that everyone in this society is almost superhumanly cool and calm in a crisis.

The battered thugs are hauled away. Ed can’t be found, so Win and Lucy head to suite 1919, the place Madison proposed for a meeting. They come with guns ready, but the room is empty. There’s no one there—just a note:

Lieutenant:

We enjoyed more success with Dr. Olson and Mr. Bear. Instead of wasting time—and possibly lives—attempting to follow, reconsider my offer before Congress convenes.

M.v.R.

While they’re reading the note, a clerk arrives to tidy up the room for its next occupants. When they ask where the previous occupants went, the clerk says: “Mr. Richthofen and his party took a groundward shuttle not more than five minutes ago. I arranged it myself.”

L. Neil Smith would never have admitted it, but his own writing shows why his utopia doesn’t work.

As I wrote last week, in an anarcho-capitalist world, you’re responsible for your own safety. The problem is that no one can realistically defend themselves all the time against a resourceful and determined enemy. You might get lucky once—Lucy did in this chapter, and Clarissa in an earlier chapter—but if the bad guys can afford to keep trying, your luck is eventually going to run out.

Smith proved that point himself, by having Clarissa talk about how guns are the great equalizer that levels the playing field, then having her get kidnapped offscreen. Now he reinforces the point by having Ed Bear get captured too.

Remember, Ed is a private investigator who’s used to dealing with dangerous criminals, so we can assume he’s appropriately paranoid about his own safety. Also, unlike Lucy and Clarissa, he knew the bad guys were coming. He should’ve been as well prepared as anyone in this world could be. Yet he still got taken hostage without firing a shot.

Throughout this book, the demands of storytelling clash with the demands of political ideology, and this chapter is the most blatant example. Smith wants to convince us that statism causes crime and violence, whereas anarchy produces peace and prosperity. He tells us that his anarcho-capitalist world is peaceful and safe, to the point that crime is virtually unknown.

However, if he were consistent about this, this novel would be too boring to read. To keep it exciting, he added these action scenes—home invasions, shootouts, car chases. They’re the spoonful of sugar that makes the medicine palatable. But he doesn’t seem to recognize that having those scenes undercuts the central premise of his philosophy.

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Image credit: Wikimedia Commons

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New on OnlySky: America and Israel are headed for divorce

I have a new column this week on OnlySky. It’s about how the once-permissive relationship between America and Israel may be coming to an end.

Until very recently, unwavering support for Israel was a cornerstone of both major U.S. political parties. Democratic politicians supported Israel because Jewish voters were an important part of their base; Republicans, because white evangelical Christians are their base, and most of them are premillennial dispensationalists who believe Israel’s existence is a prerequisite for the end-times scenario they long for.

But all that was before Hamas’ October 7 attacks, to which Israel responded by launching a genocidal war on the entire Gaza Strip. Not only has that conflict not been resolved yet, Israel has only gotten more aggressive and belligerent since then – bombing Syria, invading Lebanon, and dragging the U.S. into a globally disastrous war with Iran.

Would U.S. voters be okay with all this? Recent polls suggest the answer is an unambiguous no. In fact, for the first time ever, one poll finds that Americans are now more sympathetic to the Palestinian cause than to Israel.

Support for an arms embargo and recognition of a Palestinian state is growing by leaps and bounds, especially among young voters. The question that should be keeping Israeli hawks up at night is – might that previous alliance return in time, or is this a permanent rupture?

Read the excerpt below, then click through to see the full piece. This column is members-only, so consider signing up! Members of OnlySky also get special benefits, like a subscriber newsletter:

All this is in accordance with the desires of a fanatical, religious fundamentalist faction in Israeli politics. They believe that God has given them a huge swath of territory: not just Gaza or the West Bank, but all the way to the Euphrates River, far beyond Israel’s current borders. In a colossal show of arrogance, they refer to this imperialist dream as “Greater Israel”.

They believe they have divine permission to conquer and rule this land, displacing or killing everyone who already lives there if necessary. They’re even issuing threatening rhetoric against Turkiye.

The biggest unanswered question is how far America’s tolerance extends. Would American politicians and voters stand by as Israel attempts to gobble up its neighbors? Would we countenance Israel dragging us into war with Iran against the will of the American people, or committing genocide in Palestine with the weapons we gave them?

Continue reading on OnlySky…

The Probability Broach: The self-rescuing hostage, part 2

An eye in the center of a crosshairs

The Probability Broach, chapter 17

En route to the capitol of the North American Confederacy, Win and Ed are exploring the amenities on their enormous, luxurious airship, while their female companions are off entertaining themselves. That’s when they receive an unwelcome message:

Scattered through the ship like potted palms, Telecoms posted announcements, public and private. I’d started keeping an eye out for Clarissa or Lucy trying to find us, so I wasn’t altogether surprised to see my name on a screen:

LT. WIN BEAR: MR. VON RICHTHOFEN REQUESTS CONFERENCE, SUITE 1919, WITH YOU & YOUR COMPANIONS. KINDLY RING FIRST. MESSAGE ENDS.

While L. Neil Smith accurately anticipated some future technologies, he missed this one. Even though cell phones were just starting to become commercially available in the 1980s, he didn’t predict that they’d become as common as they are now.

Ed and Win find a videophone booth and give their enemy a call:

The screen rearranged itself into John Jay Madison, reclining in his smoking jacket, Oscar Burgess glowering in the background. I pushed past Ed.

“Ah,” breathed the Hamiltonian, “I wasn’t expecting so prompt a reply.”

“Can it, Madison. What do you want—before you’re shipped out to Pluto, that is?”

… “I’d like to offer you fellows a truce, an essentially friendly meeting to discuss exchanging certain ‘valuable considerations.’ As you might surmise, I’m attending the Continental Congress to speak for my society. However, there’s no reason we can’t do business along the way, and it might render this whole Gallatinopolis affair unnecessary.”

Ed interjects that they already know Madison’s intentions are evil, since they saw the military training films from Win’s world that they stole from his house. They know that he wants to import atomic bombs and use them to force the NAC to submit to his rule. Win tells him to cut the crap and tell them what he really wants from them:

He looked squarely into the camera. “Very well, to begin with, the films, immediately—and I want this Congress nonsense called off. Also, you will cease harassing me, either by further intrusions or by means of the thugs you have placed around my property.”

“Anything else—while we’re talking about it?”

“Since you ask, I want Paratronics to turn over its technology in full and at once. I confess to growing impatience with Dr. Bealls’s flounderings. Both of you will permanently absent yourself from North America—that’s quite a concession, considering the desires of Mr. Burgess.”

(As you’ll remember, villains in libertarian novels are always incompetent, so Madison’s scientists can’t figure out the dimensional-travel technology and want to steal it from the smart capitalists who invented it.)

Win asks Madison why they should even entertain these outrageous demands:

Madison searched for the proper euphemism. “This is rather delicate. I’d rather not discuss it over the—”

“Spill it!”

“As you will: wouldn’t even a pair of perfectly capable ladies be found at some disadvantage, under a hair-dryer or in a darkened theater? I leave you to draw your own inferences and to consider my generous offer while you have time. Good day, gentlemen.” His image vanished.

Suddenly realizing the danger their friends are in, they split up. Ed goes to find Lucy, while Win goes after Clarissa. He asks an attendant where the nearest salon is, then dashes madly through the crowded concourse, with no time to be polite:

I charged up an escalator, shoving riders aside. Eight, nine, down corridors in a wake of angry shouts and cursing, past tennis courts, bowling alley, and shooting range, out into the mall.

What’s wrong with this picture?

Everyone in the NAC is armed, remember. Why would it stop at “angry shouts and cursing” when a stranger rudely shoves you aside? In a gun-nut fever-dream world like this, wouldn’t bowling through a crowd be a great way to get shot or stabbed?

Somehow, that doesn’t happen, and Win makes it safely to the salon where Clarissa was getting her hair styled. The staff tell him she went next door, to a clothing boutique. But when he gets there, he’s too late. Her purse is on the seat, but she’s nowhere to be found:

I grabbed a clerk. “Where’s the lady who belongs to this bag?”

“Bag? Oh—she left her bag.”

“You mean she’s gone?”

… “Well, she came in, tried on a few things. Then, while she was changing, her husband—”

“Her husband?”

“Yes, a very tall man with an accent and almost no hair. He came in to wait. Next thing I knew, the lady had collapsed. Fainted. He said it was her ‘condition.’ Practically had to carry her out.”

It’s comically oblivious of L. Neil Smith to include this scene, since it contradicts one of the central premises of his anarchist society.

Remember, in the North American Confederacy, there are no police to call on. Everyone carries weapons at all times, including children, because everyone is responsible for their own safety. Smith insists that this makes everyone safer, because no rational mugger or rapist would dare try their luck knowing their intended victim is armed.

In a grand irony, Clarissa – the character who just got kidnapped! – argued strenuously for this in an earlier chapter. These were her words at the time:

“Armed people are free. No state can control those who have the machinery and the will to resist, no mob can take their liberty and property. And no 220-pound thug can threaten the well-being or dignity of a 110-pound woman who has two pounds of iron to even things out.”

In fact, she repeated this assertion in this chapter, just a few pages prior to this scene:

“Come on, you’re stalling! What happens if I take a hostage?”

“The hostage kills you,” Clarissa said, and that seemed to be that.

But when it comes time to show this principle in action, rather than lecture the readers about it, the exact opposite thing happens. Clarissa was kidnapped easily, without bloodshed, without resistance. With so little fuss, in fact, that no bystanders realized anything criminal had happened.

This point bears repeating: The gun nut’s own story shows that his ideal society doesn’t work.

For the sake of argument, I’ll grant that an armed person might be able to defend against a random crime of opportunity. But even if you carry a gun at all times, you can’t hope to protect yourself against someone who wants to harm you specifically. No one can be that vigilant 24/7.

A determined stalker or hitman in this society would have an easy time. They can watch and wait until their intended victim is asleep, or in the shower, or any other situation where they’re distracted or unprepared to defend themself with a split-second’s notice. Madison says so – and he’s right. Whether or not it’s accidental, the plot agrees with the villain of the story.

Now, you might object that the police in our world aren’t very good at dealing with stalking either. They often don’t take it seriously, and they rarely take effective action even when they do. This much is sadly true. But at least there is a justice system that exists, and that can (not often enough, but sometimes) be motivated to act to protect victims. In Smith’s anarcho-capitalist world, you’d have no chance at all.

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The Probability Broach: Make the desert bloom

Dry, barren, cracked land

The Probability Broach, chapter 17

Win Bear and his friends are traveling on a high-tech airship. Smith makes a big deal out of the fact that this anarcho-capitalist society prefers this means of air travel, because zeppelines are more strictly peaceful than jet planes:

U.S. airlines are subsidized; every one of those big tin birds can be instantly converted to some military use, blueprints on handy file at your friendly neighborhood airport. Airships have no such potential; they’re vessels of peace, big, fat, and vulnerable to uniformed strangers with evil intentions. Ask Lucy, who wound up touring Europe by shanks’ mare.

But Smith’s own writing contradicts this. In the Prussian war (this timeline’s equivalent of World War I), the NAC did send a fleet of airships as an invasion force. Lucy’s airship was shot down in a dogfight with the Red Baron, as she mentioned, but that doesn’t change this fact. (Or was Lucy just a military ignoramus who went to battle in a patently unsuitable vehicle? Nothing in Smith’s depiction of her character implies this.)

Ed and Win circulate through the cabin, meeting some of their fellow passengers. To judge from this passage, news of the Hamiltonian world-conquest plot has spread, and people are gossiping about it. You’d think that would make the two of them heroes or celebrities, since they’re the ones who brought it to the populace’s attention. But if they’re the focus of any special interest, Smith never says so:

Naturally not all of them were human. Nuclear blackmail concerned every being on the continent—the entire planet, to judge from languages I heard around me. Some felt more threatened than others: Hamiltonians hold that animals have no place in society except as slaves and breakfast. A quarter of the Congress would be chimpanzees.

Bookmark it for later: You’ll want to remember this passage when Win arrives at the Continental Congress.

To pass the time, Ed and Win take some time to admire the scenery. Their zeppelin, the San Francisco Palace, is like a skygoing cruise ship. It’s huge enough to have casinos and shopping malls on board:

We circled around the gambling tables, plunking ourselves down where we could look outside. Half the Palace, more or less, is a tough, transparent skin stretched over titanium bones. These great windows ran from floor to ceiling, twelve feet. Scenery unrolled beneath us as we plowed northward: “Wyoming” now, a barren cattle-dotted plain in my world, a lushly irrigated breadbasket here.

I’ve previously discussed the paradoxical nature of these fictional libertarian utopias. They have no central government, yet somehow they have roads, bridges and other massive public works, none of which have ever existed in the real world without a government to organize and direct the construction.

In an earlier chapter of this book, I talked about this with reference to the North American Confederacy’s road system. It’s implausible that such a thing can exist in a world where private property rights are absolute and a single stubborn property owner who stands in the way can scuttle the entire project.

Air travel would also pose some issues. With no FAA requiring airlines to file flight plans, who’s to ensure planes don’t collide with each other in midair?

But this line about Wyoming being a “lushly irrigated breadbasket”, which L. Neil Smith treats as a tossed-off reference, is the biggest implausibility of all.

What river would you divert to irrigate Wyoming? The most likely candidate is the Green River, which is a tributary of the Colorado River. But who decided it would be Wyoming, rather than a different region, which gets that water? Who planned this project? Who paid to build the dams, the canals, and the other infrastructure necessary for irrigation? And after all that investment, what would they do if someone else wanted to divert the river in a different direction to water their crops instead?

Deciding how to allocate scarce natural resources is a serious challenge in the real world, so an anarchist world would have to wrestle with it as well. And since Smith set most of this book in Colorado, there was a perfect example at his fingertips.

The Colorado River is the major source of water for the southwestern United States. It’s used for irrigation for agriculture, for hydroelectricity generation, and as a source of drinking water for tens of millions of people.

With so much demand, there’s constant wrangling over how to allocate the river’s water among the seven states it flows through (Utah, Colorado, New Mexico, Wyoming, Arizona, California, and Nevada), plus Mexico. The overarching agreement is a 1922 compact that sets out how the water should be divided.

The problem is that this agreement was made during a historically wet period. Now, with climate change causing hotter temperatures and shrinking mountain snowpacks, the amount it allocates to each of these states adds up to more water than there is.

As you can imagine, this has led to years of tense negotiations that may soon escalate into legal battles. So far it’s been deadlocked, because no state wants to give up its ration of water for its neighbors’ sake. No governor wants to tell angry farmers they have to let their crops wither, or tell angry suburban voters they won’t be able to flush the toilet or brush their teeth.

The stalemate has led to a looming crisis: water levels at the river’s two major reservoirs, Lake Powell and Lake Mead, are dropping so low that the hydroelectric turbines in the Hoover and Glen Canyon Dams could soon stop working. That wouldn’t just be an inconvenience, but a huge economic hit and possibly a humanitarian disaster.

This is a hard enough problem in a world with a government. How could you possibly solve it in an anarchist society like the North American Confederacy?

Defenders of the NAC might say that they could reach a water-sharing agreement through private arbitration. The problem is that, even if an agreement was worked out, it would be purely voluntary; nothing would make it binding. Once all the dams and canals were in place, people could just cheat and take more water than they agreed to. Who would know?

Also, what about people who came along later and weren’t party to the original agreement? Why would they regard themselves as bound by a contract they had no hand in negotiating? The river is right there, after all. What would stop them from just digging a side channel and diverting it for their own use, and too bad for everyone who lives downstream?

In a society where selfishness is the rule and there’s no central authority to enforce conservation agreements, this kind of cheating is all but inevitable. People who live upstream would hoard the water for themselves, turning arid lands into gardens, building shimmering swimming pools and planting lush green lawns. The poor people who live downstream would be screwed. By the time the river reached them, it’d be no more than a silty trickle, if that.

And if you were one of those people and you trudged upstream to protest, you’d undoubtedly be met by a heavily armed force of private security guards. When they have the guns and the water too, how could you hope to fight them?

Smith’s vision of Wyoming becoming an agricultural “breadbasket” is a libertarian fantasy. It might happen in a more eco-conscious world, but in his world, the water wouldn’t be fairly distributed or go to the best overall uses. It would go to the richest, the most powerful, and/or those most willing to cheat or use violence to get what they want.

A more realistic outcome, for an ancap society, would be a cluster of mansions owned by the ultra-rich that take all the water for themselves, turning their walled estates into pleasure gardens, while the rest of the state becomes a parched and barren hellscape.

As I’ve often mentioned, libertarians follow a philosophy that can be called “cornucopianism“. It claims, implicitly or explicitly, that natural resources are infinite and so they don’t need to be rationed or conserved. Their ideology forces them to believe this, because the only alternative is an enforceable agreement for who gets what: in other words, a government, with all the laws, taxes and everything else they despise. But the real world isn’t nearly so obliging, and it doesn’t comply with their rosy vision of limitless resources.

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New on OnlySky: Hungary says “Igen!” to democracy

I have a new column this week on OnlySky. It’s about the democratic triumph of Hungary’s elections.

Hungary is a small and geopolitically insignificant country, but it has an outsized presence in global politics. Its longtime prime minister, Viktor Orbán, pioneered a style of illiberal, right-wing authoritarian governance that’s inspired conservative autocrats all over the world. Over sixteen years in power, Orbán steadily chipped away at Hungary’s democracy and tilted the playing field more and more in his favor and against any potential opposition, all without firing a shot. He oppressed LGBTQ+ people, slammed the doors on immigration, and repeatedly frustrated the European will to aid Ukraine. Donald Trump, Vladimir Putin, and many other dictators and wannabe dictators cheered for him – and took notes.

But the Hungarian people fought back this month. In a closely watched election, Orbán and his allies were thrown out of power in a landslide, despite everything they did to rig the system on their own behalf. This is great news for Europe, great news for Ukraine, and great news for democracy all around the world.

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:

For the last sixteen years, Orbán held near-absolute power in Hungary. He struck a pose as a defender of Christianity and traditional values, claiming he would protect the West from scary threats like Muslim refugees and LGBTQ+ people.

His party, Fidesz, advocates hard-right, Christian nationalist politics. Its agenda includes banning same-sex marriage and adoption by gay couples; banning pride parades; prohibiting people from legally changing their gender; rolling back anti-discrimination laws; and opposing multiculturalism and blocking immigration, with the goal of making the country racially and culturally homogeneous. (For example, Orbán has said, “We do not want to be a diverse country”).

You might say that this sounds like what the Republican party wants to do in America, and you’d be right. In many respects, Hungary pioneered the anti-democratic politics that’s been embraced by the right wing in the U.S. and around the world. American conservatives saw what Orbán was doing and loved him for it.

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The Probability Broach: The self-rescuing hostage, part 1

The wreckage of a bomb-destroyed plane in a hangar

The Probability Broach, chapter 17

Win Bear and his friends are en route to the Continental Congress via cross-country airship. Win is still incredulous, as he might well be, that people in this world are allowed to bring guns on airplanes:

“Look, friends,” I said, once we’d cleared security, “I know you’re enthusiastic about weapons, but haven’t you heard about hijacking?” I had to explain.

“Silly way to commit suicide.” Ed laughed. “And if you lived, you’d be paying restitution for the rest of your life!”

… “What about capturing the crew?” I insisted.

“Like to see ’em try that on my ship!” Lucy, our former combat pilot, said. “One of these big balloons, they’d just switch over to auxiliary control, while the regular crew mopped your brains off the dashboard.”

“Security’s pretty good, these days,” Ed added. “Crew-country bulkheads are titanium. No one gets in unless invited. Besides, the minute you ban handguns, criminals will take up less detectable and less discriminating weapons. Bombs, for instance.”

Once again, Smith doubles down on his bizarre belief that terrorists only resort to bombs because airports ban guns.

This book was written before 9/11, but that doesn’t mean that airplane bombings were unknown to him. One example is the 1949 crash of Canadian Pacific Air Lines Flight 108, in which a disgruntled man named Albert Guay sent his wife on a plane with a time bomb hidden in her luggage. His goal was to blow up the plane and kill her so he could marry his mistress. The bomb did go off, the plane crashed, and Guay’s wife died along with everyone else on board, but he didn’t get away with it. His guilt was quickly discovered, and he was convicted and executed.

There are many other examples as well. In all of these cases, the perpetrators didn’t resort to bombs because they first tried to hijack the plane with a gun and failed. The bombing was the plan from the start, whether to assassinate a specific person, or just to spread terror and destruction as a way of getting revenge on a country they had a grudge against.

Smith has no answer at all to these kinds of crimes. All the armed passengers and crew in the world won’t help when a bomb goes off at 30,000 feet and ruptures your airship’s helium envelope like a popped balloon.

Given the extremely light security he envisions, it would be very easy to smuggle explosives on board one of the North American Confederacy’s airships. As we’ll see later in this chapter, you can depart by shuttle while it’s between stops, so it wouldn’t even be a suicide mission. Just set a timer and leave the bomb on board when you go.

Indeed, you have to ask why the bad guys don’t do this more often. Given that the Hamiltonians want to force this world to adopt centralized government, why don’t they commit some spectacular terrorist attacks, to make more people afraid for their lives and persuade them that they need a government for protection?

Win is supposed to be the skeptical outsider, probing for flaws in this system so that the other characters can easily dispatch his objections with their common-sense political philosophy. But he never asks about this, most likely because Smith doesn’t let him pose questions that his belief system doesn’t have an answer for.

I persisted. “But what happens if I point a gun at the passenger sitting next to me, and threaten to blow his head off if they don’t take me, say, to Algeria?”

“Algeria?” Lucy asked. “Isn’t that somewhere at the bottom of the Sahara Sea?”

“Come on, you’re stalling! What happens if I take a hostage?”

“The hostage kills you,” Clarissa said, and that seemed to be that.

It’s not a spoiler to say that this exact scenario plays out in this chapter, just a few pages from now, and it doesn’t go the way Smith’s characters claim it would. In fact, hostage-taking is a highly effective strategy in this anarcho-capitalist society.

This is just what we should expect. It’s unrealistic to imagine that giving a gun to an ordinary civilian would transform them into a badass action hero who can competently defend themselves in a sudden life-or-death situation. (That’s why it’s so stupid for gun-loving conservatives to suggest that teachers should be armed to deal with school shooters.)

A more realistic expectation is that most civilians would freeze, panic, fire blindly, or make other terrible decisions in a crisis. A hardened criminal—let alone a gang of criminals—would easily overpower them. That’s the glaring flaw in Smith’s world, which asserts that you have to rescue yourself from muggers, hostage-takers and murderers because no one else will.

Image via Wikimedia Commons

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The Probability Broach: Fly the heavily armed skies

Airport security sign reading "No Sharp Objects"

The Probability Broach, chapter 17

This chapter begins with another of the fake quotes L. Neil Smith loves. This one is attributed to his fictional anarchist philosopher Mary Ross-Byrd:

Nine tenths of everything is tax. Everything you buy has a complicated history of robbery: land, raw materials, energy, tools, buildings, transport, storage, sales, profits. Don’t forget the share you contribute toward the personal income tax of every worker who has anything to do with the process.

Inflation by taxation: there are a hundred taxes on a loaf of bread. What kind of living standard would we enjoy if everything cost a tenth of what it does? What kind of world? Think of your home, your car, your TV, your shoes, your supper—all at a 90% discount!

Government can’t fight poverty—poverty is its proudest achievement!

—Mary Ross-Byrd
Toward a New Liberty

We’ve been over this before, but this quote offers an especially vivid example of Smith’s ideologically-driven economic illiteracy. He thinks that all the money we pay in taxes vanishes into a black hole, providing no value in return.

How did that loaf of bread get to the market or to my house? By truck? Those trucks travel on highways, bridges and tunnels—how did those get built? Who paid the costs of construction? When it snows, who plows the roads to keep them open? When there’s a pothole, who fills it? When there’s an accident, who clears it?

Was there any kind of food safety inspection at the bakery, to make sure they’re not putting toxic alum, chalk or sawdust in the dough to save money? Or do you just have to take the company’s word for it?

Where does the factory get electricity to keep the lights on and run the appliances? Who generates it and how? Who regulates the utilities to make sure their reactors don’t melt down and they don’t spill toxic waste into the drinking water?

Even in a hypothetical scenario where there’s no government and private corporations perform the same services, those services have a cost that isn’t zero. Why wouldn’t those costs be built into the price of bread in the anarcho-capitalist utopia, just like they are now?

Smith’s assertion that everything would cost “a tenth of what it does” if not for government is pure magical thinking. It’s on a level with saying all the money we pay farmers is wasted because crops just spring out of the ground on their own.

In this chapter, Win and his friends are doing their best to alert the world to the Hamiltonian threat, and their efforts have borne fruit. The North American Confederacy’s version of Congress has agreed to meet, and our protagonists are traveling to the seat of government (which isn’t Washington, D.C., as we’ll see shortly) to testify in person.

Rather than one of the NAC’s jet liners (“thousand-passenger fusion-powered titanium monsters that bash their way through near-space at five times the speed of sound”), they’re taking a zeppelin, because zeppelins are cool. Smith describes them as enormous and luxurious—a mile long, like floating cruise ships with lavish suites, shopping malls and restaurants on board, with power supplied by fusion reactors which also generate helium for buoyancy.

However, there’s a tiny problem. As you may remember, everyone in this anarcho-capitalist world goes heavily armed at all times. How does that work with air travel?

Riding the corridor to the elevators, we encountered a security setup not too different from the ones back home. Ed bellied up, drew his Browning, pulled the clip and chamber round. Lucy’s horse-pistol materialized from some region of her person, and Clarissa unsheathed her Webley Electric. Following their example, I unholstered my Smith & Wesson, wondering what would happen next.

At home, the officer would lose control of her sphincters, and forty thousand federal marshals would trample in and haul us away for the next several eons…. Whatever happened to the Fourth and Fifth Amendments at U.S. airports? Or the First, for that matter?

This is one of those spit-take moments you keep running into while reading this book. Smith thinks people have a constitutional right to carry guns on airplanes? On zeppelins, even?!

Note that he mentions the Fourth Amendment—i.e., the right to privacy—implying that it’s a violation of his rights to be searched, even at an airport security checkpoint.

“Excuse me, sir,” the attendant said politely. “Is your ammunition in compliance with aeroline policies?”

Ed nodded. “Frangibles, at under nine hundred feet per second.”

Even a gun-worshipping fanatic like L. Neil Smith recognizes the problems that would ensue if people started blasting away in an airplane cabin. This is his answer to that. In his ancap utopia, you’re allowed to bring guns on planes, but only if they’re loaded with special ammunition that kills people but won’t damage the structural fabric of the vehicle.

Everyone’s weapon passes the safety check except Win’s pistol, which is an antique by the standards of this world:

The official took a hard look at my revolver. Naturally, she couldn’t find it in any of her references. “I’m terribly sorry, sir, would you mind if we took your, er, gun, until you reach your destination?”

Ed grinned smugly. “See the trouble that museum piece causes? Use the cartridges in the yellow box.”

…I reloaded cylinder, speed-loaders, and my derringer—which caused another round of dithering—with this new stuff: bright-yellow plastic bullets. They’d explode into harmless powder on aerocraft-tolerance materials.

Thank goodness. Now we can riddle other passengers with bullets without causing midair explosive decompression. Much better.

Note, however, that the attendant makes only a cursory effort to verify this. She asks them to take out their weapons, inspects them, and asks if the ammunition they’re loaded with is compliant with airline policy. No one gets patted down; no one has to go through a security scanner or send their luggage through an X-ray machine. It all seems to be voluntary.

It’s fair to assume that people who outright refuse to cooperate with inspection would be denied boarding. But if you wanted to bring a noncompliant weapon on board, could you just keep it under your coat and not produce it when asked, like teenagers smuggling outside snacks into a movie theater? Or what if you took regular ammunition, but in the box of a frangible brand? Would anyone check or be able to tell?

In the real world, air rage is a problem every airline has to grapple with: angry, disorderly passengers assaulting each other or the crew. It’s almost inherent to the industry. Expensive tickets, stressful travel plans, uncomfortable seats, jet lag, and alcohol create a pressure-cooker environment in which some people’s worst impulses explode. There’s no scenario in which this gets better if everyone is armed, even if Smith makes the token concession of ensuring they can’t accidentally shoot down the entire aircraft.

Much like the section on traffic regulation (or lack thereof), these are wildly dangerous policies that would cause mass death and devastation if they were ever implemented in the real world. But Smith waves these problems away through the power of authorial fiat, scripting a world where they (somehow) lead to greater safety and security, and then holding that world out as an appealing place where we should want to live. It’s a circular argument, using a fictional scenario as proof of itself.

Image credit: Edward Betts, released under CC BY-SA 3.0 license

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New on OnlySky: One terawatt per year

I have a new column this week on OnlySky. It’s about some unexpectedly hopeful news that shows progress fighting climate change.

The war with Iran has supercharged the world’s drive toward renewable energy. As oil and gas prices soar, people everywhere are looking for alternatives, like electric vehicles and plug-in solar panels. But is there enough renewable energy to displace fossil fuels in time to make a difference?

The answer is yes. Green energy is still a fraction of the world’s energy portfolio, but its share is climbing exponentially. It took almost seventy years to deploy the first terawatt of solar power, and only two years after that to deploy the second. We now have the industrial capacity to build an additional terawatt each and every year, which at a sustained pace would completely decarbonize the economy in less than twenty years. A future is in sight, not too distant, where we dispense with fossil fuels entirely.

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:

When gasoline is cheap, consumers flock to buy huge, wasteful trucks and SUVs. But Iran’s closure of the Strait of Hormuz has caused prices to spike. As the price of gas climbs, more and more people are starting to see these fuel-guzzling vehicles as a painful financial burden.

According to surveys, $4 a gallon is the threshold at which a majority of Americans start cutting back on driving or looking at more fuel-efficient vehicles. The data bears that out: since the war started, there’s been a sharp upsurge of interest in EVs.

Gas-burning cars will always be at the mercy of the global oil market. Prices swing dramatically and unpredictably. A war half a world away brings instant pain in the pocketbook.

Meanwhile, electric vehicles are cheaper to recharge. They’re powered by the cheapest electricity in history, and they get the equivalent of 100 to 140 miles per gallon. Perhaps even more important, they’re dependably cheaper, especially if they’re powered by electricity generated by local renewables. No dictatorial regime or warmongering theocracy can shut off the sun or the wind.

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