The Probability Broach: Robots do nothing

A black and white photo of a factory assembly line

The Probability Broach, chapter 12

Over lunch, Ed and Win Bear are debating the merits of their respective governmental systems. Win protests half-heartedly that his world isn’t all that bad:

“We must be doing something right, the U.S. is the most prosperous—”

“Slum in your world.”

“The poorest American’s rich, compared to other countries!”

“And the poorest Confederate’s rich, compared to most Americans. All your taxes and regulations freeze old wealth, and make new fortunes impossible—except for those with political pull. The rich fend off the law, while those below get picked clean by your IRA.”

“IRS, though I’ll concede there isn’t much practical difference.”

First of all, how does Ed Bear know anything about Win’s United States? He’s never been there or even seen it. He might argue on behalf of his own society about why it’s better, but how can he feel qualified to criticize someone else’s?

On top of that, this feels like a Gish Gallop, where one party in a debate throws out dubious assertions too rapidly for the other side to counter them all.

Taxes freeze old wealth? Including progressive tax systems, which tax the rich at higher rates and use the revenue to fund safety net programs for the poor? How does that preserve old wealth?

This is a bald-faced assertion that programs whose goal is to decrease inequality actually increase inequality. I’d argue the point, but there’s nothing to argue. Smith doesn’t even try to justify it; he just makes the assertion and leaves it hanging. It’s like Ayn Rand asserting that regulation makes coal mining more dangerous (somehow).

Now, I’ll grant it’s true that there’s such a thing as a regulatory moat: big companies that lobby for government licensing and burdensome regulations in order to suppress competition. The big players can afford the costs of compliance, while smaller competitors can’t. But the solution isn’t to have no regulations at all!

In fact, Smith’s own argument proves the point: large corporations will do anything they can to shut out competitors. In our world, laws restrain them from doing that, however much they might want to. In an anarcho-capitalist world, nothing prevents them from using dirty tricks or outright violence. They could hire an army of Pinkertons, or whatever the NAC equivalent is, to threaten competitors with a gun duel if they don’t leave town. Under the anything-goes customs of this society, that’s perfectly allowable.

This goes back to the common libertarian misunderstanding that a free market is a self-sustaining state of nature. Actually, markets require laws and regulators to protect their existence and keep anyone from tipping the playing field too far in their own favor. Just as a sports game needs rules and referees to keep from degenerating into a brawl – and it doesn’t invalidate this point that referees are occasionally corrupt or unfair – markets can only exist when authorities uphold the preconditions for free and fair commerce.

“Tell me, how long does an American work to buy a car?”

“He can’t, any more. We used to spread it over a couple of years, why?”

“Win, a Confederate hoverbuggy represents about three weeks’ earnings—don’t look at me that way! How about a home?”

“Nowadays, forget it. Ten years ago, maybe five years’ wages. Actually, you’re talking a forty-year mortgage, even with—”

“I paid my house off in six months. And Win, this meal you’ve kindly provided is an expensive one. Meep’s got decorators to pay, after all. We could’ve eaten under the corner for the same price in copper!”

It’s also cheap because the NAC has no food safety inspections or labs analyzing ingredients or safety, of course. Getting rid of those undoubtedly saves money. But who do you call if you get sick from that cheap lunch?

It’d be one thing to argue that we have too much regulation, which creates inefficiencies that make goods more expensive without adding adequate value in return.

Smith isn’t arguing anything so modest. He’s saying that if we scrapped all government, the payoff period of a mortgage would fall from thirty years to six months, and the cost of a car would fall from several years’ earnings to several weeks.

In other words, he expects us to believe that state-imposed overhead makes up something like 98% of the cost of a house or a car. And he generalizes this to all goods, claiming that taxes and the cost of regulations accounts for a huge majority of the prices we pay for everything.

There’s an easy, back-of-the-envelope way to check this. If it were true, government spending would have to account for a massive majority of GDP. (Because all that money the state steals from hardworking citizens presumably goes somewhere, and isn’t just put in a pile and burned.)

The real value, as of 2023, is around 36% for the United States. That’s broadly in line with most industrialized countries. Even if you assume that all this taxing and spending creates no value (a dubious point we’ll discuss next week), it’s clearly not the case that it overwhelms the economy to the point of crowding out all else.

“How come everything’s so fucking cheap? Don’t your workers have to eat? Or is everything automated?”

“Automation doesn’t help: it always takes more people to create and maintain the machinery, and a healthy economy’s real problem is chronic labor shortages. Things aren’t unnaturally cheap. Win, we simply don’t tolerate a parasite that takes half your income and then builds more taxes into everything you buy!”

Wait, what?

It’s hard to understand Smith’s argument, but he seems to be saying that automation doesn’t make the economy more productive, because it takes the same amount of labor to maintain the machines that make stuff as it would have to make that stuff by hand.

This is screamingly, unbelievably wrong. An assembly line with industrial robots can’t make cars faster than if each employee was a blacksmith hammering out the parts?

Of course automation makes us more productive. Why else would anyone bother with it? Why have we been inventing labor-saving technologies since at least the Roman era? This is an elementary failure, not just of political understanding, but of basic reasoning.

My best guess is that this bizarre assertion is the fruit of Smith’s ideologically driven one-reason worldview. He doesn’t want readers to conclude, incorrectly in his opinion, that the North American Confederacy is superior only because it has more advanced technology. (Because then a different society with the same technology would be just as good to live in.)

He wants readers to conclude that government and taxes are the only source of evil, and that every other good or bad thing about a society traces back to whether it has them. But to flatten a society down to the point where that’s the only thing that matters, he has to do violence to elementary logic.

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New on OnlySky: The end of marriage?

I have a new column this week on OnlySky. It’s about the prospect of marriage going extinct, whether it can be saved, and whether it deserves to be.

Contra the princess fantasies and cottagecore dreams of the wedding-industrial complex, marriage is becoming an endangered species in America. More and more American women are happily single, and fewer girls than ever say that marriage is their aspiration. Even in red states, divorce rates are rising.

The decline in marriage is the direct result of women recognizing that it’s a bad deal for them. All too often, married women end up working outside the home and bringing in an income, while also being expected to run the household, do all the chores and raise the children. The demands of modernity have increased, but the expectations of tradition and culture haven’t decreased to compensate. Top this sexist sundae with the cherry of more-conservative men doubling down on demands to limit women’s autonomy, and it’s no wonder that women are heading for the exits.

The good news is that men can still change this. But it won’t happen through cheap machismo or obnoxious preaching about what God wants. It will only happen when men learn to be better partners, husbands and fathers. Are we up to the challenge?

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:

All these factors converge on one result: increasingly, women are finding marriage unappealing. They see it as a ticket to second-class status where they’re expected to subordinate their own lives and dreams to the desires of men.

The data bears this out. According to a new poll, for the first time ever, 12th-grade girls are less likely than 12th-grade boys to say they want to get married. Significantly, the number of boys who aspire to marriage has been unchanged for thirty years, but the girls’ numbers are dropping.

Another poll finds that male conservatives now rate having children and being married as among their top priorities, while for progressive women, both of those have dropped to the bottom of the list.

More and more American women are staying single by choice. According to a Wall Street Journal article reporting on analysis by the Aspen Economic Strategy Group, over half of women ages 18 to 40 are single. And they’re happy that way: Pew data suggest only 35% of single women are looking for a relationship, versus 50% for single men.

Continue reading on OnlySky…

The Probability Broach: Too much freedom

A huge cloud of dust about to engulf a farm

The Probability Broach, chapter 12

Win and Ed have one lead to follow up on: the university researcher, Dr. Thorens, whose name Freeman K. Bertram gave them. According to Bertram, Dr. Thorens is the best person to answer some of their questions about parallel universes.

Before they head over to the university, they stop for lunch at a restaurant called Mr. Meep’s Spanish Hideaway:

Meep would take explaining in anybody’s universe. A chimpanzee, he’d adjusted his wrist-talker for what he fancied was a Spanish accent, then grafted a gigolo moustache to his upper lip to go with his bolero jacket, Mexican bellbottoms, and one of those off-duty bullfighter hats, the kind with little balls of fringe around the brim. When he lifted it, his hair was dashingly oiled, parted down the middle like Rudolph Valentino.

Culture shock is a terrible thing. Ask the man who has one.

Win asks Ed, “Doesn’t this place seem a little silly, even to you, sometimes?”—which I guess you could take as evidence of self-awareness on the author’s part.

They eat and smoke. Because Win has a pocketful of cash—the blood money he received from the prison company, as payment for failing to protect his prisoner—he offers to pay for lunch. But when they get the check, he’s shocked by how cheap it is:

Ed took longer finishing his meal than I did—I still say chocolate turkey is a little heavy for lunch. Since I was suddenly wealthy, I decided to pay. The bill popped up on the screen and I turned to my munching messmate: “Ed, is this right, a silver quarter-ounce? That’s only a buck and a half!”

“Mmphl. Probably added in your cigar by mistake. Need some money?”

“No.” I observed absently. “Nor does anybody else around here, apparently… Everywhere I go in this town, everyone has lots of cash, and everything costs practically nothing. Where are you hiding your poor people?”

As we previously saw, Smith maintains his economically implausible insistence that everything is cheap and everyone is wealthy in the North American Confederacy. In this section of the book, he tries to explain how that can be possible.

Ed explains that by the standards of his society, he is one of the poor people (“When did you ever know a rich detective?”), but it doesn’t matter. Once they abolished government, Capitalist Magic made everyone prosperous and comfortable. He reminds Win that their super-advanced medical technology fixed his injuries virtually overnight, and the same is true of every other problem as well:

“Fractured bones are a problem we’ve solved, largely with substantial amounts—by standards you’re used to—of scientific and economic freedom.” He took the last bite of pastry and wiped off his chin. “We’ve also solved hunger, and by the same means. All you have to do is leave people alone.”

“To die in the streets of old age or starvation? That’s why you need government, Ed, to take care of those who can’t—”

“Wrong way around, Win. Politicians need human misery, for their very—”

“Now wait a minute! We spend trillions, just to—”

“Spread the misery around! My friend, government’s a disease masquerading as its own cure.”

These are bold claims. Smith says that government never makes anything better; it only holds people down. If we scrapped all laws, regulations and safety-net programs, the economy would flower and poverty would disappear.

Let’s put these claims to the test with a real-life example of what happens when we “leave people alone”.

After the Civil War, the U.S. government passed a series of Homestead Acts that gave away unclaimed land in the western Great Plains (“unclaimed” in the sense that its indigenous inhabitants had been forcibly displaced or wiped out) to white settlers who were willing to farm it.

It was known that this region was arid, harsh and susceptible to drought. But millions of settlers flocked to claim land, because of a popular belief called “rain follows the plow” which held that cultivating the land would make it more fertile and temperate.

Nothing could be more libertarian than this. The homesteading land rush was motivated by the same belief L. Neil Smith argues for in this section: the belief that people do best when they’re left alone. All we have to do is grant them the freedom to do what they think best, and then stand back. Smith’s logic would lead you to believe that they’d transform these arid lands into a Garden of Eden.

The results didn’t live up to these rosy expectations.

A wave of settlers plowed the prairie, using newfangled technology like the combine harvester. They ripped up the perennial native grasses whose deep, dense root networks held the soil together. The crops they planted to replace them, like wheat, were shallow-rooted annuals that couldn’t perform the same function.

When drought inevitably came, the soil dried out and crumbled, and Great Plains winds did the rest. They scoured the loose topsoil, catching it up into huge dust storms that darkened the daytime sky for miles. The dust smothered towns, made travel impossible, and killed people and animals who suffocated or contracted pneumonia from inhaling it. Millions of people lost their homes and their land, becoming penniless, hungry refugees.

The Dust Bowl can’t be blamed on regulation, government overreach, or political machinations. It was caused by—if you care to put it in these terms—too much freedom. Letting everyone do what they wanted led directly to ecological devastation and economic collapse. If the government had exercised a heavier hand, preserving some of the native prairie and keeping it off-limits to farming, it wouldn’t have been as big of a crisis.

You might be wondering, why hasn’t there been another Dust Bowl since the 1930s? The answer is that it’s because of government intervention.

The New Deal created agencies like the Soil Erosion Service, which taught farmers to use anti-erosion practices like terracing and cover crops. The states created soil conservation districts which made these practices mandatory.

Another government initiative, the Great Plains Shelterbelt, hired CCC workers to plant trees across hundreds of miles to serve as windbreaks. The Conservation Reserve Program paid farmers to take land out of production, replacing crops with native vegetative cover. The idea of paying farmers not to plant crops has been the target of endless mockery, but there’s sound ecological reasoning behind it.

The Dust Bowl is a dramatic example of how excessive freedom can lead to disaster, but there are others. Fishing fleets with no restrictions on the size of their catch have pushed commercially valuable fish species to the brink of extinction, causing the collapse of coastal economies.

Desert farms and settlements have pumped too much water from aquifers like the Ogallala, causing wells to run dry and harvests to fail. Drought and overuse has forced entire cities, from Cape Town to Mexico City to Tehran, to reckon with the prospect of running out of water. Governments in these places have had to impose rationing to keep the taps from going dry.

These are all Prisoner’s Dilemma situations: collective action problems where, when every individual makes the self-interested choice, it results in the worst-case outcome for everyone. If everyone voluntarily agreed to rein in their selfishness—leaving some land unplowed, catching fewer fish, conserving water—they’d all be better off. But any such agreement will collapse in the absence of any way to enforce it.

Smith’s cornucopian ideology (also seen in Ayn Rand) holds that the bounty of nature is inexhaustible—so the more people who work to extract resources, the more there’ll be for everyone. If you hold this belief, it’s a logical conclusion that government regulation can only decrease humanity’s output, never increase it. Of course, a libertarian has to say this, because it’s the only scenario that justifies the absence of government.

But cornucopianism is false. The reality is that we live on a finite planet where natural resources can be depleted. If money is the sole driving force, there’s no incentive to preserve something till tomorrow when you could make a profit from it today. That’s why, sometimes, we need a government—which just means an enforceable collective agreement—to conserve limited resources and prevent anyone from taking more than the planet can bear.

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New on OnlySky: American religion continues its fadeout

I have a new column this week on OnlySky. It’s about the continuing trend toward a secular future, in America and other nations.

In most countries, the power and influence of religion declines as the populace becomes wealthier and more educated. As people look toward the future with greater optimism, they feel less need for the illusory consolation of faith. For a long time, the United States was an outlier in this regard: a rich, developed country where religious fundamentalism exerted a powerful political influence.

But those days may be coming to an end. A new poll shows that less than half of Americans say religion is important in their daily lives. This is the first time that this has ever happened, and it points toward a future where religion has waned in cultural influence and power – despite the regressive right-wingers in office doing their utmost to prop the churches up. Their best efforts have done precisely nothing to stop this trend.

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 numbers of atheists, agnostics and generally nonreligious people have been growing for years. As a share of the U.S. population, they now outnumber every single religious denomination. As of 2021, for the first time ever, less than half of Americans belong to a church, synagogue, mosque or other organized house of worship.

Even among those who still identify as religious, the intensity of their belief is declining. Increasingly fewer people say that religion is an important part of their lives.

There’s a new poll on this topic, and it comes with a whopper of a title: Drop in U.S. Religiosity Among Largest in World.

Continue reading on OnlySky…

The Probability Broach: Fair cop

A prison cell with light streaming through a barred window

The Probability Broach, chapter 12

[Content note: Mention of suicide.]

After their meeting with Bertram, Ed and Win pay a visit to their prisoner from the home invasion the other night, to see if he feels like talking:

First stop, Valentine Safe & Vault, where the thrifty shopper can get anything from a titanium can that’d hold both Thorneycrofts, to a tiny padlock smaller than a matchhead, guaranteed to withstand a full clip of .375s.

Most Confederate crooks post bond, not to assure appearance in court, but restitution to their victims.

How strangely gracious of them.

Consider the logic of this. If you’re accused of a crime, either you did it, in which case you obviously don’t care about the “laws”/customs of this society; or you didn’t, in which case you’re not going to have fond feelings toward the person who falsely accused you.

In either case, why would an accused criminal be so obliging as to put up a bond, when there’s no authority that can force them to do so? Apparently, L. Neil Smith expects us to believe that criminals in the North American Confederacy follow the rules and politely acknowledge, “It’s a fair cop” when they get arrested.

Valentine was in the hoosegow biz sort of by accident. Some client had ordered up a pair of cells, intended for the rare bird who wouldn’t make bond, then had gone bankrupt before the goods were delivered. Valentine had tried to make up the loss by renting them out.

Smith implies that if you’re accused of a crime and can’t or won’t post a bond, you’re jailed until the trial. That seems normal and familiar – until you think about it, because the North American Confederacy is an anarchist society with no laws, police or justice system. Yet he writes as if the legal regime he scorns is still in effect.

If you’re accused of a crime, who sets the bond amount? This is supposed to be a free society with no coercion, so on whose authority can you be locked up?

The apparent answer, as we saw in a previous chapter, is that the private security firm you hire to protect you also adjudicates disputes. This includes detaining you until trial, if it’s a criminal matter.

But what if you don’t have a security company, or you refuse to say what yours is? Do they have to let you go? Or can the person who caught you just kill you on the spot?

This also ignores, as I mentioned, the predictable consequence that wealthy people would have impunity, because these firms would always side with their paying customers. They’d give them a slap on the wrist, or let them off with no punishment at all. Even if some firms tried to be fair, they’d quickly lose all their customers to less-principled competitors that promised their clients sweetheart deals.

The reason this doesn’t happen in real life is because there’s a justice system that won’t let you stonewall forever. If you harm someone, you can be prosecuted or sued in a court with the power to enforce its judgments. If you have an insurance company that indemnifies you, they can be forced to pay up. But in Smith’s world, these companies are a law unto themselves. There’s no higher authority that can force them to do anything.

When Ed and Win arrive at the private, for-profit jail business (just try not to shudder at the thought of that!), they get some bad news. Like other fanatic cultists from fiction, their prisoner committed suicide rather than face interrogation:

Penology’s scarcely a science here, but Valentine hadn’t taken precautions any two-bit county calaboose would consider elementary. Our prisoner, subcontracted to Valentine’s by his insurance company, had torn up a bedsheet and hanged himself in the night.

“And this makes money for me?” I asked, unsure what Ed was talking about as we bellied up to the counter.

“It better. You put that bullet in his leg, so I listed him as your prisoner.” He fixed the manager with a frosty glare. “It’s just as if he’d escaped.”

Worse, the prisoner refused to give his name or address (and his insurer also refused to identify him – further evidence that security firms will do favors for their customers), so they have nothing to go on. Their investigation has hit another dead end.

The silver lining is that the proprietor of the lockup owes Win compensation for this inconvenience: three hundred and seventeen gold ounces’ worth, according to the text. Under Ed’s glare, he grudgingly agrees to pay up:

“Say, bud, where do you want this forfeit credited?”

“Good question. Ed, where do they send your money?”

“Mulligan’s. But hand them a second ‘Bear, Edward W.’ and I’ll never get balanced again!”

I felt around in a pocket for the Gallatin goldpiece. “Then how about the Laporte Industrial Bank?”

This is one of those little throwaway lines that has gigantic implications. Let’s analyze it.

“Mulligan’s” is presumably a reference to Midas Mulligan, the banker from Atlas Shrugged, but that’s not the line I was talking about.

I was referring to Ed Bear’s dismissive remark about something that’d actually be a big problem in this anarcho-capitalist society: How do they handle people with identical names?

It seems like the only means of identifying people is by name. There are no Social Security numbers, nor any other government ID scheme that could be used to disambiguate people. Biometrics would be an option, but that’s out too; remember, they don’t know about fingerprints in the NAC.

So, how do you handle it if you’re a banker and your bank has a thousand John Smiths as clients? How do you know which account to apply a credit or a debit to?

Again, the seemingly-obvious answer is that private companies could develop their own ID numbers and tracking schemes, like credit card numbers. But if that’s Smith’s solution, he never says so. As we just saw, Ed Bear believed that his bank wouldn’t be able to deal with two accountholders who had the same name.

This should be impossible. You can’t run a high-tech industrial capitalist economy on a first-name basis.

Dozens or hundreds of different companies, and thousands of workers, are needed to manufacture all the parts that go into making something sophisticated, like a computer or a jet plane. For this to work, you absolutely need ways to identify and keep track of people, so that goods, services and payments all get routed to the right places. Otherwise, the flows of commerce would seize up, accounting would be a nightmare, and long-distance trade would be inefficient to the point of impossibility. And just try to imagine how stock and bond trades could work!

As we saw last week, Smith handwaves all this complexity away. He claims that most Confederate citizens run small businesses out of their homes in their spare time, doing business with their neighbors on a handshake. Yet, somehow, they also live in a hyper-advanced, highly-organized society with interstate highways, interplanetary travel, immense skyscrapers, and massive scientific endeavors like transdimensional portals. It just doesn’t add up.

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The Probability Broach: Economies of scale

A crowded, futuristic skyline

The Probability Broach, chapter 11

Ed and Win are going to see a client in Laporte’s Old Town district. Win narrates that, where he comes from, “old town” conjures up a Norman Rockwell image of quaint little cottages. But here, the oldest part of the city is a megalopolis, with skyscrapers “swooping five hundred stories into the clear bright air”:

That expression, “Old Town,” conjured up mental pictures that couldn’t have been more wrong. Most Confederates do business out of their living rooms, which discourages undue formality and keeps enterprises small. Mention time clocks or commuting, they’ll look at you like they know where you escaped from. But like many inhabitants of Laporte’s older district, Freeman K. Bertram had things turned around: the high-powered executive’s version of sleeping over the delicatessen.

Paratronics, Ltd., an impressive pile of Aztec Modern rock, was planted where the Poudre River canyon empties onto the plains. We slid into an underground parking lot, dismounted, and pulled three gees getting up to the 223rd floor.

Once again, this section has one of those libertarian/anarchocapitalist sleights of hand we need to pause and unpack. Just like a conjurer distracting the eye with flashy moves, L. Neil Smith’s invocation of massive skyscrapers is meant to distract readers from the precarious assertion one paragraph earlier.

Libertarians always claim that they’re the realists, the ones who understand the cold hard truths of math and economics, not like us silly socialists with our heads in the clouds. Yet at the same time, Smith says that most businesses in the North American Confederacy are small businesses—so small, in fact, that they need nothing more than a home office.

So how does he explain economies of scale?

Large businesses have an inherent advantage over small businesses, because they can take advantage of high volumes to get by on a smaller profit margin. If you own a factory where machines churn out a million widgets per year, you only need to make pennies on each one to turn a profit. Meanwhile, the artisan who crafts each widget by hand obviously has to charge much more to make a living.

Even if the small business buys the same machines as the larger business, there are fixed costs that have to be repaid. The more sales they have, the more they can spread out those costs across each sale, increasing the amount of profit they can squeeze out. So, again, there’s a built-in drive toward bigness. It’s inherently more efficient to be big than to be small.

Of course, there may be sentimental reasons why people prefer to shop at small businesses, even if it costs them more. But in raw economic terms, a bigger business can always undercut a smaller one. And Smith has crafted a world where economics outweighs everything else. Why aren’t people in the North American Confederacy obeying the incentives of the free market?

It would appear that, even though he’s depicted an anarchocapitalist society where nothing limits how big or powerful a corporation can get, L. Neil Smith is uncomfortable with the implications of that.

He wants to depict a Jeffersonian country where most people are homesteaders living under their own vine and fig tree, running small cottage industries from their porches, beholden to no one. He doesn’t want readers to picture a cyberpunk dystopia where colossal, amoral megacorps carve up the world, and most people are impoverished peons who live in company-town slums and spend their lives in indentured servitude to their employers.

But he doesn’t have any explanation of why the latter scenario doesn’t crowd out the former. Why don’t larger businesses outcompete smaller businesses and drive them to extinction? Why don’t companies agree to merge rather than compete with each other, so they face no competitive pressure and can gouge their customers for as much as they want to? Why don’t they try to buy up critical resources to become a monopoly, gain a chokehold on the flow of commerce and raise their prices to eye-watering levels? There seems to be nothing in this world that would prevent any of this from happening, and yet somehow it doesn’t.

High up in that skyscraper, Ed and Win meet their client: Freeman K. Bertram, the head of Paratronics, Ltd.

Bertram was a tallish, nervous type who preferred hornrims to getting his eyeballs resculpted like everybody else; he affected a sort of Italian Renaissance beard and a kilt.

The backstory here is convoluted, but to summarize: Bertram had hired Ed Bear to investigate a series of thefts from one of Paratronics’ warehouses. By coincidence (or is it?), a pen with a Paratronics logo somehow turned up in Win’s world, on the other side of the dimensional portal.

Ed and Win relay this story to him, including the fact that Win comes from a parallel universe, something that Bertram doesn’t seem that shocked by. He’s more annoyed by the fact that Ed hasn’t caught the culprits behind the warehouse theft. To this, Ed replies that he’s advised them on how to tighten their security, and that’s all he’s going to do: “I protect property. I don’t collect people!”

Side note: Is there anyone in this universe who does collect people? Does the North American Confederacy have bounty hunters for hire? Or do you just get away scot-free unless you’re caught red-handed at the scene of the crime?

L. Neil Smith never addresses this question. He makes a big deal out of how everyone here carries weapons at all times to protect themselves, because no one can trample on the rights of an armed individual. If that’s true, it’s hard to see how that profession could exist here, unless they swarm suspects with superior force—but a government can do the same thing, and yet Smith is adamant that his armed anarchists are more than capable of repelling any government intrusion.

Bertram grudgingly accepts Ed’s explanation. He says that to help Win out and solve the mystery of the pen, he can refer them to one of the researchers his company works with, a Dr. Thorens at Laporte University.

On the way out, Win muses, “this country could use a few lessons in elementary sneakiness”. Ed asks what he’s talking about, to which he responds that Bertram was wearing a bronze ring with the eye-in-the-pyramid logo. For some reason, they don’t double back to interrogate him about it, even though this implies that Bertram has ties to the same gang that tried to murder Ed and Win at home.

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How many churches would feed a starving baby?

In the Bible, Jesus commands his followers to feed the hungry, shelter refugees, and comfort the afflicted. Whether they obey or disobey this command, he says, on judgment day they’ll be treated as if they had done the same to Jesus himself:

“Then the King will say to those at his right hand, ‘Come, O blessed of my Father, inherit the kingdom prepared for you from the foundation of the world; for I was hungry and you gave me food, I was thirsty and you gave me drink, I was a stranger and you welcomed me, I was naked and you clothed me, I was sick and you visited me, I was in prison and you came to me.’

Then the righteous will answer him, ‘Lord, when did we see thee hungry and feed thee, or thirsty and give thee drink? And when did we see thee a stranger and welcome thee, or naked and clothe thee? And when did we see thee sick or in prison and visit thee?’

And the King will answer them, ‘Truly, I say to you, as you did it to one of the least of these my brethren, you did it to me.’

Then he will say to those at his left hand, ‘Depart from me, you cursed, into the eternal fire prepared for the devil and his angels; for I was hungry and you gave me no food, I was thirsty and you gave me no drink, I was a stranger and you did not welcome me, naked and you did not clothe me, sick and in prison and you did not visit me.’

Then they also will answer, ‘Lord, when did we see thee hungry or thirsty or a stranger or naked or sick or in prison, and did not minister to thee?’

Then he will answer them, ‘Truly, I say to you, as you did it not to one of the least of these, you did it not to me.'”

—Matthew 25:31-46

Although the Bible contains many atrocities and evils, it also has some good, even beautiful passages. This verse, in this atheist’s opinion, is at the top of the list.

It’s praiseworthy because it teaches the bedrock value of empathy. It says that the measure of a Christian’s character isn’t how often they go to church, how many gospel tracts they hand out, or how many Ten Commandments plaques they cram into classrooms and courthouses – but how they treat the poor, oppressed and downtrodden. It tells them to focus on those society looks down on.

This is a beautiful message, and if more churches followed it, the world would be a better place. That being said, it’s fair to ask: do Christians follow it? Or is it just one of the many parts of the Bible they ignore?

One person conducted a brilliant experiment to find out.

On TikTok, Nikalie Monroe had a simple yet ingenious test. She called churches and religious institutions across the country – some small and humble, some large and wealthy – and posed as a mother in need of help.

She said she was out of food and money and her two-month-old baby had had nothing to eat since last night. (For verisimilitude, she played the sound of a crying infant in the background.) She asked the church if they’d donate a can of baby formula. If the person who answered the phone suggested a local food bank, she said that she’d already called that place and they couldn’t help.

The test was whether the church would help, as Jesus told them to, or whether they’d make up excuses or deflect the responsibility onto someone else.

Can you guess what happened?

According to Nikalie’s report, she called 42 churches and other religious institutions. Of those, 33 – a huge majority – either gave her the runaround or said no.

In this category, there were many huge, wealthy churches that unquestionably could have helped: for example, Dream City Church, a Pentecostal megachurch in Phoenix which Charlie Kirk attended.

Joel Osteen’s massive Lakewood Church in Houston told Nikalie she could put in an application to their “benevolence ministry”, but said it might take weeks for them to approve her request – as if that’s helpful for a baby who’s starving now. (This is the same church that refused to house flood refugees during Hurricane Harvey.)

At the 13,000-member First Baptist Church of Dallas, the person who answered the phone said, “I’m not aware of any programs that we have to help you.” Nikalie asked if the church was pro-life, and they hung up on her.

Germantown Baptist Church in Memphis said, “Our benevolence is for our members” and turned her away. Note, it wouldn’t even be good enough for her to be Christian – she’d have to be a member of that specific church for them to consider helping!

(As a side note: I listened to a lot of Nikalie’s videos to write this post. The sound of a screaming baby is viscerally disturbing. It was taking a psychological toll on me, and I knew there was no actual baby! Imagine the hard-heartedness of people who listened to it in the belief that it was real and still did nothing.)

This is just what an atheist would have predicted. We’ve always said that the churches’ pretensions of morality are empty shams. They claim to be the source of all goodness, but in reality, most are self-perpetuating clubhouses of privilege. The only thing they care about is accumulating as much wealth and power as they can get their greedy hands on.

To be sure, not every church flunked Nikalie’s experiment. Although most turned her away, a few said yes. Most of these were either smaller, poorer churches, or non-Christian religious minorities.

For example, when she called a tiny church in rural Kentucky, the pastor, who’s a great-grandfather, immediately offered to go out and buy it himself. (After her experiment was publicized, this video went viral and over $100,000 in donations poured in to that church.)

A mosque in North Carolina said yes the instant she asked.

A Buddhist temple suggested several ideas for her to try, and when she said none of those had panned out, the woman who answered the phone offered her money.

What’s striking is that some churches that failed the test – and were called out on social media for it – didn’t react with shame or contrition. Instead, they attacked Nikalie personally. It’s as though they thought, if they could find some reason to condemn her, it would invalidate her experiment.

For example, the pastor of Germantown Baptist gave a sermon where he huffed that his church was targeted by “radical woke unbelieving trolls” who engaged in “an unrighteous fake attempt to set a trap for us“.

He didn’t show the slightest remorse. He didn’t concede that, even if this was a trap, the way the church responded says something about them. He couldn’t even be bothered to say that they’d learned a lesson or that they’d reevaluate their members-only policy.

It gets worse. Raymond Johnson, pastor of Baton Rouge’s Living Faith Christian Church, arrogantly sneered, “I don’t apologize to the devil.” He said Nikalie had “the spirit of a witch” and, most shockingly, “my Bible say[s]… do not allow that thing to live”. (Is this a death threat wrapped in scripture?)

And Steven L. Anderson, the grotesquely misogynist pastor of Faithful Word Baptist Church in Arizona, snarled and raged about “‘single mother’ whores” (Nikalie never claimed to be a single mother in her experiment). He said – where other people could see it, under his own name – “Churches should not be funding fornicators and their bastards.” (Remember, brethren, Jesus threw the first stone at a prostitute!)

What deepens the sting is that most of these churches are conservative institutions who believe that government safety nets should be dismantled because it’s the church, not the state, that’s supposed to be helping the needy. But when presented with a perfect opportunity to do just that, they failed miserably. They put the lie to their own faith and their own politics.

These churches are naked in their hypocrisy. But rather than treating this as an opportunity for self-reflection, they lashed out in anger at the person who exposed them.

Again, while this was the more common response, there were good people in every religion who were willing to help a fellow human in need. The beauty of Nikalie’s test is that it’s a clear, unambiguous way to tell which is which. It’s like a litmus strip that changes color the moment you walk through the door. More than anything else, that’s what most churches fear: an inescapable test of their actions, not just their words.

The Probability Broach: Whose streets? Our streets!

An 1847 map of lower Manhattan

The Probability Broach, chapter 11

After several tedious days of convalescence punctuated by assassination attempts, Win Bear is back on his feet. The North American Confederacy’s advanced medical technology has healed his injuries, and his friends gift him new clothes. For free, because they’re just that nice.

He’s eager to get out and about, and he plans to join his counterpart Ed Bear on a case. Ed’s vehicles were damaged in the shooting that nearly killed Win, so they’re borrowing his neighbor Lucy’s. (Everyone here owns hovercraft rather than cars, because hovercraft are cool.)

Lucy had a matched pair of elderly Thorneycroft 418s, a stately machine dating back almost to the beginnings of hovercraft production. Enameled a garish yellow paisley, they’d rolled off the assembly line sixty years ago, but, with the help of an adoring mechanic, Lucy proudly kept them in mint condition.

…She pointed toward the drive fans, rudders high and stately behind them. “Can’t handle more’n a six-degree incline unless you give ’em full power and blow out every window in town.”

See, this is why you’re better off with no government. Those meddling busybodies pass all kinds of nanny-state laws, like “you’re not allowed to have machines so loud they can shatter your neighbors’ windows with sheer sonic force”.

Here, they believe in freedom! Don’t take our choices away. Let every individual decide for themselves whether they want to rupture everyone’s eardrums within a six-block radius.

As near as I can figure, Laporte occupies about half the area of Colorado’s Larimer County. According to the ad agencies who keep track—a census-taker would be cold meat before his second nosy question—population varies between two and three million. North Americans are incredibly mobile. A lot of that is underground. We swept through timber and prairie Ed swore was high-density industrial, then the forest primeval would give way with breathtaking suddenness to skyscrapers swooping five hundred stories into the clear bright air.

This is another of those little moments that make you do a double-take.

Smith says outright that the trigger-happy residents of the North American Confederacy would shoot a census taker… but ad agencies are somehow better?!

In this bizarro-world, public servants going door to door to ask basic demographic questions is an intolerable infringement on privacy. However, unaccountable private companies collecting that info and much more besides, building up detailed profiles on people’s interests and affiliations, with no restrictions on how this information can be used or who it can be sold to—that’s completely fine, and doesn’t raise even a flicker of concern.

Ed’s place is in south-central Laporte, dominated by the university, an enormous park I was acquainted with, various retail businesses and small industries. We slid easily and quickly through the manicured streets, finding an artery that let us rev up almost to eighty, and, with cross-traffic whisking around us by landscaped viaduct and tunnel, were in the Old Town in minutes.

Reading libertarian novels is like watching a magician’s act. You know you’re being fooled; you just have to spot the sleight of hand when it happens. Often, it’s a casual mention of something that logically shouldn’t exist in their world. This passage has one of those.

L. Neil Smith refers to “manicured streets” so straight and wide and well-maintained that Ed and Win can drive at eighty miles an hour. Say what? Who built those streets?

As any student of history knows, roads are one of the oldest functions of the state. The Roman roads are the classic example. They spread tens of thousands of miles across Europe, the Middle East and Africa, knitting together far-flung provinces, enabling fast movement and long-distance trade. They were so well-made that some are still in use today, two thousand years later.

In South America, the Inca built roads on an immense scale throughout their mountainous empire, with bridges, retaining walls and water drainage. Like the Roman roads, the benefits persist: one study found that, even today, communities living near the old Inca roads are better off economically.

But whether Roman, Incan or wherever else, a road network is a colossal engineering project. In every instance, it requires the power of a state to plan, organize and marshal the labor of thousands of people. The same goes for other massive infrastructure projects, like bridges, dams, canals, tunnels or sewers.

The most important part, possibly even more than the labor, is the decision-making power. Inevitably, people along the proposed route get inconvenienced or displaced. How are their objections handled? Who has the final say?

In the modern era, building the interstate highways required the government’s power of eminent domain to seize property from landholders, on a vast scale. From Tom Lewis’ book Divided Highways:

It required seizing more land by eminent domain than “had been taken in the entire history of road building in the United States,” according to Lewis.

Obviously, eminent domain is a dangerous power that can be abused. Racist urban planners like Robert Moses bulldozed highways right through the middle of thriving minority neighborhoods, displacing residents, destroying homes and businesses. Moses and those like him created an architecture of segregation that persists to this day.

But just because a power can be used in unjust ways, it doesn’t follow that it shouldn’t exist. No one wants to go back to the medieval era, when long-distance travel meant a grueling, hazardous journey that took months to go a few hundred miles. Reliable roads make civilization possible, but they have to be put somewhere. Inevitably, some have to sacrifice for the benefit of all.

So, again, how can you have roads without a state? Who decided the routes? How did they pay for it? Most important, how did they get everyone else to agree?

It would be one thing if libertarians tried to answer these questions, however implausible their answers were. But they don’t even seem to realize the problem.

The same issue exists in Atlas Shrugged. In the capitalist utopia of Galt’s Gulch, there’s no government and everything is privately owned. Yet somehow they, too, have roads and other infrastructure. There’s no explanation of who built these things or how; it’s as if they just condensed from the ether.

If landholders had an absolute right to refuse to sell, it would be almost impossible to build roads in a populated area. In an anarcho-capitalist world, if roads existed at all, they wouldn’t be convenient straightaways laid out in a logical grid. They’d be a crazily branching network of tight, tangled paths with no rhyme or reason, riven with hairpin turns and dead ends, twisting and dividing around buildings whose owners wouldn’t move. They would all look like this “nail house” in China.

Also, there would be toll booths on every block charging extortionate fees—both because this would make roads incredibly expensive and difficult to construct, and because the investors would expect high returns. (In case you were curious, the word “toll” never appears in TPB.)

This goes to show how libertarians and anarcho-capitalists have a cargo cult philosophy. They insist that government does nothing good or worthwhile, but only because they have an ideological blind spot to everything it gives them: the roads they drive on, the clean water that comes out of their tap, the electricity that flows into their house, the standards and measures that enable smooth trade.

They never wonder where that stuff comes from; they believe it just appears when people need it. They overlook all the collective effort it takes to create, organize and maintain the architecture of society, because acknowledging that would point them in directions they don’t want to go.

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New on OnlySky: The era of Zohran Mamdani

I have a new column this week on OnlySky. It’s about the election of Zohran Mamdani as New York mayor and what it means for the future of American politics.

This month, a democratic socialist Muslim was elected to run one of the world’s greatest cities. In his rise to power, Mamdani defied conventional wisdom, flummoxed the media establishment, infuriated the billionaire class, and shrugged off suspicion and outright hostility from the ossified Democratic party elites. But his brand of unapologetically progressive politics connected with voters. It inspired the young and motivated an army of thousands of volunteers to get out the vote for him. It’s drawn positive attention and renewed hope all around the world.

Is his victory a fluke that can’t be repeated elsewhere – something unique to the political conditions in NYC? Or does it signal the approach of a sea change in our politics?

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:

At the start of the campaign, Andrew Cuomo was the heir-in-waiting. The son of a popular former mayor and a member of President Bill Clinton’s cabinet, he was governor of New York during the COVID era. He resigned in 2021 after accusations that he sexually harassed women in his staff, but he decided to make a comeback.

By contrast, Mamdani, a city councilman from Astoria, started out as an unknown. The earliest polls showed him at 1%, tied with “someone else”. He’s a Muslim—long thought a liability in the city that went through 9/11—and a naturalized citizen who emigrated from Uganda—at a time when the U.S. is experiencing a violent resurgence of xenophobia. As mentioned, he’s also a democratic socialist, an ideology that one party distrusts and the other despises.

But he ran a smart, media-savvy campaign. He combined an unapologetic progressive platform with undeniable personal charisma and a string of viral videos: like jumping into frigid January water in a suit to promote his proposed rent freeze, or a ferocious confrontation with Trumpist border czar Tom Homan, or walking the entire length of Manhattan while talking to voters along the way.

Continue reading on OnlySky…

The Probability Broach: Cracks in utopia

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

The Probability Broach, chapter 10

By threatening a captive prisoner, Win Bear was able to extract two useful pieces of information: one, that someone named “Madison” sent the goon squad after him, and two, that this Madison has or wants to acquire nuclear weapons (“He’ll blast you all to radioactive slag!”).

That second part is more disturbing to Win than to his new friends. Although the North American Confederacy has more advanced technology than the world he came from, Win knows what a nuclear bomb is, while his friends seem unfamiliar with the concept. They give him blank looks when he asks them about it.

But even though it got them the information they wanted, torturing a prisoner is against the rules of this society. Anyone who commits a crime and can’t make restitution is supposed to be ostracized by all, thrown out into the street and left to starve. That’s the way Smith tells us it works here.

However, even though Win flagrantly violated a prisoner’s rights in front of them, his friends never even consider doing that to him. We saw last time that they’re a little angry, but their anger only lasts a few paragraphs and then it’s never brought up again. Despite Smith’s insistence that his anarchy works because everyone follows the unwritten social contract, he unintentionally depicts the more realistic outcome: people overlooking the rules to help out their friends.

That said, when Win asks, “I’ve gone and spoiled it, haven’t I?”, they confirm the prisoner can file a legal case:

“‘Fraid so, buster,” Lucy absently swirled her ice, “He’ll likely sue our pants off and you don’t have that much to spare.”

… “He can’t get blood out of a turnip. Does that mean Devil’s Island?”

“Asteroids. No, Winnie, it just means we can’t sue him: our claims’ll cancel out.”

Once again, no one proposes the obvious solution, which is to kill the prisoner before he can complain to anyone about his treatment. In a world with no laws, where murder is perfectly allowable as long as you say it was self-defense, that’s the rational course of action.

Luckily for Win, this never becomes an issue. When the Civil Liberties Association arrives, the prisoner denies being tortured. No reason for this is given. You’d think the bad guys, who want to subvert this society, would be eager to wield its rules against their enemies. Even if they failed to kill Win, why not try to tie him up in court?

By the time I got to bed, the authorities had carted off the bodies, living and otherwise, along with depositions in living color and stereophonic sound, from every witness and participant—a lengthy process, but not without its rewards.

I wasn’t going to the asteroids, after all. Our damaged guest denied being intimidated—was downright vehement about it. I wasn’t looking any gift horses in the mouth, but everybody else was curious as the CLA shook him down.

“What’s this?” The representative removed a medallion from the prisoner’s neck.

… “Private property!” he snarled. “Give it back!”

The medal is bronze, engraved with “1789” and the “eye-in-the-pyramid” logo—better known as the Eye of Providence—which Win recognizes because it’s on the money where he comes from.

(Evil Overlord tip: Don’t make your henchmen wear identifying regalia when they go out to commit assassinations!)

Lucy, who until this point hasn’t been described as anything other than Ed Bear’s elderly neighbor, declares that she recognizes the symbol:

“I’ve seen this type before”—Lucy chuckled grimly—”back in the War in Europe. Coulda collected a mess of those medals if I’d been the souvenir type.”

Ed looked exasperated. “There you go again, Lucy, that was seventy years ago, and the Confederacy was neutral. The only Americans over there were volunteers in—”

“The Thousand Airship Flight! Bloody Huns shot us to pieces, but I got my passengers down okay, and joined the fighting.”

Lucy explains that they were fighting the Prussians, who had launched an imperial war of conquest against the rest of Europe. It’s this timeline’s version of World War I.

The North American Confederacy, being an anarchy without a standing army, officially stayed neutral. But thousands of its citizens volunteered to go and join the resistance, and Lucy was one of them. (As we’ll see, the NAC has life-extending technology, which is how she’s still alive to recall it seventy years later.)

The symbol dates back to the war, but doesn’t come from the Prussians, she says. Rather, it’s from the conspirators who were giving them their marching orders:

Ed goggled. “You mean it’s really—”

“That’s right, Eddie, it’s them. And Win, I do know what an atom bomb is. I helped move Phobos into synchronous orbit over Coprates.” She jerked an unkind thumb toward the prisoner. “If these crablice’re plannin’ t’use thermonuclear earth-movers as weapons…”

“Who the hell are you talking about?” I demanded. “Who’s them?”

“The Hamiltonians,” Ed answered quietly. “They’re the ones trying to kill you, Win.”

If you hadn’t guessed, the “Hamiltonians” are a secret cabal plotting to impose that ultimate evil: government. Smith chooses this appellation for his villains because he hates Alexander Hamilton the most of all America’s founders.

This is the first indication that that anyone is plotting to overthrow this society. Smith is eager to convince us that his version of anarchism works; that the North American Confederacy is a super-advanced, prosperous, peaceful utopia. But, clearly, it still has people who are so disgruntled that they want to tear it down.

This could be the launching point for an interesting philosophical discussion. If the NAC is as good as its author says it is, what motivates people to be Hamiltonians?

In fact, they’re so attracted to this ideology that they’re willing to kill or die for its sake—as opposed to, say, writing angry letters to the editor. That’s an extreme level of devotion that’s normally only brought out by severe oppression or desperation.

Cover of "The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas" by Ursula K. LeGuin

What made them so fanatical? Are these the poor and homeless, people who couldn’t earn enough to survive, and joined a cult because it was better than starving? Did they suffer some appalling injustice at the hands of its for-profit legal system? Are they serfs or indentured servants who escaped brutal treatment by rich owners and want to strike back? Is there a dark underbelly to the NAC that we’re not seeing?

These are the kinds of questions any decent world-builder should ask. Obviously, some societies are better and some are worse, but no arrangement is going to please everyone. The best way to learn about a civilization, real or fictional, is to look into its cracks—to ask who it’s not serving, and why.

Alas, this potentially interesting question goes unanswered in this book. Smith never explains what motivates the Hamiltonians, nor treats them as anything other than anonymous, disposable goons. For plot purposes, there have to be bad guys even in his superior anarcho-capitalist world, but he doesn’t want to delve into their reasoning. Perhaps he felt he couldn’t give them believable motivations without risking his utopia seeming not so utopian.

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