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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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.

Continue reading on OnlySky…

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.

Continue reading on OnlySky…

The Probability Broach: Inside job

The gate to the Alnwick Poison Garden of poisonous plants

The Probability Broach, chapter 16

Win and his friends are trying to alert the North American Confederacy to the Hamiltonian threat in their midst. Conveniently, one of said friends is Jenny Smythe, the president of the NAC.

The NAC has a Congress, but it doesn’t meet regularly—only when all the members feel like it. So, she heads out to spread the word:

As Jenny flitted about the continent persuading balky Congresspersons into their first parley in three decades, Lucy acted as anchor, relaying messages, confirming “crazy” stories, arranging tickets and travel schedules.

So what did Lieutenant Bear do to make himself feel useful? Zilch. Well, I had some minor value as Exhibit A: the Barbarian from the Land of the Bomb. Wonderful.

With no part to play, Win feels bored and useless. He’s moping around the house, drinking and feeling sorry for himself. (Once again, no one seems to care that he’s unemployed, nor hints that he needs to make a financial contribution.)

Lucy notices his funk and and tries to cheer him up (“Winnie, you look like the Before model in a cocaine commercial”).

She laughed suddenly. “Tell me, boy, you planning to stick around? I mean after Deejay’s thingamajig’s back in working order?”

That caught me by surprise. “Haven’t thought about it much.” I’d been thinking about very little else. “I guess I just assumed—”

“All you talk about’s ‘back-home-this’ and ‘back-home-that’—what in lumbago’s a girl gonna assume?”

“I just never imagined—besides, I have obligations back home.”

… “Who says you’re obligated to attend the funeral of your own civilization or get buried with it?”

This is an entirely unwarranted show of confidence on Lucy’s part, considering they know for a fact that Madison is preparing to bring in an invading army equipped with atomic bombs, and there’s nothing they can do to stop him because his private property rights are sacrosanct.

Given that the North American Confederacy is facing a threat of nuclear holocaust, isn’t it a little premature to be discussing Win’s plans for the future? What makes Lucy so sure they’re going to win, or that the world won’t be left a radioactive wasteland even if they do? Shouldn’t they at least acknowledge the possibility that Win’s world might end up being the safer place to seek refuge?

They’re still contemplating this when Ed bursts in. He’s been reviewing the footage they took from Madison’s house, including the room where the villains are building their own Probability Broach, and he’s belatedly made a connection.

As you may remember, before Win showed up, Ed was investigating a theft from a company called Paratronics, which makes parts that are essential for building interdimensional portals. It turns out the machinery they saw in Madison’s house was built from those stolen parts. Ed is furious at himself for not figuring this out earlier:

“Anyway, that basement’s got every dial and gauge, every coil, transistor, and interociter that’s missing from Bertram’s warehouse, that’s what!”

…I had an idea. “Now we can take Madison to court… He can’t plead ignorance with a basement full of stolen parts!”

“Sorry,” Lucy said, “That information was obtained unethic—”

“But I thought that could be taken care of! Don’t keep changing the rules!”

Yet again, the ethics of this society interfere with our heroes seeking justice. But this is an especially puzzling obstacle for Smith to lay in the path of his protagonists.

He’s referring to a legal doctrine called “fruit of the poisonous tree”. It says that prosecutors can’t use evidence against you at trial if they broke the law to get it. It’s supposed to be the incentive for police to apply for search warrants, rather than breaking into your house whenever they feel like it to rummage around for evidence of a crime.

But, again, there are no search warrants here, because there are no laws here. Ed and Win aren’t public servants who are sworn to uphold established precedents; they’re private parties who don’t answer to anyone. Are there really codes of ethics that prevent them from using evidence acquired through shady methods? If so, who enforces them? Are these codes so universally agreed upon that they couldn’t bring a case with any hope of success?

(Also, an obvious point: Why do Ed and Win have to say where they obtained the footage of Madison’s house? Why not just say it came from an anonymous tipster?)

It’s hard to imagine how any crime could be solved in this world, if all you have to do is keep stolen goods in your house. No one can enter without your permission, and even if someone did, they wouldn’t be able to use anything they discovered against you. Also, as we saw previously, no one knows about fingerprints, and there are no ID documents or other means of identifying a stranger if you don’t know them on sight. What on earth is left for a private investigator like Ed to do?

But even discounting that obstacle, Ed says there’s a bigger problem:

“Oh, if we retrieved Bertram’s property, it’d delay Madison, but he’d acquire what he needs eventually, and we’d be right back where we are now. But what really makes me mad is that, in order to sue, you need a victim, a complainant. Once I’d done the analysis, I called Bertram.”

“And?” I said, not liking where this was headed.

“And he was very upset. I found out why later on—he’d flown the coop. Forsyth’s team watched Madison greet him at the door, and they weren’t exactly acting like enemies.”

“So Bertram’s been stealing from his own company,” I said. “For the Cause, no doubt.”

This is a classic needlessly complicated villain plan.

Ed has discovered that Freeman K. Bertram, the Paratronics CEO, and Madison, the would-be world conqueror, are in cahoots. But rather than just sell Madison the parts to build his own Probability Broach, Bertram schemes with Madison to steal them, and then… hires Ed to solve the crime he masterminded?

Why bother with this? Bertram has no reason for this subterfuge—he’s in charge of the company! He can sell to whoever he wants! In this anarcho-capitalist world, you can be sure there’s no law preventing him from doing so. If he wanted to be really devious, he could do it through a chain of shell companies, so no one can trace the purchases, or arrange some kind of kickback scheme, to reimburse Madison for the cost.

But instead of using the legitimate methods available to him, he schemes to commit this completely unnecessary crime. That ends up being the only thing that puts the heroes on his trail.

Image credit: Amanda Slater, released under CC BY-SA 2.0 license

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The Probability Broach: Do no harm

A medical caduceus laid on top of a stack of dollar bills

The Probability Broach, chapter 16

We previously read that, while Ed and Win were burgling John Jay Madison’s house to get evidence of his evil plan, he returned the favor by sending his thugs after their friend Clarissa Olson. In this week’s installment, Clarissa explains what happened:

“I’d stayed late with a client who’s having a rough regeneration—geriotic complications to be cleared up before the limb can replace itself… Anyway, I went home and freshened up, intending to come over here and see what mischief these two had accomplished at Madison’s. Just as I was starting out the front door, a couple of huge men smashed it in. I ran back through the house, but someone was there with a machine gun, shattering my windows.”

“How many were there?”

… “Two in the front, and the one out by the pool, with the hideous scars—I turned around again and practically ran into them. I had my Webley out, and sort of waved it around with the trigger held back.”

Lucy chuckled. “Walked right into it, the jerks.” She held one of the wicked little projectiles, eleven caliber, an inch or so long. “A thousand of these a minute, ten thousand feet a second. It’d ruin your whole day, wouldn’t it?” I examined the pistol with considerably more respect. Its barrel was a single massive coil, driving little steel needles by linear induction. There were hundreds in its magazine.

In case you’ve forgotten, Clarissa is the doctor who operated on Win and saved his life when he was gunned down and almost killed. She never asks him to pay for this, which is arguably in keeping with medical ethics, although it’s puzzling in an anarcho-capitalist world where money and profit is supposed to rule everything.

But in this chapter, we see a different side of her. She’s a healer who saves lives, but she’s also a stone-cold killer who wields a deadly flechette gun (sci-fi sometimes calls this kind of weapon a “needler”), and shoots men dead without a qualm.

Obviously, this is an indulgence of authorial fantasy on L. Neil Smith’s part: the sexy blonde doctor who’s also a badass gunslinger. But what about the ethics of this? Isn’t there an inherent contradiction in the idea of a healer who goes armed to kill?

The Hippocratic Oath is famous for its clause to “do no harm“. That vow is echoed in modern medical oaths, like the Declaration of Geneva, in which doctors swear to “maintain the utmost respect for human life”.

This even applies to military medics, who, according to the Geneva Conventions, are supposed to be noncombatants. They have a moral duty to render aid to anyone in need, including wounded soldiers from the other side.

Doctors aren’t forbidden to defend themselves if they’re in danger, of course. But you’d think a good doctor would be at least a little conflicted about having to shoot two people dead. That ethical conflict is never alluded to or explored in this book.

This raises a related question: Are there pacifists in the North American Confederacy? Is it possible to exist in this society while abstaining from violence—or are such people easy pickings for the first thug who knows they won’t defend themselves? This is another of those questions that a gun fetishist like Smith never considers.

Clarissa explains that she got away unscathed, but her home was destroyed:

“I stepped over the bodies, ran out front, and drove away. There was a blinding flash in my rear viewscreen and a huge ball of fire”—she shook her head sadly—”pointless destruction for its own sake. They’ll pour me a new house, and my professional records are transmitted every day to the insurance company, but my furniture, clothes—everything is gone.”

Lucy invites Clarissa to stay with her in the meantime, while Ed gives orders to increase their private guard (yet again). Win, still outraged, says: “Madison couldn’t get to us, so he decided to pick on you, probably as a threat to hold over our heads. As far as I’m concerned, it would have worked, too.”

He’s still fuming that they can’t just round up some goons and go repay Madison in kind, but his friends again tell him that that’s not the way it works here. However, Lucy says she has another idea. She has a connection that’s about to pay off:

“Ladies and gentlemen…” Lucy announced from the hallway, “The President of the North American Confederacy!”

The president entered, pausing a moment to commiserate with Forsyth, expressing pleasure at meeting Deejay, nodding grimly over the news while being introduced to Clarissa, greeting Ed like an old friend. Under the peculiar circumstances, I had to be introduced to the president, too. But no one had to introduce her to me.

I know Jenny Noble when I see her.

This is the NAC’s alternate version of Jenny Noble, the libertarian activist Win met in his own world (although her name is Jenny Smythe here, for avoidance of confusion).

In this world, she’s the president of the North American Confederacy. The NAC has a president and a legislature, although they’re symbolic figures with no real authority or power, as you’d expect in an anarchy. However, she’s apprised of the situation and she says she can help:

“I’ve been trying to tell you that, with any luck, the Confederacy’s going to pay for everything!”

Lucy narrowed suspicious eyes. “How y’figure that, girl?” I was interested, too, since there didn’t seem to be enough government on the whole planet to buy Forsyth a box of ammunition.

Jenny laughed. “It’s really very simple. In a week or so, there’ll be people standing in line to contribute. You see, I’ve decided there’s only one way to deal with the Hamiltonians. I’m calling a session of the Continental Congress.”

Is this anarcho-capitalist Congress going to show an unprecedented burst of community spirit? Will they come together to save the day through collective action?

Here’s a hint: Take your best guess about what would happen in real life when a bunch of selfish individualists assemble to argue about which one of them should deal with a threat. That’s pretty much how it plays out in this book.

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