The Probability Broach: Villainous authoritarians

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

The Probability Broach, chapter 9

L. Neil Smith has a serious grudge against the Constitution.

It’s not just that he disagrees with its goals, as you’d expect from an anarchist. Like a good sovereign citizen, he claims the whole thing was illegal. He denounces it as a grand conspiracy led by Alexander Hamilton. As Smith’s narrator Win Bear tells it:

He and his Federalists had shoved down the country’s throat their “Constitution,” a charter for a centralist superstate replacing the thirteen minigovernments that had been operating under the inefficient but tolerable Articles of Confederation. Adopted during an illegal and unrepresentative meeting in Philadelphia, originally authorized only to revise the Articles, this new document amounted to a bloodless coup d’état.

Funny—as near as I remembered, these were the same events that had happened in my own world. But in the eyes of my new friends, historic figures like John Jay and James Madison became villainous authoritarians. Of seventy-four delegates chosen to attend the Constitutional Convention, nineteen declined, and sixteen of those present refused to sign. Of the thirty-nine remaining, many of whom signed only reluctantly, just six had put their names to the original Declaration of Independence.

It’s true that not all the delegates to the Constitutional Convention were willing to sign, but that’s not surprising. It’s easy to reach agreement that an existing system isn’t working; it’s harder to agree on what to replace it with. Governing always involves compromise, and no political system makes everyone happy. That’s not a challenge unique to America, but something that every band of revolutionaries throughout history has discovered.

Smith roars that the Constitutional Convention was an “illegal” meeting, but he omits a relevant fact: the delegates met to revise the Articles of Confederation because it was very clear that they weren’t working.

Under the Articles, America was more like a loose alliance of thirteen separate nations. There was a national Congress, but it had no power to levy taxes. To fund anything it voted for, it had to beg the states to contribute.

This created a Prisoner’s Dilemma situation. Each state had a selfish incentive to sit out and let the others do the unpopular work of raising revenue—and because they all reasoned the same way, almost none of them ever did. In 1786, Congress requested $3.8 million from the states to pay national obligations, and got… $663.

The early American republic was chronically broke and hamstrung. It couldn’t pay the debts it had taken on while fighting for independence. It couldn’t even pay its own soldiers.

Smith puts huge importance on the Whiskey Rebellion. But there were other, equally serious crises that he ignores because they don’t fit with his worldview that blames centralized government for all evils.

In March 1783, in the so-called Newburgh Conspiracy, officers in the Continental Army were enraged over not receiving their promised pay and pensions—in some cases, for years on end. They circulated a letter hinting at plans to overthrow Congress. George Washington personally intervened to defuse the conspiracy.

But he couldn’t stop the next one: the Pennsylvania Mutiny of June 1783, when Congress was surrounded, mobbed and threatened by hundreds of angry, rebellious soldiers demanding their promised pay. They had to flee Philadelphia, the seat of government at the time.

Last but not least, there’s Shays’ Rebellion. It was an uprising of rural Massachusetts farmers, many of them veterans of the Revolutionary War, who were angry about state taxation when they themselves hadn’t been paid for their service. They attacked local courts, preventing them from meeting, and tried to storm a federal armory and seize its weapons to overthrow the government. Once again, the federal government was helpless to intervene. An alliance of private citizens paid out of their own pockets to fund a private militia to suppress the rebellion.

Meanwhile, America faced pressure from foreign powers. Spain, which controlled the Mississippi River, closed it to American navigation—strangling trade from western regions—and pressured Americans to swear allegiance to Spain in exchange for access. Once again, there was nothing the U.S. government could do.

These repeated crises made it clear that the fledgling American state was too weak to govern, and risked being torn apart by internal uprising or subjugated and carved up by European powers. By the time of the Constitutional Convention, there was widespread recognition that something better was needed. It wasn’t a sinister conspiracy, as Smith imagines.

Smith’s fuming about a “coup d’etat” or the Constitution being “shoved down the country’s throat” ignores another obvious fact: the delegates to the Constitutional Convention didn’t force a new government on the nation at gunpoint. How could they have?

There was no skullduggery or subterfuge. The new Constitution was presented and debated in public over the course of several years. It took until 1790, but all thirteen states ratified it democratically. To assuage some holdouts’ concerns, the Bill of Rights was added—arguably a step up from the Articles, which had no such thing!

After the Constitution was ratified, Smith’s alternate history proceeded the same as ours, until the Whiskey Rebellion. We’ve already heard about Albert Gallatin, and he makes another appearance in this chapter.

In 1794, a Pennsylvania gentleman stepped into the fray. A former Swiss financier, Albert Gallatin disapproved of the way Alexander Hamilton handled the nation’s checkbook. He organized and led the farmers and began convincing federal soldiers they were fighting on the wrong side…

Thus “fortified,” the 80-proof revolution marched on Philadelphia. Washington went to the wall, Hamilton fled to Prussia and was killed in a duel in 1804. Gallatin was proclaimed president.

Smith acknowledges (vaguely) that the Articles of Confederation gave rise to some problems, which he tries to address as follows:

Economic problems that had precipitated the Constitution Conspiracy were solved with a new currency, backed by untold acres of land in the undeveloped Northwest Territories.

…Gallatin’s land certificates were redeemed, the last money ever issued by a United States government. He served five four-year terms in all, and lived long enough to see his own peculiar brand of anarchism begin spreading throughout the world.

There’s a lot of furious handwaving in this passage. I’ll limit myself to pointing out the top two problems.

In Smith’s history, America’s Revolutionary War debts were settled by a new currency, backed by land in the Northwest Territories. Except… the Northwest Territories were occupied at that time—by the British—who refused to relinquish them because, again, the Articles of Confederation government was shirking its financial obligations under the Treaty of Paris that ended the war!

Smith expects us to believe that the British crown would accept land they already controlled as payment for the debt we owed them.

In reality, the British didn’t withdraw from those territories until the 1794 Jay Treaty, negotiated by that villainous authoritarian John Jay. (There were also Native Americans living there—more about this next week.)

Second, to re-raise a point I made before: How can a currency be backed by land, unless there’s a central government that can protect and adjudicate claims of ownership?

In the anarchist society that Smith envisions, there’d be nothing to stop crowds of claim-jumpers and squatters from taking over territory that other people thought they owned. Any currency whose value was predicated on being able to redeem it for parcels of land would rapidly become worthless.

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New on OnlySky: Will China save the world from climate change?

I have a new column this week on OnlySky. It’s about the looming disaster of climate change, and how many nations are decarbonizing at the scale required. Arguably, there’s only one – and that one is China.

In the past few years, China has been installing more renewable energy than the rest of the world combined. If we have any chance of saving the planet from the worst outcomes of the climate crisis, it may well be because of Beijing. And, lest I be mistaken, that’s not what we should want! It’s infinitely preferable that the future be written by a liberal democracy, not an authoritarian one-party state.

But the U.S. has ceded its leadership role in world affairs, very likely for good. We’re in the throes of vicious anti-scientific propaganda that’s robbed us of the will to act. Meanwhile, China’s rulers seem to be among the few who recognize the scope of the problem and are willing to do something about it. The shocking thing isn’t that they’re taking action, but that so few other countries are showing the same urgency.

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

In the first half of 2025, China deployed more solar power than the rest of the world—combined. In that time, humanity as a whole installed 380 gigawatts of new solar capacity, of which China accounted for 256 gigawatts. Almost two-thirds!

This isn’t a fluke, but the continuation of a trend. Similarly, in 2024, the world installed 600 GW of solar power. Of that number, China accounted for 329 GW. The U.S. was far behind in second place, with a measly 50 GW. Most other countries installed far less.

The scale of China’s ambition can be seen in the desert of northwestern Xinjiang, where they’ve constructed the biggest solar farm in the world. It’s almost 33,000 acres, about the size of Paris, with a total capacity of 3.5 gigawatts. It’s big enough to power a small country by itself.

This massive build-out of renewables is having an effect. Studies suggest that China’s carbon emissions are beginning to fall, without any reduction in economic activity.

Continue reading on OnlySky…

The Probability Broach: Who lives, who dies, who tells your story

A portrait of Alexander Hamilton

The Probability Broach, chapter 9

Safe and sound (for the moment), Win Bear continues his research into why history unfolded so differently in this anarchist universe:

I hunched over the Telecom, a stranger in a strange land, trying to figure out how we both got so strange. What real differences were there between the Encyclopedia of North America and the smattering of history I could recall?

…What really differed was interpretations.

In 1789, the unlucky year 13 A.L., the Revolution was betrayed. Since 1776, people had been free of kings, free of governments, free to live their own lives. It sounded like a Propertarian’s paradise. Now things were going to be different again: America was headed back—so Lucy and the encyclopedia said—toward slavery.

The fiend responsible for this counter-revolutionary nastiness was Alexander Hamilton, a name Confederates hold in about the same esteem as the word “spittoon.” He and his Federalists had shoved down the country’s throat their “Constitution,” a charter for a centralist superstate replacing the thirteen minigovernments that had been operating under the inefficient but tolerable Articles of Confederation.

Headed back toward slavery? That’s a cringeworthy turn of phrase, given that even in L. Neil Smith’s alternate timeline, America still had real, actual slavery at this point.

“People” most certainly weren’t “free to live their own lives” in that era… unless by “people”, he meant “white men”. As I’ve mentioned, this is a persistent blind spot of his.

We’ll discuss more about the North American Confederacy’s history later, but for now, here’s a quick reminder: In their world, as in ours, the Constitution superceded the Articles of Confederation. The divergence point is the Whiskey Rebellion against the nascent federal government.

In our world, it fizzled out. In the Confederate world, it succeeded. George Washington was executed, the Constitution was scrapped, and the United States government was overthrown, giving rise to an anarchist society.

To hear Smith tell it, centralized government is the source of all evil. Once the Constitution was abolished, America experienced an immediate renaissance – not just technologically, but morally.

A case in point is his treatment of slavery, as told by Win:

Confederate history after the Rebellion was a mishmash of the familiar and the fantastic. Gallatin adopted a new calendar and a system of weights and measures, both devised by Thomas Jefferson.

…Jefferson enjoyed an even more illustrious career than back at home. Fourth president, after Edmond Genêt, he’d almost single-handedly lectured, argued, and shamed the country into giving up slavery, freeing his own slaves in 31 A.L. On the lecture circuits, four years later, an irate reactionary put a nine-inch dagger into his leg, leaving Jefferson with a limp and a cane he carried the rest of his life. They hauled the assassin out with a faceful of pistol lead, as the inventive future president had mounted the rostrum bearing a repeating sidearm of his own design. He finished the speech before he’d see a doctor. Slavery was abolished in 44 A.L., the year Jefferson ascended to the presidency.

Hold on just a minute! I want to hear more about how Thomas Jefferson peacefully talked all slaveholders into freeing their slaves.

Smith doesn’t linger on this. He makes the claim, then hastily segues to a different image – a badass Jefferson blowing an assassin away – almost as if he’s trying to distract readers so we don’t ask for more details. (No surprise we don’t hear any of the actual words of these magically persuasive speeches.)

In our world, defeating slavery took the bloodiest conflict ever fought on American soil. Does Smith expect us to believe that all this death and devastation was unnecessary? Could Abraham Lincoln have prevented the Civil War if only he’d been a better speechwriter?

Smith drastically underestimates how simple it is to convince people to give up racist beliefs, especially racist beliefs they benefit from. He believes that once the right political system is in place, all prejudice will melt away and everyone will lose their desire to dominate others. Ironically, that’s very similar to what communists believe, only in service to more or less the opposite conclusion.

Of course, Smith has to say this, because he’s an anarchist. If people won’t freely make the right choice – for example, if they choose to enslave, oppress or discriminate against others based on race – the only other option is a state or state-like power to compel them. He can’t abide that, so his ideology requires him to believe that bad beliefs are easy to overcome. But his ideology patently clashes with reality.

All libertarians have to grapple with an inconvenient historical truth. The Anti-Federalists – the founders who were most in favor of limited government – didn’t hold this view out of devotion to an abstract concept of liberty. They held this view so that government didn’t interfere with their ability to own slaves.

For example, Patrick Henry – he of “give me liberty or give me death” – was an outspoken opponent of the Constitution. Why? Because he feared that it would give Congress the power to free the slaves:

“They will search that paper, and see if they have power of manumission. And have they not, sir? Have they not power to provide for the general defence and welfare? May they not think that these call for the abolition of slavery? May they not pronounce all slaves free, and will they not be warranted by that power? There is no ambiguous implication, or logical deduction. The paper speaks to the point. They have the power in clear unequivocal terms; and will clearly and certainly exercise it.”

(See also this paper, and this article arguing that the Second Amendment was ratified to protect the legitimacy of slave-patrol militias.)

The enslavers who opposed the Constitution were explicit about their reasoning: With a weak central government, they’d be able to do as they pleased. But a strong central government might one day come under pressure to liberate its enslaved citizens, and would be capable of doing so.

Meanwhile, although Smith loathes Alexander Hamilton for being the architect of strong central government, he did more than most founders to fight slavery.

Hamilton founded the New York Manumission Society, which called for (and achieved) the abolition of slavery in the state. During the American Revolution, he lobbied for enslaved people to be permitted to join the Continental Army in exchange for their freedom.

After the war, he argued that enslaved people who escaped to freedom on the British side shouldn’t be returned to slavery after Britain’s surrender: “as odious and immoral a thing as can be conceived… to bring back to servitude men once made free.” And after the Haitian Revolution, where a slave rebellion succeeded in overthrowing colonial rule and creating a free society – and terrifying the colonizing powers of the Western world – Hamilton was one of the few who advocated trade and diplomatic relations with the new Haitian government.

To be fair, Hamilton didn’t have completely clean hands. Despite his abolitionist advocacy, he married into the wealthy, slaveholding Schuyler family. He also swallowed the pro-slavery clauses of the Constitution to win Southern support for ratification.

Given how deeply slavery permeated the early American economy, none of the founders were free of its taint. However, it’s fair to say that Hamilton was more anti-slavery than most – both in his words and his deeds.

As for Thomas Jefferson, he talked a good game about ending slavery. He wanted to put anti-slavery language in the Declaration of Independence, though it was deleted at the insistence of slaveholding delegates. As president, he signed a law banning the international slave trade, which he called “violations of human rights which have been so long continued on the unoffending inhabitants of Africa”.

Nevertheless, when it came to the most obvious thing he could have done – freeing his own slaves, both for their sake and as an example to others – Jefferson failed. He didn’t even emancipate them in his will.

For all his rhetoric, he was acutely aware that the wealthy, plantation-owning class of which he was a member depended on the labor of enslaved people to support them and enable their aristocratic lifestyle. If slavery were abolished, that economic system built on exploitation would collapse. That was a sacrifice he wasn’t willing to make.

This fact doesn’t sit well with L. Neil Smith. So he rewrites history to conform to what he thinks “should” have happened.

He erases Alexander Hamilton’s anti-slavery advocacy so as to more easily villainize him. He recasts Jefferson the slaveholder as a principled hero of abolition. In doing so, he bulldozes the messy, inconvenient facts of real history, so he can put all the “good” people on his side and all the “bad” people on the other side.

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New on OnlySky: Cities without cars

I have a new column this week on OnlySky. It’s about the curse of car dependence, and whether there’s another way for us to live.

Middle-class American life is built around the car. The assumption is that everyone owns a private vehicle and uses it to drive everywhere they go. Alternative methods of transit, like bike lanes, mass transit, and even sidewalks and crosswalks for pedestrians, are an afterthought at best. When this assumption is baked into the layout of towns and cities, the result is a self-fulfilling prophecy. We make driving easy and everything else all but impossible, so of course most people choose to drive. The consequences are pollution, gridlock, deaths in traffic accidents, and all the other ills of car culture.

But it doesn’t have to be this way. We used to have walkable, human-scale neighborhoods, and if we so choose, we can start building them again. In a suburb in Arizona, there’s an urban experiment in progress which aims to prove that life without cars isn’t just viable, but better.

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

When you look at places where people want to live, they look very different.

These desirable places aren’t sprawling suburbs fed by rivers of highway traffic, or impersonal strip malls and chain stores, or wastelands of concrete with buildings set far apart from each other.

They’re towns and neighborhoods that are built on a human scale. They’re charming, character-rich, and most important, walkable.

They have public green spaces, like parks and gardens, with shade trees and fountains. They have pedestrian-friendly boulevards where people can stroll, and public squares and plazas where they can sit. The boulevards and the plazas are lined with buildings that have small businesses like cafes, restaurants or bookshops on the ground floor and living space above.

We haven’t built places like this in a long time. But in Arizona, the builders of Culdesac are trying to start doing it again.

Continue reading on OnlySky…

The Probability Broach: Roosevelt the warmonger

President Franklin Roosevelt sitting at a desk

The Probability Broach, chapter 9

Having fended off his nighttime attacker, and with extra security in place, Win resumes mending from his injuries using the North American Confederacy’s advanced medical tech.

While he’s healing, he does some research on Ed’s computer, trying to understand why this world turned out so differently from his own:

Who can explain their own times and the past that created them? I don’t remember enough from high school and a junior college curriculum in police science. What little I can parrot is just a hodgepodge of other people’s opinions.

Hell, they revise it every year. I never did figure out what caused World War I, and with each decade World War II seems more FDR’s doing than Japan’s. If I didn’t understand my own world, how could I understand this one?

Ed and Clarissa didn’t have quite the same problem. For them, there’d never been a World War II; no Roosevelt I could discover had ever scored higher than dogcatcher.

This was one of those lines that made me raise my eyebrows. Blaming World War II on Roosevelt?

Arguably, you could blame World War II on the victors of World War I, including Woodrow Wilson, who imposed punitive terms on Germany that created a sense of national humiliation and fed a desire for revenge. But why FDR? How could he possibly be responsible when the U.S. didn’t join WWII until it had already been raging around the world for two years?

It turns out that this is a common opinion among libertarians. The Libertarian Institute published an essay, “Roosevelt’s Infamy“, which asserts that FDR wanted the U.S. to enter World War II and schemed to provoke Japan so as to create a casus belli:

FDR began his machinations by doing everything he could to provoke the Germans into attacking U.S. vessels in the Atlantic. In that way, he could exclaim, “We’ve been attacked! Now, give me my declaration of war!” But the Nazi regime knew what FDR was up to and refused to take the bait.

…That was when Roosevelt turned to the Pacific, in the hope that a Japanese attack on the United States would give him a “back door” to the war against Germany.

That’s what FDR’s oil embargo against Japan was all about. Japan had invaded China and was occupying the country. Its war machine necessarily depended on a continuous supply of oil. The purpose of FDR’s embargo was to prevent Japan from acquiring that badly needed oil.

FDR’s oil embargo was remarkably successful. It maneuvered Japan into a position of having to make a choice: Either invade the Dutch East Indies to secure its oil supplies or meekly withdraw its military forces from China.

…Not surprisingly, Japan decided to invade the Dutch East Indies rather than withdraw from China. But Japan knew that the invasion stood the risk of the U.S. Navy interfering with its operations in the Dutch East Indies. That was what the attack on Pearl Harbor was for—to knock out the U.S. Pacific fleet so that Japan would have a free hand in securing those oil supplies in the Dutch East Indies.

The Mises Institute agrees, in an article titled “How U.S. Economic Warfare Provoked Japan’s Attack on Pearl Harbor“:

When Germany began to rearm and to seek Lebensraum aggressively in the late 1930s, the Roosevelt administration cooperated closely with the British and the French in measures to oppose German expansion. After World War II commenced in 1939, this U.S. assistance grew ever greater and included such measures as the so-called destroyer deal and the deceptively named Lend-Lease program. In anticipation of U.S. entry into the war, British and U.S. military staffs secretly formulated plans for joint operations. U.S. forces sought to create a war-justifying incident by cooperating with the British navy in attacks on German U-boats in the northern Atlantic, but Hitler refused to take the bait, thus denying Roosevelt the pretext he craved for making the United States a full-fledged, declared belligerent—a belligerence that the great majority of Americans opposed.

…The Roosevelt administration, while curtly dismissing Japanese diplomatic overtures to harmonize relations, accordingly imposed a series of increasingly stringent economic sanctions on Japan… Roosevelt and his subordinates knew they were putting Japan in an untenable position and that the Japanese government might well try to escape the stranglehold by going to war.

This is an astonishing position for libertarians to take.

Libertarianism is supposed to be founded on the non-aggression principle, which says you can’t use violence against someone unless they start the fight. Then you can strike back to defend yourself.

There’s a patently obvious fact that’s missing from these analyses: Even if FDR wanted to involve the U.S. in WWII, he didn’t start the war. The Axis nations did that, by coming up with imperialist, supremacist ideologies that justified their desire to control the world, then followed through by invading neighboring states – Poland in Germany’s case, China in Japan’s – and treating the conquered populaces brutally.

Why doesn’t that count as use of force? Why didn’t it justify U.S. involvement, to assist in defense of the countries that were under attack?

In essence, these libertarians are arguing that Imperial Japan was entitled to whatever resources it needed to expand its empire, and that Roosevelt refusing to sell those resources to them was an act of violence that justified the attack on Pearl Harbor. It’s like saying, “I have the absolute right to trade with you, and if you won’t sell me what I want to buy, I can shoot you.”

This should be anathema to a principled libertarian. Somehow, it doesn’t bother them. These groups claim to be anti-aggression, but it seems that as long as someone other than the U.S. starts the war, it’s fine by them.

I was going to draw an equivalence to today’s conservatives pretending not to know who started the Russia-Ukraine war, but they make this comparison themselves:

As an aside, it’s worth mentioning that more recently, U.S. officials, operating through NATO, maneuvered Russia into having to make a similar choice: Either accept Ukraine’s membership in NATO, which would enable the Pentagon to station its nuclear missiles and troops along Russia’s border, or invade Ukraine to prevent that from happening.

Again, this is a bizarre stance for a professed libertarian to take. They’re saying that Ukraine wanting to join NATO as defense against a Russian invasion was an aggressive act that justified that very invasion. In black-is-white libertarian-land, if someone takes steps to defend themselves against you, that justifies you attacking them.

(Ironically, there are factions on the socialist left who make the same error as these right-wingers. They both assume that only the U.S. has agency, and that our choices determine how the rest of the world reacts, so anything that happens must be our fault.)

To be clear, I don’t think the U.S. is responsible for policing the world, or that we have a moral obligation to overthrow every oppressive regime. We don’t have the power to do that, and it often ends badly when we try, as our prolonged failure in Afghanistan made painfully clear.

However, a reasonable middle ground is that we can, at least, not support regimes that wage war on others or oppress their own people. We can peacefully express our disapproval and limit their power through trade embargos and sanctions. That position seems like it should be congenial to libertarian thinking. However, actual libertarians don’t agree.

Again, why Roosevelt in particular? What did he do to earn L. Neil Smith’s enmity?

The libertarian hatred of FDR is also on display in Ayn Rand’s writings, and that gives a better view of their reasoning. Libertarians will tell you they loathe FDR because his New Deal was a massive government imposition on the free market. That’s closer, but still not the truth.

The true reason for their hatred, I think, isn’t because the New Deal was a government imposition on the economy, but because it was an effective one. Most of the New Deal programs are still in existence today, and they’re so popular that even conservatives are reluctant to touch them.

In other words, they hate FDR because he showed that government can work well, which goes against their anti-state ideology. They want to tear down his record by proving that everything he did was driven by sinister motives. But in order to do that, they’re forced into siding with the most infamously evil regimes in history.

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The Probability Broach: Blood on the highway

A wrecked car engulfed in flames

The Probability Broach, chapter 8

Speaking as a policeman, Win Bear is still incredulous that the anarcho-capitalist North American Confederacy has no such thing as license plates or driver’s licenses. He’s disturbed that his counterpart, Ed, is nonchalant about it:

How could I explain that licenses are necessary to public safety, especially when his culture apparently found no use for such a concept? “Look here, Ed, how many people get killed on your roads every year?”

… “No idea at all.” He reached for the Telecom pad. “Last year, around five or six hundred if you discount probable suicides.”

“What? Out of what population—and how many of them drive?”

More button-pushing. “Half a billion in North America, and maybe three vehicles for every person on the continent.”

This passage is a nested onion of implausibilities. Let’s unpeel them one at a time.

First: How does Ed – or anyone – know how many people are killed by car accidents in the North American Confederacy?

There might be media coverage of some car crashes, especially spectacular ones, but there’s no reason to believe it would be comprehensive. There’s no census, no Social Security Administration, no government agency keeping track of people. There are no police whose duty it is to investigate fatal accidents. There’s no requirement to report a death, and no central registry to report it to.

So, again: Where does Ed get this number from? Shouldn’t the only possible anarchist answer to this question be “I have no idea”?

Second: How can it possibly be true that the NAC has fewer traffic fatalities than our reality (which suffers around 40,000 traffic deaths per year)? Smith never even tries to justify this. Just think of what doesn’t exist here, in a society with no laws about what you can drive or how.

There are no speed limits. Not just the highways, but every road is an Autobahn. You can floor the gas pedal and roar at top speed through quiet residential neighborhoods where kids are playing. You can do wheelies in front of a school or drag-race through crowded streets for fun. (Even Germany is contemplating speed limits for its famous Autobahn, to reduce pollution and prevent deadly crashes.)

Since there are no driver’s licenses, there are no restrictions on who can drive. You can get behind the wheel if you’re a little kid, or if you have impaired vision, or if you have seizures. You don’t have to pass any test to prove you know what you’re doing.

There are no drunk driving laws. You can get behind the wheel blackout drunk, or high as a kite, or stoned on whatever recreational substance you like.

There are no laws regulating the size or shape of cars. In fact, you can intentionally make them more dangerous. You can mount a bulldozer blade on the front to push other vehicles out of the way. You can put spikes on your bumpers to defend against other drivers, as I suggested previously. You can add rocket boosters to go faster, and too bad for anyone who’s behind you when you hit the afterburners.

Or, in a less fanciful example, you can drive cars so massive and heavy that anyone you hit is almost certain to die. In the U.S., pedestrian fatalities have been rising, and our national obsession with heavy trucks and giant SUVs is the reason why.

You don’t have to have crumple zones, airbags, anti-lock brakes, or any of the other safety features that governments have mandated from years of hard-won experience. You can own a car that turns its passengers into projectiles, or explodes in a violent fireball, if it collides with something. (After all, safety features cost money! Why not leave them out to get a cheaper price? I know I’m a good driver, so nothing bad will happen to me.)

You can drive any kind of weird or experimental vehicle you want, whether or not it’s been through safety testing. You can roll out computer-controlled driving with insufficient testing, and use your customers as crash test dummies.

In flavor text from a later chapter, Smith not only agrees with this, he doubles down on the idea that you can drive literally anything you like, including cars powered by dynamite or on-board nuclear reactors:

North Americans adore any contraption that moves under its own impetus; they’ve harnessed every conceivable form of energy (and not a few inconceivable ones) to propel that most fantastic of their inventions, the private ground-effect machine. Steam and internal combustion compete with electricity and flywheels; there are fables of “hoverbuggies” run by enormous rubber bands, caged animals, charges of dynamite; and now, nuclear fusion. Secretly playing Prussian Ace in a cloud of turbodust or reading quietly while computers guide them along the Greenway at 300 miles per hour, they don’t care much about the power source. Within the portable privacy of their road machines, they have tapped a greater source of energy, the inner contemplation of a powerfully creative people, which is the source of all their lesser miracles.

The obvious fallback for an anarcho-capitalist would be to say that there’s no government which makes laws, but the private companies that presumably own the roads do mandate safety features. However, if this is Smith’s solution, he never says so, and excerpts like the one above suggest the opposite.

People in the North American Confederacy appear unused to any rule that restricts their freedom to do as they wish. As you may remember from last week, Ed is unfamiliar with the concept of license plates – suggesting that no private entity requires anything like it either.

What this shows is how L. Neil Smith’s brand of anarchy implies a radical rejection of basic political theory.

In standard political thinking, people agree to come together and create society, giving up some rights in exchange for the protection and benefits that the state offers. You can conceptualize this as a spectrum. On one end is absolute liberty – freedom in its raw and primal sense, where there are no rules except the law of the jungle. On the other end is an all-powerful totalitarian state, which guarantees safety and order by controlling everyone’s lives.

Few people would go to either extreme. But most of us would agree that some rules and some kind of governance are necessary. We just differ about which point along this spectrum strikes the most desirable balance.

However, Smith denies this framework altogether. He seems to believe that there is no tradeoff between liberty and safety – that, by getting rid of all laws, we somehow become safer as well. It’s “you can eat your cake and have it, too” as a political philosophy.

If he made an argument for how or why this win-win scenario could arise, that would be one thing. But he doesn’t. His position doesn’t come from any reasoned argument or consideration of the evidence, but through pure magical thinking.

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The Probability Broach: Nine-tenths of the law

A black-and-white fingerprint

The Probability Broach, chapter 8

Win Bear was attacked in the middle of the night, but he successfully defended himself. The attacker got away, but left his weapon behind: a big knife, “almost a short sword, fully eighteen inches from pommel to point, razor-sharp halfway along the back.”

Ed Bear, his parallel-universe twin, calls it a Rezin. It’s this world’s version of a Bowie knife, only here it’s named after Jim Bowie’s brother. He offhandedly mentions that in this world, the Battle of the Alamo was a victory for Texas, resulting in Santa Anna’s death and the establishment of the “Republic of Texas”.

Ed congratulates Win – “you’ve won yourself a handsome Rezin” – because apparently in this anarchist society, when you take something from someone in combat, that makes it yours.

“So I’ve got myself a genuine Rezin. Spoils of war, and all that?”

“You think its former owner will come back and claim it? Besides, it’s the custom.”

However, Win says he doesn’t want the blade, because he’s clueless about knife fighting. (He prefers guns.)

Ed is going to dispose of the knife, but Win realizes it could be a clue:

“Fingerprints!” I hollered. “Don’t screw up the evidence!” I flipped a corner of the blanket over and picked it up by the blade.

… “Fingerprints?” Ed protested. “What kind of evidence is that?”

I sat, trying to take it in. “Look—our worlds may have differences, but this ain’t one of ’em! No two fingerprints are—”

“I’ve heard that theory, but what good does it do? We still have to catch the culprit, and if he’s already caught, what’s the point?”

“Jesus Christ! Don’t you people keep any kind of records, licenses, anything that uses fingerprints for identification?”

“People wouldn’t stand for such a thing. I wouldn’t.”

You have to give L. Neil Smith points for ideological consistency. As a libertarian, he’s opposed to government ID records on principle; but at least he’s willing to acknowledge that this creates problems for catching the perpetrator of a crime. As Win snarkily comments, “Anarchy has its drawbacks, especially for cops.”

In another passage, Win asks if there’s any other way of tracing the car that shot him:

“Okay,” I said, enmeshed again in therapeutic wiring. “Fingerprints are out.” Ed was having coffee and pie. I was sucking vitamin-sludge through a flex-straw, and not liking it. “What about the Frontenac? Anyone in the neighborhood—Lucy maybe—remember the license plates?”

“What’s a license plate?”

You could always ask the filmmakers of the Atlas Shrugged movies. Hilariously, their semi-anarchic utopia did have license plates.

The absence of license plates is logical for an anarchy, although it again raises the question of what Ed actually does at his private-eye job. If there are no fingerprint databases, no license plates, no other official records or means of identifying people… what steps are left to take?

Ed says that such a database would be pointless because it wouldn’t help them catch the culprit. But without these kinds of evidence, how could you ever know that you have the right culprit?

If a crime is committed by a person with a known grudge against their victim, you can imagine steps a private investigator might take. But in the case of a random crime where the criminal has no personal connection to the victim, like a mugging or a burglary, it seems there’d be nothing to do. There’s no way to identify, trace or locate people.

That leads to another important question, which this chapter skates around: If you steal something from someone, do you just get to keep it? Is “stealing” even a meaningful concept in a world with no laws?

Ed tells Win that he can keep the knife as “spoils”, saying this is the custom in the North American Confederacy. How far does that custom extend?

To illustrate the issue, let’s conjure up a scenario.

When we met Ed Bear, he was about to leave on a three-week vacation. As we saw, it’s not that hard to break into someone’s house, especially if you have an expensive “defeater” to silence their burglar alarms.

Imagine that while Ed is away on vacation, someone breaks into his house, moves all their stuff in, throws his away, and changes the locks. When he gets back, he’s greeted by an unpleasant surprise: a stranger occupying the property he thought was his, and claiming to be the rightful owner.

In an anarcho-capitalist society like the North American Confederacy, what could you do about this?

In our world, there are official government records, like deeds and titles, that you can bring to the court to prove you’re the rightful owner of a piece of property. In the NAC, there are no such records. Even if there were, there’s no legal system you can appeal to. There’s nobody with the power to adjudicate who owns what.

What other options are there? The obvious one is to perform a self-help eviction: round up a posse of armed friends to back you up, break into your own house, and toss out the squatter by force. However, that has an unpleasant corollary: you can take over your neighbor’s property the same way. If you outgun them, they’d have no recourse.

This squatter scenario is just the tip of the iceberg, when it comes to the chaos that would ensue in a society with no rules and no records.

Imagine a person who owns a big, expensive house (or some other valuable piece of property) dies with no will, and all their descendants start arguing about who should get it. With no court system to settle the dispute, it would be a free-for-all. In fact, even if there is a will, who’s going to enforce it? Wouldn’t the first person who gets into the empty house and barricades the door get to claim it?

Or imagine a landlord-tenant dispute. If you rent a room in your house to someone else, do you have the power to evict them if they’re messy, disruptive, or violent? Or if you’re the renter, can you take the position that if you live there, you have the right to do anything you want in your space and no one’s going to tell you otherwise? What if a landlord raises the rent and the tenant refuses to pay? Does it end with a shootout?

For someone who calls himself a Propertarian, L. Neil Smith has no clear way of solving these extremely foreseeable problems. Without a legal system that holds a monopoly on force and follows knowable rules, the only other possibility is might makes right. If you steal something, it’s yours. The old proverb is that possession is nine-tenths of the law, but in an anarcho-capitalist society, it’s closer to ten-tenths.

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The Probability Broach: Constant vigilance

Two white stone statues in a sentry position

The Probability Broach, chapter 8

For the second time since arriving in this world, Win Bear has narrowly escaped being murdered – this time in his bed, while he was still recuperating from the last attack.

The intruder was wounded in the struggle, but got away. Win’s counterpart, Ed, is searching for any evidence that he left behind:

He examined the empty window frame, leaning outward for a moment. “He left his ladder behind. Wait a minute… something here just below the sill.” He held up a plastic box the size of a cigarette pack, hanging from a skein of wires. “A defeater. Damps the vibrations caused by forced entry. Complicated, and very expensive. Only the second one I’ve seen since—”

“If that thing makes a humming sound, he should demand his money back. That’s what gave him away.”

“Excess energy has to be given off somewhere—heat or sonics. Maybe it just wasn’t his day.”

I snorted, surveying the shambles. “You didn’t see him lying on the ground out there?”

“No. Missed him by a mile. He probably picked up a fanny full of splinters, though.” He nodded toward the shattered window.

L. Neil Smith doesn’t linger on the implications of this passage, but I will: There are businesses in this society making products whose only use is to assist people to rob and kill others. There’s no purpose for a “defeater” that doesn’t involve crime.

Like several places in Atlas Shrugged, the author is saying one thing even as his own writing shows something else. Smith insists that the North American Confederacy is a peaceful utopia, where crime is virtually unknown because everyone carries the means of self-defense. People with criminal intent – he wants us to believe – are deterred by the knowledge that all their potential victims are armed.

What it actually shows, just as a critic of anarchism might point out, is that life without laws or government is far more dangerous. Widespread gun ownership doesn’t prevent crime; it just incentivizes criminals to get even bigger guns to overpower their victims. Weapons and other devices that would be banned in our world (in civilized countries, at least) are completely legal to manufacture and own.

You can put spinning spikes or flamethrowers on your car’s wheels, Mad Max-style, to get revenge if some jerk on the highway tailgates you. You can bury land mines in your front lawn or rig up lethal booby traps around your property, protecting against intruders but also endangering innocent visitors. You can set up machine guns or artillery pieces aimed at your neighbor’s house, just in case he does something that annoys you.

The next line drives this point home. Ed is apologetic about Win’s latest brush with death:

“My fault, really. I considered putting on extra security, but decided the autodefenses would be enough. Now I’ve let you get attacked again, in my own home.”

Ed’s house has “autodefenses”, not further described. Does everyone have these? You wouldn’t pay for something if you had a reasonable expectation of never needing it.

It goes to show, again, how the writing undercuts its own premises. Smith insists that everything is cheap in the NAC because anarchy is more efficient. There’s no wasteful government leeching off people’s productivity, so they get to keep everything they earn.

But his own plotting shows the opposite. Without a government, life isn’t cheaper. People just have to pay out of their own pockets to supply all the services that a government would normally provide.

You have to supply your own security, and if those “autodefenses” aren’t enough, you have to hire people to patrol your house (which Ed does after this scene).

If you care about your house burning down, you have to pay for a private firefighter service. You have to pay for private school instead of attending public school. You have to be your own bank regulator, investigating any bank you do business with to determine if they’re likely to collapse and lose your life savings. You have to be your own consumer-safety advocate, inspecting every product you buy to see if it’s toxic, flammable, or otherwise hazardous. You can probably think of more examples.

Given Ed’s description of the defeater as “expensive” and better than his home defenses, there’s yet another unpleasant implication. In this anarcho-capitalist utopia, everyday life is an arms race.

If you can outspend someone and buy tech to overcome their defenses, it’s completely feasible to kill them. Or to put it another way: if someone wants you dead and they have more money than you, you’re in big trouble. And if you’re poor (and can’t afford your own private security or a house with “autodefenses”), you have no chance at all.

After all, there’s no higher authority to investigate or hold criminals accountable. If you’re lucky enough to catch an assailant in the act, you can shoot them. But if a thug or a hitman succeeds in murdering their victim, they get away scot free. If Win’s midnight attacker had succeeded in murdering him in his bed, he could have escaped safe in the knowledge that no consequences would follow.

Even if the victim has friends or family who can afford to hire a private investigator, it’s unclear what that person would be able to do, since there’s no legal system. (Smith takes a stab at answering this question later in the book – his solution involves private arbitration and restitution or exile as punishments – but it has some very obvious holes, which we’ll go into.)

What it adds up to is this: if you’re living in Smith’s ancap society, you have to be on guard against attack at any moment, for your entire life. You have to protect yourself, because no one else will protect you. Win would have been killed, if not for the stroke of luck that he happened to be awake when the hitman broke in, and that’s a good template for how things would work in the North American Confederacy.

There’s good reason to be paranoid in this world. Everyone is armed, and everyone ought to be on a constant hair trigger, for fear that some casual encounter could be a robber or a murderer about to make their move. This society shouldn’t be peaceful and civilized, but a melee of bloody violence.

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New on OnlySky: The fertility freeze

I have a new column this week on OnlySky. It’s about the declining birth rate, not just in the U.S., but around the world.

In a wide cross-section of countries, fewer women are having kids. There’s widespread fear over what this means for the future, but too many commentators treat this as a strictly economic issue without delving into the cultural reasons for it. The answers should be obvious, to anyone who takes the time to think about it: soaring inequality that makes child care increasingly unaffordable for working parents; women’s healthcare bans that directly threaten the lives of anyone who’s pregnant; cultural reasons which mean fewer men than ever are willing to be dependable partners.

Are we locked into an unstoppable downward spiral? Or is there still time to turn this trend around?

Read the excerpt below, then click through to see the full piece. This column is free to read, but paid members of OnlySky get some extra perks, like a subscriber-only newsletter:

According to CDC data, the U.S. fertility rate in 2024 ticked down to an all-time low of 1.599 children per woman.

It’s not only the U.S. that’s in this situation; it’s a worldwide trend. Declining birth rates and aging populations in the wealthy nations of Europe and Asia are a well-studied phenomenon. However, the birth rate is also declining in middle-income and developing countries like Colombia, Chile, Cuba, Egypt and Sri Lanka.

Fertility keeps falling faster than demographers’ estimates, forcing them to revise their projections downward year after year. While previous projections forecast that the world population would start to shrink by the 2080s, it may now begin by 2055. Possibly even sooner.

Continue reading on OnlySky…

The Probability Broach: Smoke ’em if you got ’em

An old patent-medicine ad for heroin

The Probability Broach, chapter 8

After debating alternate histories with Ed, and contemplating the possibility that his own universe no longer exists to return to, Win is sleepless with worries:

I had a hard time sleeping that night. I was exhausted, and not only from exertion and gunshot wounds. Clarissa’s wonderful machines were healing me at a rate that taxed my reserves and made me ravenous about every forty-five minutes. But sleepy I was not. Lying around in bed all day wired up like Donovan’s brain is not exactly conducive to a solid night’s hibernation.

I’m not the warm-milk type, and booze has never helped me sleep. This anarchist’s Disneyland apparently hadn’t any prescription laws. Ed’s medicine cabinets contained everything from aspirin to morphine.

I’ll give Smith points for consistency, at least, for highlighting an implication of his worldbuilding that some authors might shy away from depicting. In an anarchist society, there’d be no such thing as controlled substances. Anyone who wanted any drug, from cocaine to heroin to crystal meth, would be able to buy it over the counter.

Now picture it from the other side of the cash register. In an anarcho-capitalist society, there’s nothing stopping you from making drugs that are as addictive as you can possibly make them and selling them to everyone, including kids.

Given what we know about how capitalism works, every company under the sun would rush to do just that. Why struggle with competition, why subject yourself to the whims of the market, when you can rake in obscene profits by cultivating a customer base that literally can’t stop buying your product?

We’ve seen this exact thing play out in the real world, most infamously with tobacco companies. For decades, they schemed to get their customers addicted. They deliberately took steps to make cigarettes more addictive: genetically modifying tobacco plants to contain more nicotine, or adding bronchodilator chemicals to speed the absorption of nicotine into the body.

Another destructive story of corporate greed producing human tragedy is America’s opioid epidemic. By many accounts, it began with OxyContin. Purdue, OxyContin’s manufacturer, promised it would provide 12-hour pain relief with minimal addiction risk. However, many people complained that it wore off too soon, leaving them to suffer as they counted down the hours.

Instead of having patients take the drug more frequently – which would surrender their claimed advantage over other painkillers – Purdue told doctors to prescribe bigger and bigger doses. This created a rollercoaster of highs and lows that, for many people, was a prelude to addiction. Instead of providing a steady level of relief, it trains the brain to crave the next hit of the drug. This paved the way for desperate people in withdrawal to seek out even stronger opioids, like heroin and fentanyl.

Last but not least, there’s Feel Free. It’s a tonic sold in gas stations and smoke shops. Its manufacturer describes it as a “plant-based herbal supplement” and markets it as a healthy and natural alternative to alcohol, and it comes in a blue bottle that looks like an energy drink. But it’s not caffeine: it contains kratom, a plant with natural opioid-like compounds.

Many consumers of Feel Free report an intense addiction that sets in almost immediately, coupled with debilitating withdrawal symptoms if they try to stop. A class-action lawsuit has been filed against the maker for allegedly concealing its health risks and addictive potential.

But, again, in an anarchist society, there’s no such thing as consumer-protection laws. There wouldn’t even be these safeguards, as flimsy and inadequate as they are. Makers of dangerous, addictive drugs could conceal the risks, could market and sell them in any way they like, and there’d be nothing that anyone could do about it. This makes it all the more implausible that there are no poverty-stricken or homeless people in Smith’s North American Confederacy: you can easily blow any amount of money and ruin your life on drugs.

As I’ve said before, I’m not a prohibitionist. I’m skeptical of any law that tries to control what consenting adults do with their own bodies. Addiction isn’t a sign of poor character; it’s a medical problem, and it should be treated as one.

Of course, people who drive drunk, steal or commit other crimes to feed a drug habit may have to be imprisoned, both for everyone else’s safety and so they can be compelled to get treatment. But putting people in prison simply for using drugs doesn’t solve anything. It makes a bad situation worse by forcing addicts into the shadows and making them afraid to get help. It furnishes a ready excuse for aggressive overpolicing of minorities and the poor. It feeds a black market where criminal gangs wage turf wars over territory and adulterate their products with toxic additives – all problems that America has experienced firsthand during its long, violent history of prohibition.

However, here’s where I draw the line: there are good reasons society shouldn’t permit some people to profit off of other people’s addictions.

In my ideal world, no recreational chemicals would be banned. But advertising would be forbidden, there’d be stringent safety regulations, and drugs with high addictive potential (especially alcohol and tobacco!) could only be sold at cost, not for profit, with added taxes to fund the treatment of those who need help. This eliminates the incentive for companies to try to get their customers hooked.

Getting back to the book: for whatever reason, Win chooses not to avail himself of Ed’s medicine cabinet. He lies awake, tossing and turning. However, in yet another of those author-scripted convenient coincidences, his insomnia saves his life:

Lying restlessly in the dark, I tried arguing Ed’s terminal out of something to read. Then I heard it: a humming, soft but unmistakable. I might have slept through it. I turned. In the dim backlight of distant street lamps, I could make out a shadow against the windowpane.

…The window, hinged at the top, opened outward. A shadow silently threw its leg over the sill. One step across the floor, two, three. Starlight glinted on naked steel.

Win has a derringer – a miniature gun with only one shot – under his pillow. He tries to draw it without alerting the intruder that he’s awake:

He was on me! A huge knife swung in a glittering arc and I twisted the gun to bear as his blade tangled in the wiring around me, skittered along the cast on my arm, and was deflected. The derringer went off in a blinding explosion, missing his face by a handspan. I dropped the gun from stinging fingers, grabbing at his wrist. He jerked it back-I let him, pushing the razor-sharp edge toward his face. It caught under his jaw, pivoting where it bit, slicing flesh and corded muscle, spraying us both with blood.

…Suddenly he let go, ripped himself from my failing grasp, and dived head-first out the window as—Slap! Slap! The glazing dissolved in a million crystalline shards.

The lights came on. Ed slumped against the door frame, a spidery wisp of smoke drifting from the muzzle of his .375. I sagged back into the sweat-soaked bed; Clarissa’s careful circuitry a dangling ruin. The bloody knife lay on the blanket, millimeters from my shaking, gun-bruised hand. Ed’s glance traveled from my blood-streaked face to the foot-long blade. “Don’t you know better than to try shaving in the dark?”

The fact that Ed is so nonchalant about a home invasion – going so far as to make action-hero-style quips about it – suggests that he’s used to it. That would make sense. In a society with no police and no government, where the only law is what you can get away with, these kinds of crimes ought to be common.

As we’ll see in a later chapter, L. Neil Smith implausibly insists this isn’t the case and that crime is actually very rare in his lawless, laissez-faire paradise. But if the average citizen of the North American Confederacy never has to fire a gun at a would-be murderer, why would his protagonists be so unfazed?

Smith probably didn’t mean anything by this line, other than trying to establish the badass credentials of his heroes. But in a meta sense, it could be seen as a big, glaring hint that this world isn’t as peaceful as its author wants us to believe it is.

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