The Probability Broach, chapter 4
As part of his investigation into Vaughn Meiss’ murder, Win Bear wants to examine his office at the university. Otis Bealls, Meiss’ department chair, notes that Win doesn’t have a search warrant but agrees to show him around anyway.
Win is more than a little suspicious of Bealls’ suddenly cooperative attitude. He suspects a trap, but having come this far, he doesn’t want to leave without taking a look:
Vaughn Meiss’s office was a cinder-block cubicle in a nest of cinder-block cubicles along a cinder-block hall, all painted a depressingly familiar government gang-green. Bookcases teetered to the ceiling on all four walls, and a desk heaped with books and papers was crammed into the middle somehow. On the ceiling, over crumbing acoustic tile, he’d taped a Propertarian poster: IRS—IT REALLY STEALS!
…One strange datum: the desk was piled with histories covering the Revolution and two or three subsequent decades. Bookmarks—campus parking tickets going back to 1983—indicated special interest in Alexander Hamilton, the Federalist Party, and, by golly, Albert Gallatin.
Gallatin, you may remember, is the man whose face is on the strange gold coin Meiss was carrying when he died.
Win doesn’t seem to have consulted an encyclopedia, but in our world, Albert Gallatin was a real person. He was a politician and diplomat of America’s founding generation, a Swiss-born immigrant who was elected to Congress and served as Thomas Jefferson’s Secretary of the Treasury. He also played a role in negotiating a resolution to the Whiskey Rebellion (more on this later).
Another curious thing: in an absolutely jam-packed office, one drawer of the desk, the second on the right, was conspicuously empty, or almost so—a half-empty box of Norma .357 Magnum ammunition, 158-grain hollowpoints; a felt-tip pen bearing the odd inscription LAPORTE PARATRONICS, LTD., LAPORTE, N.A.C., TELECOM GRAY 4-3122; a single pistol cartridge in an unfamiliar caliber marked D & A Auto .476; and—another coin! This one was about the size of a quarter:
ONE HALF METRIC OUNCE
SILVER 999 FINE
THE LAPORTE INDUSTRIAL BANK, LTD.The other side was even weirder, a ferocious-looking elder in a Karl Marx beard:
LYSANDER SPOONER
A.L. 32-110 ARCHITECT OF LIBERTY
Strangely, Win never speculates about what any of this means. The most he does is make a mental note to go to Laporte later to look for these businesses.
When a detective finds a clue like this, you’d think his brain would go into overdrive to figure out the crime. There aren’t many innocent explanations for someone minting their own money in secret—especially when those coins are found together with a bunch of bullets.
Shouldn’t he suspect a counterfeiting ring testing its equipment? Or some sovereign-citizen-esque plot to topple the United States and replace the dollar, like the German Reichsbürger plot of 2022? That would even fit with the involvement of SecPol.
In his internal monologue, Win brags about how good at his job he is (“In a business lucky to solve one out of twenty, I get my man about half the time”)—but that’s a case of “tell, don’t show” on the author’s part. Win never solves this, in the sense of deducing the solution from the clues he has. A few pages from now, he quite literally stumbles across the answer by accident.
These dubious clues in my pocket, I resolved to stop by the city of Laporte after I finished here. If it was the Laporte in Colorado, something definitely funny was going on. Six or seven miles northwest of Fort Collins, Laporte boasted fewer than five thousand inhabitants—an unlikely place for a bootleg mint, industrial bank, or paratronics factory—whatever that was.
In reading this chapter, I had a feeling of deja vu. Why are libertarians always drawn to Colorado?
In Atlas Shrugged, Ayn Rand described Colorado as the last redoubt of freedom when the rest of the world had been plunged into communism. She placed her secret capitalist utopia of Galt’s Gulch there, hidden in the Rocky Mountains.
The U.S. Libertarian Party was founded in Colorado in 1971. Libertarian thinker Robert LeFevre founded his unaccredited, pro-capitalism “Freedom School” there in the 50s.
And now there’s The Probability Broach, which takes place entirely in Colorado—both the dystopian version, and the parallel-universe Colorado that’s an anarcho-capitalist paradise. The fact that L. Neil Smith lived in Colorado himself is probably part of the reason, but still. Is it just a coincidence that libertarians keep settling there and placing their stories there?
This is only speculation, but I wonder if it’s inspired by Colorado’s geography. As I’ve said before, libertarianism is an ideology of the frontier. It’s premised—whether its advocates realize it or not—on the belief that there’s no need to get along with your neighbors, because you can always pull up stakes, move away and start over somewhere else.
The Rocky Mountains, which are the dramatic backbone of the state, are like a visual metaphor for this idea. They’re a natural boundary, majestic and beautiful yet isolated and forbidding. As opposed to, say, the Great Plains states, which are wide-open and flat and have no obvious place to go where others can’t follow you, the Rockies seem to promise escape to anyone who’s tired of putting up with civilization. That’s exactly what Ayn Rand used them for, of course.
Colorado’s history of gold rushes and silver booms may also play into its libertarian inclinations. There’s nothing more libertarian than the idea that you can get rich overnight by yourself in the wilderness.
Even though mining is no longer the basis of the state’s economy, those cultural memories linger. To a political ideology that worships gold, it will always be tantalizing to dream that the secret to enormous wealth is out there, just waiting for an adventurous person to find it.
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Being a native Coloradoan myself, I’m not sure why it has this association. I’m from Denver like Smith, which is a progressive city (but that might have been different when he was born, decades before me). The state has never held any particularly libertarian associations for me, but your reasoning may be theirs. However, other libertarians have tried to create enclaves out in New Hampshire, Chile and even on the high seas (which you probably know). Science fiction is also popular with them, probably for the same motives that you describe (no matter how absurd). Even as a libertarian in the past for a time, I found such schemes very foolhardy, and their fictional scenarios quite unconvincing, but that’s probably not surprising since I’ve long since given up libertarianism.
Why the focus on Colorado? I’ve run across some really whacko people from there. For example, in the late 1980s, in the military, I worked with a man who had grown up in Colorado in the 1960s and 1970s in a house with no running water or electricity. Why not? Because in order to have those things, you needed a permit, and you can’t trust the gummint to have any information on you. Yes, I did point out to him that he joined the military and the gummint he hated so much was his boss, and thus had information on him. He didn’t see the dissonance.
He was just one example of the anti-government types I met who were from Colorado. I could reel off more than a dozen if I put my mind to it. A lot of them are drawn to the military.
Starting in the 1980s, fundagelical religious groups colonized parts of Colorado, especially around the US Air Force Academy, and they’ve been trying to brainwash young cadets ever since. Other fundagelical groups hold “leadership seminars” for high-school-aged kids, to get them younger. In the 2010s, I worked with a woman who was always passing the hat at work for “scholarships” for her kids to go to these camps. For a month, the kids had no access to their phones, internet, or any contact with the outside world because they were supposed to focus on their lord & savior and how they could usher in the new “Generation Joshua”.
Another Colorado fun fact: John Denver made the place famous in the 1970s, singing about when he got there, how much he loved getting high, and how other people were coming there and ruining it for him. Yup, one of those “pull the ladder up after me” types of people. I grew up in early elementary school listening to his songs on the radio, and knew a lot of people who were “the last of the hippies” and going to go to Colorado and get perma-stoned. My kids have no idea who he is, but he was really very popular in his day.
So, in my mind, Colorado is the stoners and the religious whackos. And much of the state has been in a historic drought for a couple of decades now.
“Yup, one of those “pull the ladder up after me” types of people”. Randomly, I happened to be friends with a bunch of people from Colorado in undergrad and grad school. Nearly every one of them had that attitude, and at least half of them had the Colorado native bumper sticker. The only ones who didn’t have that attitude: the ones who moved there in middle school or high school, i.e. the non-natives. The reality is that the Denver metro area just did a really good job of fostering the development of a large tech industry. They have several excellent science/tech/engineering universities, the cost of living is better than the coasts, and if you’ve ever been there, it’s lovely and has a pretty good climate. They’re a victim of their own success, and the failure of the coasts (particularly the Pacific coast) to build enough housing.
…Ayn Rand described Colorado as the last redoubt of freedom…
But as Michael said, there’s too many progressives in Denver now, which is probably why libertarians are now fawning over the Dakotas.
Also, a nitpick: a cinder-block cubicles? Really? Standard, soft cloth mounted to a frame cubicles are both cheaper and reconfigurable. I feel the same way about gov’t green walls–any government building I’ve ever been in–including post offices, schools, libraries, and the Dept. of Motor Vehicles–is always some shade of off-white.
Smith’s conception of Big Gummint offices is about as obsolete and unconnected to reality as the rest of his ideology and worldview. I do remember that shade of green on the walls of the old Main Navy building when my dad worked there, before it was torn down to make way for Constitution Gardens and the Vietnam Veterans’ Memorial. It had been built, quick and cheap, as part of the US military expansion for WW-II, and (IIRC) was nowhere near as nice as, say, the Herbert Clark Hover Building, which was built in 1930-32.
Reading this is has been interesting for me, since I’m about a month away from moving to Fort Collins to study at Colorado State. From what I’ve seen of Fort Collins and Denver so far, it doesn’t seem like much of a libertarian haven, but of course it could have been different in Smith’s day. Hopefully I never have to meet anyone like Win Bear.
By definition wealth is a relative term.
By oneself you ahve what you have -whatever it is.
Only with at least one other person are you richer or poorer or equal.
On your own with no one to share it with or sell it to or do anything with, gold is just a heavy weak rock.
If you have enough, you can shape it into a solid container which doesn’t rust or tarnish. There are of course plenty of other materials which one can make a container out of, but they might not be suitable or available or might be too hard to work with, depending on what you need that container for. So it potentially could still be quite “valuable” for someone living without any contact with humanity. Just not in the economic sense of “value” – though in that situation, nothing would be, because economic value is meaningless without trade.