The Probability Broach: Mo’ money, mo’ problems


Money of various denominations and countries

The Probability Broach, chapter 5

Dizzy and baffled, stumbling through an unfamiliar world with no clue where he is or what’s happened to him, Win spots something he recognizes:

…lower and wider than I was used to, with tinted panes in a wrought-iron latticework, and a fancy Kremlinesque spire pointing skyward:

TELECOM

Whatever that meant. Nothing orients you faster in strange territory than browsing through the phone book. There wasn’t any door. I took two steps down into the booth and the street noises went away.

…No phone book. Just like back home. No telephone, either: just a simple matte-finished panel like sandblasted Corningware. Underneath was a keyboard. I plunked myself down on the broad upholstered bench and abruptly the screen had letters on it:

—NEED ASSISTANCE?—
The Grand Combined Director of Greater Paporte!
Gray, Bell, & Acme Communications Systems

As we tour this anarcho-capitalist fantasy world, one way to spot the authorial sleight of hand is to keep an eye out for what’s missing. This is a good example. This phone booth is far too neat and clean. Where’s the graffiti?

The impulse to make your mark is as close to universal as it gets. People from every era find it an irresistible temptation: whether it’s rude remarks directed at your rivals, boasts about your sexual prowess, fond memories of the dead, or the simple desire to leave something of yourself for the future.

Humans have put carvings and paintings on the walls of caves, on the stones of temples and cathedrals, and on the trunks of old trees. There’s graffiti on the walls of Pompeii and Herculaneum, inside Egyptian pyramids, and in the Church of the Holy Sepulchre, left by Christian crusaders.

Graffiti persists despite efforts to stamp it out. In an anarchy where there are no police and private property is only a convention, it should be omnipresent. Every surface should be covered with it.

Win pecks at the keyboard, and an animated avatar appears on the screen (“a pleasantly stereotypical old-timey operator, crisply pretty in a high-collared blouse and headset”). He’s a little startled to be talking to a cartoon, but he takes it in stride:

“Could you give me Long Distance? The Denver Police… This is Lieutenant Win Bear.”

“One moment, please Lieutenant Bear.” The screen blanked, then she reappeared. “I’m sorry, we have no records for a Denver Police in either local or trunkline memories. Are you sure you’re using the correct name?”

That stopped me. “What do you mean? Try ‘Denver, City, and County of.'”

Her face registered good-natured exasperation. “I’m very sorry, sir. I’ve accessed 36,904 listings: but no ‘Denver, City and County of.'”

Win is sure there must be an error in the phone system. He asks the animated operator what her directory covers:

“Sir, we list over seven billion individuals and organizations currently contracting with some twelve thousand telecommunications companies on this planet, the Moon, Mars, and Ceres Central. I am confident to sixteen decimals that there is no ‘Denver, City and County of’ in the known solar system. May I be of further assistance, or would you prefer a live operator?”

These interplanetary colonies are alluded to several times in this book, but L. Neil Smith never tries to justify how they can exist. Who on earth footed the bill for them?

A government, which marshals and directs the productive capacity of millions of people, can build something huge, complicated and costly – like a pyramid, an interstate highway system, or a space program, or a lunar colony. But there’s no realistic way a private individual could finance this, unless there are plutocrats so gigantically wealthy they might as well be kings.

In a libertarian world where money reigns supreme, everything has to be done for the sake of profit. There might be philosophical reasons for establishing a colony on the Moon or Mars – scientific curiosity, a belief that our destiny lies in the stars, a desire to spread out so humanity won’t go extinct in case of planetary catastrophe – but there sure as hell isn’t an economic reason for it. There’s nothing on another planet that we can’t get more easily on Earth.

Win is starting to form a hypothesis about what’s happened to him. Given the high-tech look of everything (“some artist’s conception of Tomorrowland”), plus the mention of space colonies, he concludes that this is the future. He wonders if the explosion he survived was the first nuke of World War III, and the force of the blast flung him through time. Or was the unfamiliar gadgetry in Vaughn Meiss’ lab a prototype time machine?

He looks up Otis Bealls, wondering if the man or any of his descendants might be alive. There’s no one by that exact name in the directory, but:

The cursor dot slide-whistled up and down the page uncertainly.

Then, in the right-hand column across from the Beallses, it caught me, right between the eyes:

BEAR, EDWARD W., Consulting Detective
626 E. Genêt Pl.		ACMe 9-4223

Win is dumbfounded to see his own name and his own (“more-or-less correct”) profession in the phone book of a strange futuristic city. Driven by irresistible curiosity, he punches in the number.

The machine displays a prompt: “PLEASE INSERT ONE TENTH COPPER OUNCE”. Win doesn’t know what kind of money that is, but he rummages through his pockets and finds the silver coin he took from Meiss’ lab. He puts it in the slot, and the machine accepts it.

There’s something that’s missing in this scene. It’s subtle, but look again at this seemingly innocent transaction. How is it possible that the phone booth only accepts one kind of coin – which, conveniently, just so happens to be a coin of the kind Win has on his person?

As we’ve discussed, this sort of thing should be a massive problem in an ancap society. There’s no central bank, no treasury, no government with a money-printing monopoly. Anyone who wants to coin their own money, can – and there’s a powerful incentive to do so, namely seigniorage, the power to profit by creating money on demand.

There should be dozens, if not hundreds, of currencies in circulation. There should be competing coins in different sizes and combinations of precious metals, as well as paper notes, gemstones, IOUs, electronic cash, carved stones, wampum beads, and more esoteric valuables. (In a later chapter, Smith does indeed say that there are competing private currencies, but we never see this.)

Trying to do business in this place would be a logistical nightmare. Imagine trying to buy something at a store, but being unable to, because the Venn diagram of currencies the merchant accepts and currencies you use has no overlap. Imagine having to check a hundred wildly fluctuating exchange rates every time you want to buy groceries.

Imagine how hard it would be to tell if an unfamiliar coin or bill is counterfeit – or, even if it’s not, whether its issuer has the reserves it claims to back the currency with. Imagine your life savings suddenly wiped out because the issuing bank went bust and your money is now worthless. Even coins of precious metal can be debased with less-valuable alloys.

Not least of all, imagine workers trapped in a cycle of exploitation and debt slavery because their employer pays them in company scrip that’s only accepted at its own overpriced stores. Again, under anarcho-capitalism, there’s every incentive to do this and no regulator that can prevent it.

L. Neil Smith never considers these problems because, like most libertarians, he doesn’t grasp that the economy is a construct of society. He thinks all the rules and norms he’s used to just arise naturally – like rivers and rainclouds. He can’t fathom that they come from the government he despises.

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Comments

  1. says

    My own theory is that a society like Smith imagines would turn quickly into a state as leading corporations merged, simply for mutual benefit to avoid problems like those you mentioned, and then acquire or force out lesser actors with their power. Of course, I highly doubt such a society ever would occur as he describes to begin with.

    • StevoR says

      Yeah, any such society if it ever formed (highly unlikely is understatement) would quickly fall victim to those with power or accumulating power who want their own way(s) to dominate. Those who are the biggest, worst bullies. Corporaism and monopoly would take over. Much like, well, the kakistocracy that is developing or already here under MuskTrump in the carcass of what was the USA

    • Brendan Rizzo says

      Oh, that absolutely would happen. Hierarchy re-emerges without a constant effort to prevent it, and corporations are as hierarchical as they get. Propertarians care more about justifying why CEOs should have absolute power than explaining how this doesn’t conflict with human rights, because reconciling them is impossible. But if such a corporate state emerged, _Smith would be fine with it_. All his ideology cares about is letting the 1% do whatever they want. They don’t want “no government”, they want business to be the government.

  2. Brendan Rizzo says

    But Mr. Lee, obviously everybody respects private property so much they won’t dare write graffiti everywhere. [/sarcasm]

    On the other hand, the phone clearly accepts more than one kind of currency, since it asked for a copper coin but took his silver coin. (Note that it did not give him change.) Since Smith was a goldbug, he probably just has it that everyone accepts any coin made from precious metal based solely on its metal content, and that the issuer is a formality. (So you’d just need the acid test and a scale to check for counterfeits.) But I don’t see how they could build vending machines with coin slots that could accept creations from every private mint that sprouts up. But to be as fair as possible, mints might design their specie to fit vending machine coin slots so that they can be used more.

    Of course, any society that uses money cannot be a utopia. Has Smith ever heard the saying, “Money implies poverty.”? Because you can’t deprive people of resources unless you deprive them of the means to get them. So the very fact that money exists means some will be undeservingly rich and others will be undeservingly poor. Don’t tell me Smith says this world’s billionaires deserve their fortunes and this world’s poor need a work ethic. (Though I’m certain that this is what he believed.)

    I think Smith originally named his protagonist Edwin, and changed it to Edward for no clear reason, since Win makes sense as a shortening of the former but not the latter. Unfortunately, this gives his hero the same name as Winnie-the-Pooh. I guess they aren’t explaining why he gets a counterpart and Bealls doesn’t? Is there a Meiss in this world who wasn’t killed? How can these counterparts exist when they would be born to worlds of vastly different histories?

    This whole utopia rings false because it is built on a false premise: that capitalism is the best way to run a society and all goods must have a price instead of just being available for the good of all. You can’t have both post-scarcity and money because the existence of currency creates artificial scarcity. And if scarcity exists, society can’t be a utopia.

    • says

      I suspect that for many libertarians/ancaps, you CAN have both scarcity and utopia, simply because everyone will Take Responsibility when government disappears, and those who have money will voluntarily take care of those who don’t. That’s the libertarian utopia: the existence of poor people can be ignored and/or rationalized, and “someone else” will take care of them.

      • Brendan Rizzo says

        Yeah. I just find it funny that I could imagine a better society than the NAC in five minutes, just by making the phone and its directory free to use. Hey, is that why they have a computerized directory instead of a physical phone book, to charge people for the information?

      • Katydid says

        @Raging Bee, the whole Libertarian mindset appears to be how a child thinks. “I’m free to be me, and someone else will take care of the responsibilities.” One of my jobs as a parent was to teach my kids that everyone is responsible for the group–to wit, my kids had chores to do around the house to make the house a nicer place for us all to live. It seems Libertarians either never got that message, or they rebelled against it.

        • says

          How much you wanna bet most libertarians got into the habit of calling their parents “nazis” and “slave-drivers” every time they were asked to do any household chores? Been there (age 9 IIRC), done that, parents didn’t buy it, chicks didn’t dig it, had no choice but to move on. And yet that seems to be the template for libertarians in their “adult” lives. (Remember their current campaign slogan: “Become ungovernable!”)

  3. Pierce R. Butler says

    Until the 1830s or ~40s, the US allowed private banks to issue their own money, with so much chicanery and chaos that many continued to use the English pound for serious business.

    Digital money seems poised to repeat that pattern in the near future. Will corporations and their owners switch to Euros, renminbi, or BRICSbucks?

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