The Probability Broach, chapter 5
Win has almost reached his doppelganger’s address in the parallel world he’s stumbled into. He’s walking through a residential neighborhood, “elaborate in architectural extremes”:
Victorian and Edwardian gingerbread sat grandly between the baroque and a sort of Swiss-chalet style—ornate, almost rococo, but taken all together, neither garish nor intimidating. Just different. The homes were set back deeply from the road, on enormous lots with gracefully curving rubber driveways winding through gardens and wrought-iron fencery. If Edward W. Bear lived like this, being a P.I. must pay better here than it did in my jurisdiction.
One thing we’ll see more of is Smith’s insistence that everything is cheap in this society, including land. A person who works an ordinary job can live in a mansion and own a fleet of cars.
We’ll discuss the plausibility of this in more detail later. For now, I’ll simply point out that capitalism is premised on scarcity: either naturally occurring, or created artificially by rent-seeking and monopolies.
It can’t be the case both that all goods are cheap and also that everyone is affluent, because in a capitalist economy, my spending is your income and vice versa. If everything is low-priced (as we’ll see below with the cigarettes), then the people who sell those goods are making very little money, by definition. Someone here must have to be poor.
However, Smith breezes past this and writes as if there are no tradeoffs at all. In an economic Lake Wobegon fantasy, he believes you can have a society where everyone is richer than average.
Here, the underground crossings ran to neighborhood groceries, stationery, and candy stores—the kind of mom-and-pop operations nearly killed off by city zoning back home. I took another fling, stopping for some cigarettes, my first decent ones in almost five years. Two copper pennies for the most expensive in the place.
I haven’t emphasized it until now, but one of the reasons we’re supposed to believe Win’s United States is a dystopian, oppressive regime is that it bans tobacco.
As we saw last week, when Win saw signs advertising cigarettes, he exulted, “Prohibition was over!” In a previous chapter, he mentioned a “Confiscation Act” to Jenny Noble – although practically everyone smokes illegal cigarettes, including Win himself, and he says he refuses to enforce anti-drug laws unless he absolutely has to.
It’s no coincidence that Smith considers tobacco bans a mark of evil. Much like living in Colorado or worshipping gold bars, smoking is one of those arbitrary fetishes that an unusual number of libertarians share.
As I covered in my review of Atlas Shrugged, Ayn Rand absurdly argued that smoking was rationally proper. She claimed it was symbolic of human supremacy over nature, representing the power of a tamed fire held in the hand. Obviously, the real explanation is that she was addicted to nicotine. She concocted a superficially “rational” justification for something she wanted to do for less-than-rational reasons.
Ayn Rand never acknowledged the health risks of smoking (even though she had lung cancer later in life) or the responsibility of the tobacco companies that profit from sickening their customers. L. Neil Smith carries on that tradition of silence. In TPB, cigars and cigarettes are a symbol of individual freedom, nothing more. He never breathes a word about how they’re bad for you.
Even at the time Atlas Shrugged was published, the tobacco-cancer link was understood. TPB has even less excuse. It was published in 1980, well after the evidence had mounted to the point where it was completely unreasonable to deny it.
Of course, this is an ideologically motivated omission. If some products were both addictive and inherently harmful, there’d be a legitimate argument to restrict them. Smoking bans couldn’t just be waved off as yet another overreach by a tyrannical, power-hungry government. At the very least, you’d have to admit that there were real tradeoffs involved in regulating tobacco – something that Smith is never willing to do.
His saving throw is that his ancap utopia has super-advanced medical technology, and can doubtless cure any disease caused by smoking without difficulty. However, that’s not the case in the real world. We shouldn’t take political lessons from a fictional society that doesn’t suffer from problems we still have.
Now, to be fair, I don’t support tobacco bans either. I’m not a smoker, but I’m a fan of individual autonomy. Absent a compelling reason, people should have the right to choose what to do with their own bodies. Also, as America found out with alcohol and then again with cannabis, laws that ban recreational drugs often do more harm than the problem they’re trying to solve.
Of course, people who smoke can be charged higher insurance premiums and other sin taxes to account for the increased risk they’re assuming, and we can and should limit tobacco advertising, especially the kind targeted at children. Also, the right to put nicotine into your own body doesn’t imply a right to make others breathe your secondhand smoke, so no-smoking laws in public places are perfectly fine.
The chapter ends on a cliffhanger, just as Win finds what he’s looking for:
At long last a fancy scrollwork signpost announced PLACE d’EDMOND GENÊT. My stomach tightened, my mouth went dry. Who was this other Edward Bear?
All of a sudden a 747 was trying to land on my back! I whirled; a long black hovercraft tore down the street, coming my way fast. It bellowed, riding a tornado as other drivers bumped up over the sidewalk, swerved and slid to avoid being hit. Six feet above the ground, the monster covered blocks in seconds, sending a hideous roar ahead and a shower of sparks. Bullets sang around my head.
…I wrestled the automatic free from my coat and thumbed the hammer back, jerking the trigger again and again as the machine slid crazily around the corner. It was like a dream where nothing you do has any effect.
Win runs up the driveway, toward the house. The garage door starts opening, as if someone is expecting him, but too late:
My face slammed into the rising door as the bullets slammed into my body. Blood splashed the panel in front of me! The bottom edge rose past me… the pavement rose and smacked me in the face.
It’s no spoiler to say that Win doesn’t die here. But it does give us an opportunity, in the next chapter, to explore what an anarcho-capitalist philosophy has to say about medical care.
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Of course people know smoking is addictive and causes a number of really bad health conditions. Back in the 1960s, there were commercials on tv informing people “You mind very much if they smoke” and talking about cancer of the mouth and lungs. Despite that, restaurants had a smoking area, and an extra-smoking area. Children would be given candy cigarettes. The mascot Smokey the Bear begged people not to throw lit cigarettes out of the car window as they drove along. The “Mah FreeDUMBS” crowd (which may or may not overlap with the Libertarian crowd) absolutely lost their minds when asked not to smoke in hospital rooms, in preschools, at the movies, etc. They simply refused to accept that other people might not be able to breathe their filthy second-hand smoke.
I’m just old enough to remember smoking sections in restaurants.
And the non-smoking section was often right next to the smoking section, with no barrier of any kind! I don’t understand how anyone could eat a meal in those conditions.
It’s important to put that in perspective. Somebody has to be poor but it’s relatively poor, not absolutely poor. It’s possible that the average in this utopia is higher then the average in the world Win came from. The degree you describe here is absurd, well placed land is a limited resource and would be all the more valuable in a world without government supported transport networks or government run water/sewage/power.
What you have not mentioned is people squeezing out more wealth. Even if society started with a reasonable balance because of luck and competition, there is nothing stopping a well placed group from forming an oligarchy and setting prices. Many libertarians would argue that there is nothing wrong with that happening and somehow things will keep working well. It’s one of the points where libertarians need a lot of hand waving magic to make their system work well. Libertarians will argue that monopolies granted by the government are bad but monopolies formed by a cabal of business men are good.
I have a question: are all these mansions in Las Vegas? In other words, the desert? Who’s managing the limited water?
It’s supposed to be set in northern Colorado, near Fort Collins. There’s no mention made of any pesky thing like limited water or other scarce resources.
L. Neil Smith has no clue how hovercraft work. 6 feet off the ground my ass. There needs to be very little clearance between the skirt and the ground to maintain the air cushion. Unless you were close to water it would make a bad choice for a drive by shooting because it would corner worse than a loaded semi-truck on wet ice.
If Rand had the courage of her convictions, she would have roller-skated everywhere, to demonstrate domination over the wheel, and with a BAC of at least .8 at all times to demonstrate human power over agriculture, fermentation, and distillation
Oh, okay, Colorado. So, how are these mansions getting electricity? Phone service? (Remember, this was written in the days of landlines.) Public water and sewer services? If one of those bloated monsters caught fire, who would come put it out? If they got robbed, who would come investigate?
Again I’m reminded how childish Libertarians are. All the necessary stuff is going to magically just happen in their “I can do whatever I want!” world.
In light of the Trump administration trying to push multiple alternate currencies, I’m also thinking of the completely random currencies in this story.
This and the previous entry reminds me of the far-future sci-fi concept of an “Automatopia” (short for “Automatic Utopia”). Buildings, streets, parks, and other infrastructure are self-cleaning and self-repairing, and perhaps even self-building. Utilities? They run themselves. Food? Just take what you need. Supplies? Fire up the household fabricator. Money? What’s that? But even the most perfect self-regulating living environment doesn’t entirely obviate the need for a government of some sort – crime will probably always exist, no matter how rare, urban planning or an equivalent might still be needed, and there will always be issues that affect vast numbers of people which can’t just be ignored. Biggest difference would be that government positions would be volunteer jobs largely lacking in prestige, which would theoretically make things much harder to corrupt. (Then again, if bribing people with non-fungible goods and properties ever became a major issue, then it might still see the greedy and corruptible flocking to volunteer for government.)
This is much closer to Communism than Anarcho-Libertarianism, though. So assuming such a thing can ever exist, I wonder if Libertarian types would love it, hate it, or try to “improve” it in a way which can’t realistically work. (Yes, I’m aware that this uses the handwave of “stuff just works because super-advanced technology” rather than “stuff just works because human self-interest”, I thought that the two concepts were worth contrasting.)