The Probability Broach, chapter 11
After several tedious days of convalescence punctuated by assassination attempts, Win Bear is back on his feet. The North American Confederacy’s advanced medical technology has healed his injuries, and his friends gift him new clothes. For free, because they’re just that nice.
He’s eager to get out and about, and he plans to join his counterpart Ed Bear on a case. Ed’s vehicles were damaged in the shooting that nearly killed Win, so they’re borrowing his neighbor Lucy’s. (Everyone here owns hovercraft rather than cars, because hovercraft are cool.)
Lucy had a matched pair of elderly Thorneycroft 418s, a stately machine dating back almost to the beginnings of hovercraft production. Enameled a garish yellow paisley, they’d rolled off the assembly line sixty years ago, but, with the help of an adoring mechanic, Lucy proudly kept them in mint condition.
…She pointed toward the drive fans, rudders high and stately behind them. “Can’t handle more’n a six-degree incline unless you give ’em full power and blow out every window in town.”
See, this is why you’re better off with no government. Those meddling busybodies pass all kinds of nanny-state laws, like “you’re not allowed to have machines so loud they can shatter your neighbors’ windows with sheer sonic force”.
Here, they believe in freedom! Don’t take our choices away. Let every individual decide for themselves whether they want to rupture everyone’s eardrums within a six-block radius.
As near as I can figure, Laporte occupies about half the area of Colorado’s Larimer County. According to the ad agencies who keep track—a census-taker would be cold meat before his second nosy question—population varies between two and three million. North Americans are incredibly mobile. A lot of that is underground. We swept through timber and prairie Ed swore was high-density industrial, then the forest primeval would give way with breathtaking suddenness to skyscrapers swooping five hundred stories into the clear bright air.
This is another of those little moments that make you do a double-take.
Smith says outright that the trigger-happy residents of the North American Confederacy would shoot a census taker… but ad agencies are somehow better?!
In this bizarro-world, public servants going door to door to ask basic demographic questions is an intolerable infringement on privacy. However, unaccountable private companies collecting that info and much more besides, building up detailed profiles on people’s interests and affiliations, with no restrictions on how this information can be used or who it can be sold to—that’s completely fine, and doesn’t raise even a flicker of concern.
Ed’s place is in south-central Laporte, dominated by the university, an enormous park I was acquainted with, various retail businesses and small industries. We slid easily and quickly through the manicured streets, finding an artery that let us rev up almost to eighty, and, with cross-traffic whisking around us by landscaped viaduct and tunnel, were in the Old Town in minutes.
Reading libertarian novels is like watching a magician’s act. You know you’re being fooled; you just have to spot the sleight of hand when it happens. Often, it’s a casual mention of something that logically shouldn’t exist in their world. This passage has one of those.
L. Neil Smith refers to “manicured streets” so straight and wide and well-maintained that Ed and Win can drive at eighty miles an hour. Say what? Who built those streets?
As any student of history knows, roads are one of the oldest functions of the state. The Roman roads are the classic example. They spread tens of thousands of miles across Europe, the Middle East and Africa, knitting together far-flung provinces, enabling fast movement and long-distance trade. They were so well-made that some are still in use today, two thousand years later.
In South America, the Inca built roads on an immense scale throughout their mountainous empire, with bridges, retaining walls and water drainage. Like the Roman roads, the benefits persist: one study found that, even today, communities living near the old Inca roads are better off economically.
But whether Roman, Incan or wherever else, a road network is a colossal engineering project. In every instance, it requires the power of a state to plan, organize and marshal the labor of thousands of people. The same goes for other massive infrastructure projects, like bridges, dams, canals, tunnels or sewers.
The most important part, possibly even more than the labor, is the decision-making power. Inevitably, people along the proposed route get inconvenienced or displaced. How are their objections handled? Who has the final say?
In the modern era, building the interstate highways required the government’s power of eminent domain to seize property from landholders, on a vast scale. From Tom Lewis’ book Divided Highways:
It required seizing more land by eminent domain than “had been taken in the entire history of road building in the United States,” according to Lewis.
Obviously, eminent domain is a dangerous power that can be abused. Racist urban planners like Robert Moses bulldozed highways right through the middle of thriving minority neighborhoods, displacing residents, destroying homes and businesses. Moses and those like him created an architecture of segregation that persists to this day.
But just because a power can be used in unjust ways, it doesn’t follow that it shouldn’t exist. No one wants to go back to the medieval era, when long-distance travel meant a grueling, hazardous journey that took months to go a few hundred miles. Reliable roads make civilization possible, but they have to be put somewhere. Inevitably, some have to sacrifice for the benefit of all.
So, again, how can you have roads without a state? Who decided the routes? How did they pay for it? Most important, how did they get everyone else to agree?
It would be one thing if libertarians tried to answer these questions, however implausible their answers were. But they don’t even seem to realize the problem.
The same issue exists in Atlas Shrugged. In the capitalist utopia of Galt’s Gulch, there’s no government and everything is privately owned. Yet somehow they, too, have roads and other infrastructure. There’s no explanation of who built these things or how; it’s as if they just condensed from the ether.
If landholders had an absolute right to refuse to sell, it would be almost impossible to build roads in a populated area. In an anarcho-capitalist world, if roads existed at all, they wouldn’t be convenient straightaways laid out in a logical grid. They’d be a crazily branching network of tight, tangled paths with no rhyme or reason, riven with hairpin turns and dead ends, twisting and dividing around buildings whose owners wouldn’t move. They would all look like this “nail house” in China.
Also, there would be toll booths on every block charging extortionate fees—both because this would make roads incredibly expensive and difficult to construct, and because the investors would expect high returns. (In case you were curious, the word “toll” never appears in TPB.)
This goes to show how libertarians and anarcho-capitalists have a cargo cult philosophy. They insist that government does nothing good or worthwhile, but only because they have an ideological blind spot to everything it gives them: the roads they drive on, the clean water that comes out of their tap, the electricity that flows into their house, the standards and measures that enable smooth trade.
They never wonder where that stuff comes from; they believe it just appears when people need it. They overlook all the collective effort it takes to create, organize and maintain the architecture of society, because acknowledging that would point them in directions they don’t want to go.
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Other posts in this series:
Smith really wrote that people of the NAC are fine with telemarketers bothering them constantly? Are we sure this whole thing isn’t an elaborate joke?
I thought you were going to ask where the smoke from this high-density industrial area goes, since even if there were underground smokestacks poking up above ground that Win just didn’t notice because he was going so fast, one would not see pristine wilderness on top of it. Not only would the pollution be horrible, but it would kill the trees. So does the NAC have super-special pollution-free technology more than half a century early, or is Smith just clueless? (And if it IS the former, why didn’t he say so?)
“Manicured streets”? Excuse me? Streets don’t have fingernails! (It peeves me when people use the word “manicured” to mean “attentively maintained”.)
Now, this second half does seem to be addressed to me personally, though I might just be oversensitive. I think you are confusing states historically bankrolling public goods with the much stronger claim that only states and no other form of organization can make and maintain these goods. Obviously, the market cannot—I am not disputing that—but tell me exactly why you think a horizontal form of organization cannot build and maintain a road network? Your criticisms land against the North American Confederacy because that society is ruggedly individualist without any community bonds, but there is no reason to think that a horizontally organized society would lack the manpower and engineering knowledge to build roads connecting their communities. Issues like houses being in the way could be resolved either by altering the proposed path a little bit, or perhaps through surveying the land ahead of time so that you can subtly curve the road to avoid it to begin with, instead of going straight the whole way till you hit someone’s dwelling and have to curve out of the way hugely. But maybe I’m just assuming that adults will act like adults and can use reason to solve disputes. I’m well aware that such a thing cannot be truthfully said in Trump’s America. Again, I want to make sure that I’m not misrepresenting you, but do you really believe that nobody will work together on a complex project if they are not forced into it by a coercive authority? Horizontal organization does not mean no structure or instructions, if you are worried about too many cooks spoiling the soup.
But in any case, the real sentence of yours that I think was directed at me is when you say, “just because a power can be used in unjust ways, it doesn’t follow that it shouldn’t exist.” I actually agree with this, but anarchists don’t say, “the government has allowed injustice before, therefore it can only be unjust.” That would be dismissing progressivism unfairly without engaging with its arguments. (And I would definitely rather live in a progressive world than one run by either Republicans or mainstream Democrats!) What anarchists actually do is analyze how the systems work inherently and conclude that, based on the structure of hierarchical authority itself, the state will naturally funnel power and authority to the few and away from the many, even if the authorities are well meaning and try to stop this. If you can believe that the system created by redlining and segregation is institutionally racist even without racist individuals making it worse, then you can certainly believe that hierarchy is also institutionally unjust no matter who is in charge. But, you say, couldn’t we minimize this tendency as much as possible? But the only way to do so is to replace vertical organization with horizontal organization. There is archeological evidence of horizontal societies being just as complex as vertical ones, as shown by David Graeber or James C. Scott (and others). Horizontal organization actually has fewer points if failure than vertical organization.
But whenever I talk about this, I want to once again state, firmly, that my defense of stateless societies is in no way a defense of the plausibility or desirability of the North American Confederacy, or of L. Neil Smith’s other beliefs, and especially not of unregulated capitalism. Capitalism is vertical by nature. And time and again, we see that the book’s society is not horizontally formed, it just seems to be identical to real life except that the government is missing. This falls exactly into the “cargo cult” framing you bring up, and I don’t want to make it seem like I’m defending the cargo cult. But no matter how many times I explain the differences between “libertarianism” and horizontal organization, people just don’t get it.
A manicured lawn is a well-trimmed lawn. The roadways for hovercraft in Libertopia seem to basically be long, smooth, level grassy lawns.
(There’s nothing to prevent someone dissatisfied with hovercraft from building wheeled vehicles with 4-wheel drive and powerful engines and large wheels that would churn those roadways into mud) (Maybe the roadways come with EULAs and damage liability contracts that you sign before being allowed to drive on them?)
Streets are something you’d be walking on, so maybe we should say they’re “pedicured?”
With regards to census takers versus ad agencies, it is my impression that US movement Libertarianism considers governments (especially the Federal government) as inherently and uniquely evil, regardless of what it does, and regardless of what other institutions do.
I am of the opinion that the libertarian position should be that institutions are good servants (they allow us to achieved collectively what we can’t achieve individually) but bad masters, and that society should structure itself to constrain institutions to be servants. This applies to all institutions – governments (be they national, state, county or municipal), corporations, churches, political parties, unions, police forces, even charities. (The American Founding Fathers introduced Separation of Powers as a means to that end, though it has now failed.)
Yeah, Smith is a parody of himself sometimes. The on,y reason I can think of why the NAC citizens would shoot census-takers is paranoia about them raising taxes or sending government death squads after them, and 1) that would mean the NAC has no protections for oppressed minorities, and 2) advertising agencies could and would do the very same thing.
It reminds me of Hank Rearden (or whoever it was) complaining about no billboards on the roadways in “Atlas Shrugged”. Capitalists really do use utterly different logic from the rest of us.
Yep. I’ve read libertarian columns that argue “Privatize everything so that people can’t vote on who gets to use roads or what’s taught in schools! The corporate owners will decide that without any regulation -— freedom!”.
It’s interesting reading this after having just moved to the exact area, Fort Collins, Colorado, where this ridiculous story takes place. I notice in this alternate universe, Fort Collins is named “Laporte” instead. I’m assuming it’s meant to be the same town because of the reference to “Old Town” which is what real-life Fort Collins’ historic downtown is called, and there is a Laporte Street in it. From what I’ve gathered about the local history, Fort Collins grew up around a former Army post from the Indian Wars, so by giving the city a different name, Smith is implying that there were no Indian Wars in this universe. But, apparently the same white settlers moved in.
Ironically, a libertarian I used to follow on Usenet (he was a decent chap – a libertarian who was not pro-police (having been railroaded into prison) and anti-car (preferring bikes) felt that telemarketers and spammers were a failure of the government (for reasons that escape me).
But what really gets to me is this bit: “Lucy had a matched pair of elderly Thorneycroft 418s, a stately machine dating back almost to the beginnings of hovercraft production. Enameled a garish yellow paisley, they’d rolled off the assembly line sixty years ago, but, with the help of an adoring mechanic, Lucy proudly kept them in mint condition.”
Shouldn’t this be from the point of view of someone unfamiliar with the NAC and its products, and written more like “Lucy had this garish yellow thing that turned out to be a hovercraft. She told me it was 60 years old but that it still worked fine, but I was terrified when it took off. But it got us there alive, though I spent most of the trip staring out the window at the other vehicles zooming by at 80 – at least.” or have some of the information actually conveyed in conversation?
Speaking of hovercraft, if they’ve universally replaced cars, why are there still roads at all? Sure, this was written before “Back to the Future”, but still— “where we’re going, we won’t need roads!” The whole appeal of hovercraft is that it allows modern transportation faster and more consistent than a horse while not marring the natural environment. Smith must have had a poor imagination, so he really shouldn’t have written SF. (Did you know he wrote Star Wars fanfic—I mean, EU novels—too?) Anyone who proposes radical changes to society really ought to be able to, well, imagine radical changes to society, not just sprinkle in futuristic technology and assume that nothing else would change.
“EU novels”?
He wrote about the European Union?!
That’s a good point. Though I do like the idea that people in this Earth get as nostalgic about old hovercraft as some people do about old cars.
All right, but apart from the sanitation, the medicine, education, wine, public order, irrigation, roads, a fresh water system, and public health, what have the
Romansgovernments ever done for us?(The analogous groups for this sort of thing could be the Anarcho-Capitalists for Liberty and the Libertarian Anarcho-Capitalists)(Splitters!)
How the hell do skyscrapers “swoop?” Is this yet another wondrous marvel of building technology bought about by the unbridled innovation of NAC entrepreneurship?
She pointed toward the drive fans, rudders high and stately behind them. “Can’t handle more’n a six-degree incline unless you give ’em full power and blow out every window in town.”
Does that mean their hovercraft can’t handle a TWELVE-degree incline at all? That would make them useless anywhere but the flattest farm country. Most single-family-detached suburban houses have driveways steeper than that. All three of my mom’s houses did.
Also, I heard somewhere that hovercraft need a perfectly flat and smooth surface to travel on, and that anything bigger than, say, a football would totally hose up that air cushion and throw the vehicle catastrophically off-course. Anyone else know if this is true?
Obviously, Smith had no sense of scale and doesn’t know how sloped most terrain is.
(And I think he means the literal, science-fictional hovercraft that literally hovers, not the actually existing “hovercraft” that uses an air cushion to simulate hovering. Those weren’t invented yet when he wrote this.)
I expect that it would depend on scale (and on design), but the web tells me that the Mountbatten class ferries that plied the English Channel could handle waves up to 8 feet. The web also tells me that they gave a bumpy ride and were difficult to steer. Smaller hovercraft ferries are still in service, linking the Isle of Wight to the mainland.
Perhaps when the author refers to manicured roads he means that they’re close mown lawns.
As written below, the SR.N4 could master quite some waves. Fellow student eons ago went to England riding one, he told me that it gave quite a washboard feeling. I can’t understand the authors fascination with hovercrafts, these beasts are noisy, and as having very low friction, can only be steered and braked dynamically by diverting the Airflow/reversing the engines. So dense traffic, narrow roads and tight bends are out. And sidewalks? Getting blown away or sprayed with dust/water/dirt? And for climbing steeper inclines the engines would need to go full throttle.
“Modern” Hovercraft certainly existed when Smith was writing TPB. The SRN-1 successfully crossed the English Channel in 1959; Prince Philip famously blagged a go at the controls later that year, pranged it — and no-one ever dared risk insulting him by repairing the Royal Dent.
Hovering on a cushion of air (as Smith is clearly talking of here, with mention of fans and rudders) over dry land is definitely a secondary function, though.
My bad. I thought air-cushion hovercrafts were invented in the 2010s, but I must have mixed them up with hoverboards—which don’t hover at all.
There are definitely libertarian capitalists well aware of these issues and they try to answer them. How well they do this is another issue of course, but here’s an example of one answer. https://www.jstor.org/stable/24562135
This Bruce L. Benson guy is associated with the Heartland Institute, which instantly disqualifies him as a serious or credible source, at least IMO. Here’s his CV as cited by Heartland:
https://heartland.org/about-us/who-we-are/bruce-l-benson/
Also, your link only shows me the first paragraph of his article, but that’s enough to show he’s refuting, or pretending to refute, an argument that isn’t actually being made, which is “the private sector would be unable to supply the efficient amount of roads.”
“Everyone here owns hovercraft rather than cars, because hovercraft are cool.”
I heard a great line at a comedy show the other day: My ex-girlfriend is like a hovercraft because I used to think she was the future.
‘However, unaccountable private companies collecting that info and much more besides, building up detailed profiles on people’s interests and affiliations, with no restrictions on how this information can be used or who it can be sold to—that’s completely fine, and doesn’t raise even a flicker of concern.’
TBF, I think that’s a pretty accurate picture of how well most people seem to accept the various online mining of their data…
True in our world, but the Confederation citizens are supposed to be clear-eyed about such things