The Probability Broach, chapter 12

Win and Ed have one lead to follow up on: the university researcher, Dr. Thorens, whose name Freeman K. Bertram gave them. According to Bertram, Dr. Thorens is the best person to answer some of their questions about parallel universes.

Before they head over to the university, they stop for lunch at a restaurant called Mr. Meep’s Spanish Hideaway:

Meep would take explaining in anybody’s universe. A chimpanzee, he’d adjusted his wrist-talker for what he fancied was a Spanish accent, then grafted a gigolo moustache to his upper lip to go with his bolero jacket, Mexican bellbottoms, and one of those off-duty bullfighter hats, the kind with little balls of fringe around the brim. When he lifted it, his hair was dashingly oiled, parted down the middle like Rudolph Valentino.

Culture shock is a terrible thing. Ask the man who has one.

Win asks Ed, “Doesn’t this place seem a little silly, even to you, sometimes?”—which I guess you could take as evidence of self-awareness on the author’s part.

They eat and smoke. Because Win has a pocketful of cash—the blood money he received from the prison company, as payment for failing to protect his prisoner—he offers to pay for lunch. But when they get the check, he’s shocked by how cheap it is:

Ed took longer finishing his meal than I did—I still say chocolate turkey is a little heavy for lunch. Since I was suddenly wealthy, I decided to pay. The bill popped up on the screen and I turned to my munching messmate: “Ed, is this right, a silver quarter-ounce? That’s only a buck and a half!”

“Mmphl. Probably added in your cigar by mistake. Need some money?”

“No.” I observed absently. “Nor does anybody else around here, apparently… Everywhere I go in this town, everyone has lots of cash, and everything costs practically nothing. Where are you hiding your poor people?”

As we previously saw, Smith maintains his economically implausible insistence that everything is cheap and everyone is wealthy in the North American Confederacy. In this section of the book, he tries to explain how that can be possible.

Ed explains that by the standards of his society, he is one of the poor people (“When did you ever know a rich detective?”), but it doesn’t matter. Once they abolished government, Capitalist Magic made everyone prosperous and comfortable. He reminds Win that their super-advanced medical technology fixed his injuries virtually overnight, and the same is true of every other problem as well:

“Fractured bones are a problem we’ve solved, largely with substantial amounts—by standards you’re used to—of scientific and economic freedom.” He took the last bite of pastry and wiped off his chin. “We’ve also solved hunger, and by the same means. All you have to do is leave people alone.”

“To die in the streets of old age or starvation? That’s why you need government, Ed, to take care of those who can’t—”

“Wrong way around, Win. Politicians need human misery, for their very—”

“Now wait a minute! We spend trillions, just to—”

“Spread the misery around! My friend, government’s a disease masquerading as its own cure.”

These are bold claims. Smith says that government never makes anything better; it only holds people down. If we scrapped all laws, regulations and safety-net programs, the economy would flower and poverty would disappear.

Let’s put these claims to the test with a real-life example of what happens when we “leave people alone”.

After the Civil War, the U.S. government passed a series of Homestead Acts that gave away unclaimed land in the western Great Plains (“unclaimed” in the sense that its indigenous inhabitants had been forcibly displaced or wiped out) to white settlers who were willing to farm it.

It was known that this region was arid, harsh and susceptible to drought. But millions of settlers flocked to claim land, because of a popular belief called “rain follows the plow” which held that cultivating the land would make it more fertile and temperate.

Nothing could be more libertarian than this. The homesteading land rush was motivated by the same belief L. Neil Smith argues for in this section: the belief that people do best when they’re left alone. All we have to do is grant them the freedom to do what they think best, and then stand back. Smith’s logic would lead you to believe that they’d transform these arid lands into a Garden of Eden.

The results didn’t live up to these rosy expectations.

A wave of settlers plowed the prairie, using newfangled technology like the combine harvester. They ripped up the perennial native grasses whose deep, dense root networks held the soil together. The crops they planted to replace them, like wheat, were shallow-rooted annuals that couldn’t perform the same function.

When drought inevitably came, the soil dried out and crumbled, and Great Plains winds did the rest. They scoured the loose topsoil, catching it up into huge dust storms that darkened the daytime sky for miles. The dust smothered towns, made travel impossible, and killed people and animals who suffocated or contracted pneumonia from inhaling it. Millions of people lost their homes and their land, becoming penniless, hungry refugees.

The Dust Bowl can’t be blamed on regulation, government overreach, or political machinations. It was caused by—if you care to put it in these terms—too much freedom. Letting everyone do what they wanted led directly to ecological devastation and economic collapse. If the government had exercised a heavier hand, preserving some of the native prairie and keeping it off-limits to farming, it wouldn’t have been as big of a crisis.

You might be wondering, why hasn’t there been another Dust Bowl since the 1930s? The answer is that it’s because of government intervention.

The New Deal created agencies like the Soil Erosion Service, which taught farmers to use anti-erosion practices like terracing and cover crops. The states created soil conservation districts which made these practices mandatory.

Another government initiative, the Great Plains Shelterbelt, hired CCC workers to plant trees across hundreds of miles to serve as windbreaks. The Conservation Reserve Program paid farmers to take land out of production, replacing crops with native vegetative cover. The idea of paying farmers not to plant crops has been the target of endless mockery, but there’s sound ecological reasoning behind it.

The Dust Bowl is a dramatic example of how excessive freedom can lead to disaster, but there are others. Fishing fleets with no restrictions on the size of their catch have pushed commercially valuable fish species to the brink of extinction, causing the collapse of coastal economies.

Desert farms and settlements have pumped too much water from aquifers like the Ogallala, causing wells to run dry and harvests to fail. Drought and overuse has forced entire cities, from Cape Town to Mexico City to Tehran, to reckon with the prospect of running out of water. Governments in these places have had to impose rationing to keep the taps from going dry.

These are all Prisoner’s Dilemma situations: collective action problems where, when every individual makes the self-interested choice, it results in the worst-case outcome for everyone. If everyone voluntarily agreed to rein in their selfishness—leaving some land unplowed, catching fewer fish, conserving water—they’d all be better off. But any such agreement will collapse in the absence of any way to enforce it.

Smith’s cornucopian ideology (also seen in Ayn Rand) holds that the bounty of nature is inexhaustible—so the more people who work to extract resources, the more there’ll be for everyone. If you hold this belief, it’s a logical conclusion that government regulation can only decrease humanity’s output, never increase it. Of course, a libertarian has to say this, because it’s the only scenario that justifies the absence of government.

But cornucopianism is false. The reality is that we live on a finite planet where natural resources can be depleted. If money is the sole driving force, there’s no incentive to preserve something till tomorrow when you could make a profit from it today. That’s why, sometimes, we need a government—which just means an enforceable collective agreement—to conserve limited resources and prevent anyone from taking more than the planet can bear.

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Other posts in this series:

• The Probability Broach