The Probability Broach: The man who killed Washington

Engraving of the Whiskey Rebellion

The Probability Broach, chapter 6

Lying in his hospital bed as he recuperates, Win tries to figure out exactly when and where he is and what’s happened to him.

His initial belief was that he was somehow thrown forward in time. However, some questions for Clarissa, the doctor who treated him, quickly rules that out:

But according to my shapely physician, today was Thursday, July 9, 211 A.L. After reflecting, she added that A.L. stands for Anno Liberatis.

“That’s something, anyway. Mind if I asked what happened two hundred and eleven years ago?”

Clarissa shook her head in bewilderment. “But how can you not know? That’s when the thirteen North American colonies declared their independence from the Kingdom of Britain.”

Doing the math, Win works out that 211 years ago corresponds to 1776 in the timeline he’s used to (since this book is set in 1987). That disproves his time-travel hypothesis, since the year in this place is the same as where he came from, even if they use a different calendar.

However, Clarissa refers to this society as the North American Confederacy, which catches his attention:

“Hold it! Confederacy? Let me think—who won the Civil War?”

“Civil War?” she blinked—at least it was a change from headshaking. “You can’t mean this country, unless you count the Whiskey—”

“I mean the War Between the States—tariffs and slavery, Lee and Grant, Lincoln and Jefferson Davis? 1861 to 1865. Lincoln gets killed at the end—very sad.”

Clarissa looked very sad, systematic delusions written all over her face. “Win, I don’t know what you’re talking about. In the first place, slavery was abolished in 44 A.L., very peaceably, thanks to Thomas Jefferson… And in the second place, I didn’t recognize those names you rattled off. Except Jefferson Davis. He was President—no, it would have been the Old United States, back then—in, oh, I just can’t remember! He wasn’t very important.”

I’ll give L. Neil Smith this much credit: at least he acknowledges that slavery existed.

This is in contrast to Ayn Rand, who tried to erase slavery from American history because it was ideologically inconvenient. She treated history as a morality tale, like a capitalist version of Pilgrim’s Progress, culminating with America, the freest and therefore best nation that ever existed. Slavery doesn’t fit with that story, so she ignored it.

Smith can’t be faulted for that. However, the way he deals with the problem is only a little better. The idea of peacefully abolishing slavery without a civil war is certainly appealing. But the idea of Thomas Jefferson being the one to do it has some massive and glaring implausibilities, which we’ll discuss later.

Clarissa mentions the Whiskey Rebellion, which plays a crucial role in Smith’s alternate history. Here’s how the book introduces the topic:

“Wait a minute, Clarissa, I didn’t catch that last bit.”

She sighed, giving in to the headshaking impulse again. “I said, Albert Gallatin was also the man who killed George Washington.”

If you’re not familiar with the historical backstory, the Whiskey Rebellion was spurred by the first tax America imposed.

After the revolution, the United States was in debt. The states had borrowed huge sums of money to pay for the war, and the federal government agreed to assume that debt. Either way, the nation needed cash to pay back its bondholders. Congress passed a tax on distilled spirits to raise revenue.

This tax was enormously unpopular on the frontier, especially in western Pennsylvania, where whiskey was the lifeblood of the agricultural economy. Federal tax collectors were intimidated and threatened by hostile locals. Some were tarred and feathered, or held at gunpoint and forced to resign. One was besieged at home by an armed mob and only narrowly escaped.

After months of escalating hostilities, some of the more radical frontier dwellers began to talk openly about a second revolution. A ragtag army of several thousand rebels gathered outside Pittsburgh, threatening to attack and loot the city. Eventually, George Washington raised an army and marched into Pennsylvania, and the rebellion melted away without a fight. Only two men were charged and convicted, both of whom Washington pardoned.

In real history, Albert Gallatin was an American founder who tried to negotiate with the whiskey rebels and urged a peaceful resolution to the conflict. In Smith’s alternate history, he joined them instead, and led a rebellion that overthrew the federal government, scrapped the Constitution, and recreated the United States as a utopian anarchy.

(Side note: if the whiskey tax failed in Smith’s universe, what happened to the people who loaned America money to fight for independence? Were they out of luck? Should’ve known better than to pledge your fortunes in support of freedom, suckers!)

The interesting thing about this, although Smith doesn’t dwell on it, is that his political philosophy is fundamentally anti-American. He believes that the ratification of the Constitution was a grave error and that George Washington was a tyrant who deserved to be shot. (He reserves even greater scorn for Alexander Hamilton, as we’ll see.)

Unlike many libertarians and conservatives who wave the flag and proclaim that the U.S. is a glorious beacon of freedom, Smith takes the opposite stance. He believes that all governments everywhere are oppressive tyrannies, our own not excluded.

I’m tempted to wonder if this is part of the reason The Probability Broach never achieved the same popularity as more uncritically patriotic libertarian fictions, like Atlas. The likely readers of such books aren’t looking for a philosophical lecture; they’re only looking for a reason to feel good about themselves and to be told that they’re the superior ones.

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The Probability Broach: Good guys with guns

Logo of the Pinkerton Detective Agency: "We Never Sleep"

The Probability Broach, chapter 6

In the previous chapter of TPB, Win Bear stumbled into a parallel universe, discovered he had a doppelganger there, and sought him out – only to be near-fatally wounded in a drive-by shooting just as he found his other self’s home.

This chapter flashes back, showing these events from the perspective of this universe’s Edwin Bear. The text calls him “Ed”, to differentiate him from Win.

Ed was investigating a robbery at a company called Paratronics, but he’d had his fill of work and was planning a vacation:

One Freeman K. Bertram of Paratronics, Ltd, had a problem: someone had gotten away from a company warehouse, laden with a half-ton of valuable parts and equipment…

Ed might not be the best-known consulting detective in the land, nor the most highly paid, but he was clearly headed in that direction at an age most North Americans considered young. There were more clients than he really had time for, and although he’d worked for Paratronics, Ltd. before, and this sounded interesting, plenty of schedule-juggling had gone into shaking three vacation weeks loose.

This universe’s Ed Bear is a private “consulting detective”, the closest thing that L. Neil Smith’s anarcho-capitalist society has to police. But you have to ask: What, exactly, does this job entail?

Ed has no official legal authority, because there’s no legal system. There are no courts to back him up; he can’t get search warrants or subpoenas. He can’t enter anyone’s property without permission or compel anyone to cooperate with him if they don’t want to. He can’t arrest criminals, even if he catches them red-handed.

Also, there are no public records in this society. There are no IDs he can check, no databases he can consult. As we’ll see later, the North American Confederacy has never even heard of fingerprints. What evidence does he acquire, how does he get it, and what does he do with it? The book never really answers this.

You might point out that the phrase “consulting detective” is meant to echo Sherlock Holmes, who also lacked these powers. But Holmes did have police allies he could call on whenever the situation required it.

Ed is in his garage, getting ready to leave, when he hears a commotion outside:

Beneath the half-open door, a baggily clad form ran toward him then slammed violently into the slowly rising panel. Spots of sunlight pierced the door as a brilliant dotted line raced toward Ed… he dived, flinging back his sportcloak for the .375 on his hip. The shadow, faceless against outdoor light, slumped and fell in a pool of splattered blood.

A huge Frontenac steamer crabslipped up the driveway, bullets streaming. Ed pulled the trigger. Heavy slugs spat toward the steamer—five! six!—and silenced its machine gun… It fishtailed clumsily across the lawn and limped away.

“Death and Taxes! What was that about?” Enter a frail-looking elderly woman, 50 caliber Gabbet Fairfax smoking in her hand. She clutched her bathrobe together, shoving the monstrous weapon into a pocket, where it hung dangerously.

“I haven’t the slightest idea, Lucy.” Ed swapped magazines and holstered his gun, cautiously approaching the inert figure lying in the doorway. “Give me a hand. This fellow’s badly hurt!” He gently rolled the body over and looked down. At himself.

And as we’ve covered, Ed and Lucy drag Win inside and treat his wounds for free, because they’re just that nice – as opposed to, say, rolling his body over the property line into the gutter, hosing his blood off the driveway, and going back inside and pretending they saw nothing.

Back to Win’s perspective. While convalescing, he reminisces about the first time he shot someone, back in his own world:

I’d run out of cigarettes about 2 A.M., pulled pants on over pajama bottoms, and strolled over to one of those little twenty-four-hour groceries with inflated prices and lonely teenage clerks. Only this one wasn’t lonely—not with a 25 automatic pressed against her temple. He stood well away, gun arm fully extended, prancing nervously as he watched her shove small bills into a wrinkled paper bag, preparing herself for death.

You’re a cop around the clock. On my own time, I carried a beat-up .45 S & W sawed off to three inches. The door stood open, ten yards away—I didn’t dare get closer. I knelt, braced my hands on the rear corner of his ’57 Chevy, and pulled the trigger. She screamed for thirty minutes.

…Many a cop sees thirty years without firing a shot in anger, others quit cold after their first. You’d be surprised how often. Some few start enjoying it, but we try to weed them out—too bad the feds don’t follow the same policy.

L. Neil Smith seems to agree that it’s a bad idea to have law enforcement officers who enjoy killing people. The problem, of course, is that his ancap universe has no means to “weed out” these psychopaths. Whoever has a gun and is willing to use it can do whatever their blackened heart pleases.

I’m not for capital punishment, a useless, stupid ritual, degrading to everyone involved—except at the scene and moment of the crime, preferably at the hands of the intended victim.

L. Neil Smith takes pains to portray Win in the most heroic possible manner: an off-duty cop using deadly force to save a humble clerk’s life from an armed robber. It’s the Platonic ideal of the scenario that all gun worshippers want us to imagine.

But those situations – the mythologized “good guy with a gun” – are vanishingly rare in reality. Real-world experience shows that, when everyone is armed, what happens more often is that two people get into an argument which escalates to them drawing and shooting at each other. Both are culpable, but the one who lives gets to frame the situation as self-defense. Or angry, violent people whip out a gun and start blasting away for no good reason, just because someone annoyed them or triggered their racist paranoia.

The real purpose of these “good guy with a gun” scenarios isn’t to win over skeptics with the case for gun ownership. It’s to feed the egos of people who already own guns. It tells them that they’re lone heroes in a dangerous world, self-deputized to defend law and order from the scary outsiders all around. In that sense, this narrative may well make them feel less inhibited, and therefore, makes gun violence more common.

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New on OnlySky: AI deep research

I have a new column this week on OnlySky. It’s about the new AI mode called “deep research”, and whether it solves the problems that have plagued AI in the past.

AI chatbots like ChatGPT were introduced with the promise that they’d act as superintelligent robot librarians. Their creators promised that they could rapidly research and synthesize an answer to any question, putting the entirety of human knowledge at everyone’s fingertips.

As we know, the reality was very different. Chatbots are giant association machines, building up statistical models of which words are more or less likely to follow which other words, like a more complex version of the autocomplete on your phone. They don’t know the difference between right and wrong answers, only what a right answer “sounds like”. This means they have a tendency to invent facts, figures and references, which makes their output inherently unreliable.

However, the companies that created them keep working on improving the technology. Now they claim they have a solution to this problem: “deep research” mode, which forces the AI to cite real footnotes and references for each of its assertions.

In this column, I tested ChatGPT’s deep research mode for myself. How does it stack up?

Read the excerpt below, then click through to see the full piece. This column is free to read, but paid members of OnlySky get some extra perks, like a subscriber-only newsletter:

OpenAI doesn’t hesitate to claim that this is a step toward an artificial general intelligence, or AGI, which is a hypothetical AI that can do anything a human can do—including original research and the discovery of new knowledge.

These claims present a formidable problem for people, like me, reporting on this technology. I don’t want to be an uncritical booster or a salesman. On the other hand, if this is genuinely a breakthrough, people should know about it.

The case for—or against—AI depends very much on its capabilities. If AI is only good for creating unreliable, low-quality slop, all the energy and resources that went into creating it were a waste.

On the other hand, if AI can accelerate the pace of research and discovery, then there’s a real benefit to weigh against the admittedly large amounts of energy it consumes.

Continue reading on OnlySky…

The Probability Broach: Affordable care

A medical caduceus laid on top of a stack of dollar bills

The Probability Broach, chapter 6

Following his brief interlude of mid-surgery awareness, Win wakes up for real:

Standing over me was a breathtaking peaches-and-cream blonde, perhaps thirty, hazel eyes—when she smiled, the corners crinkled like she meant it—and an ever so slightly upturned nose. She wore a bright-red coverall with a circled white cross embroidered on the left shoulder.

The wall seemed one huge window opening into a honey-colored meadow and purple columbines. Maybe a mile away an evergreen forest fronted foothills and the ghostly peaks of the Rockies. The illusion was spoiled by a door through the wall and the railed top of a staircase. Television? A beautiful job. I could almost smell the sage.

It’s ironically appropriate that this beautiful landscape turns out to be pixelated artifice.

Given that this anarcho-capitalist world has no environmental preservation laws, it should be a blighted hellscape where forests are clear-cut for timber, mountains are bulldozed for ore, lakes and rivers are used as dumping grounds, and whatever’s left is despoiled with garish advertisements. Pristine natural beauty doesn’t produce a profit for anyone, so in a world where money rules everything, it should all be ruined. The only pastoral scenes ought to be digital fakes like this one.

As we saw previously, L. Neil Smith insists that isn’t the case. The North American Confederacy is a beautiful place with
bucolic parkland and modest, tasteful development. But he doesn’t have an explanation for why that isn’t the case. Who or what prevents these places from being sold off and strip-mined?

The woman at Win’s bedside introduces herself as Clarissa Olson, “Certified Healer”. She’s pleased to see him awake, and Win returns the compliment by engaging in some light banter – or as we’d call it, sexual harassment.

I took a deep breath, found the pain completely gone, and tried sitting up.

“Hold on, Lieutenant! You’re not quite ready for that!” The lady dimpled, pushing me back gently. “How do you feel?”

“I guess I’ll do, at that. Is this a hospital?”

“You want to get really sick? A hospital, indeed! I almost believe you are a time traveler as you claimed last night.”

“What else did I say? Hope I had enough sense to make an improper suggestion or two your way.”

“You’re a ‘Man from the Past,’ from a city that’s never existed. Otherwise you were quite gentlemanly, all things considered.”

But don’t worry – Clarissa doesn’t mind. In anarcho-capitalist utopia, healthcare workers are totally cool with being hit on by their patients. Apparently, it’s only the nanny state that makes women object to being catcalled. Who knew?

Clarissa says she removed a dozen bullets from Win’s body. She shows him the tattered remains of the bulletproof vest he donned the day before, when he left his apartment in the other Earth: “That’s why there was enough of you left for me to work on.”

“When will I be up and around?”

“Well, you’re healing pretty slowly. You were gradually dying of malnutrition: deficiencies in the nitrilosides, lecithin, ascorbic acid; a dozen degenerative diseases I’ve only read about. But as that clears up, your wounds will knit faster. Day after tomorrow—at least for a brief walkaround?”

“Where I come from, bullet holes take a lot longer than that to heal up! This has gotta be the future… or heaven, if you’ll pardon my getting personal.”

There’s no good place to point this out because the book omits it, so I’ll mention it here: Clarissa apparently never charges Win for this life-saving emergency surgery. Despite this being an uber-capitalist society, there’s no mention of him having to pay anything for it, not now or later.

How does it work, in a world with no laws and no public safety net, when a stranger shows up unconscious and bleeding to death? Just as I asked about medical care in Atlas Shrugged, “In a laissez-faire utopia, if someone suffers a critical injury and can’t prove on the spot that they can afford medical help, what happens? Would they be left to bleed to death on the ground?”

Health care is the classic case of a market failure, because critically ill people can’t afford to take their time and shop around for the best deal. They have no choice but to go to the first doctor available and agree to whatever price they demand. In turn, the doctor should charge that patient as much as they can possibly pay – up to and including a lifetime of debt slavery.

That doesn’t happen here, but only because libertarian novelists have their characters play nice and cut each other sweetheart deals, rather than taking their beliefs to their logical, ruthless conclusion.

In a passage a little later in the book, Win gives an aside into the advanced medical technology this world has and how it’s healing him much faster:

The cast on my arm was the devil’s own nuisance, although lighter than a plaster one, and ingeniously rigged for washing and scratching—in essence, merely a rigid plastic mesh. Clarissa maintained that, along with electronics and vitamins, it was helping me knit a hundred times faster than I had any right to expect. I don’t know all the therapeutic details, but I’m sure the FDA would have outlawed it.

This is another of those libertarian fixations that comes up surprisingly often. It’s the fervent belief that government prevents scientific progress.

The filmmakers of the Atlas Shrugged movies claimed that “red tape” holds back Star Trek-style medical scanners. Right-wing crank Michele Bachmann once claimed the free market could easily cure Alzheimer’s disease if only government regulators would get out of the way. And here, L. Neil Smith asserts that the FDA would, for some reason, outlaw a device that heals bullet wounds overnight. (Wouldn’t the military love to get their hands on something like this?)

This belief has an obvious implication. Of course, the government can’t prevent people from inventing things; it can only ban them after they’ve been created. This means there should be advanced medical technologies already in existence that are being held back by government bureaucrats. Where are they?

(Also, why would the government do this? Bureaucrats are people too. They get sick, they have loved ones who get sick. What reason would they have to ban cures they might benefit from?)

If anything, the reverse happens too often. Rather than being too cautious, the government approves drugs that have to be pulled because of dangerous side effects. They’ve approved uber-expensive anti-Alzheimer’s drugs that don’t work, essentially out of desperation for a lack of better options. Worthless quackery like homeopathy is barely regulated at all.

Even if regulators could stand to be more cautious, the government hasn’t stifled all innovation. On the contrary, almost any actual scientist would tell you that public funding is the keystone of their work. And new advances are still coming: During the COVID pandemic, RNA vaccine technology permitted safe, effective vaccines to be created in record time. CRISPR-based genetic engineering therapies to permanently cure previously untreatable diseases are coming online. Government research support nurtured both of these revolutionary technologies.

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New on OnlySky: The future is (still) less religious

I have a new column this week on OnlySky. It’s about the trend toward a more secular world – which, despite all the frightening headlines and discouraging developments in American politics, is continuing.

A new survey examines how the global religious landscape shifted between 2010 and 2020. It found that traditional religion continues to wane, such that that “no religion” is now the third most-common religious demographic in the world, behind only Christianity and Islam. While China has the most nonreligious people of any country, the possibly-surprising second-place finisher is the United States. The number of nonreligious Americans doubled in only a decade, and now constitutes about a third of the population.

In this article, I examine the political implications of this change. The rise of the “nonreligious right”, who espouse pseudoscientific justifications for old prejudices, is an unfortunately real phenomenon, but they’re just one small part of a much larger societal shift. The overall thrust of the evidence still signals that a less religious world will, all things considered, be better for everyone.

Read the excerpt below, then click through to see the full piece. This column is free to read, but paid members of OnlySky get some extra perks, like a subscriber-only newsletter:

The most eyebrow-raising fact is that the nones have what Pew calls a demographic disadvantage. Compared to the global population as a whole, they’re older on average and have fewer kids. This is especially noticeable in Europe, Japan, and other wealthy, developed societies where religion is fading at the same time as the population is aging and flattening out.

However, the nones are growing in spite of that, because of switching—that is, people walking away from their religious upbringing and becoming nonbelievers. This is in contrast to the way religions typically grow, by mere reproduction and indoctrination of children who are too young to question or doubt what they’re taught. Persuading adults to change their minds is much harder—and yet that’s what’s happening. In that sense, nonreligion is winning the culture war.

Continue reading on OnlySky…

The Probability Broach: Good samaritans

A painting: The Good Samaritan (1826), by Guillaume Bodinier

The Probability Broach, chapter 6

To recap the previous chapter: After escaping a gun battle with government thugs, Win Bear found himself in an unfamiliar futuristic city where everyone is armed. While trying to get his bearings, he found someone listed in a phone directory with the same name as him. He resolved to go visit his doppelganger and get some answers, but right on the doorstep of his destination, he was gunned down by a black hovercraft.

This chapter begins with him regaining awareness in the middle of surgery, with three vague shapes looming over him:

Ever wake up in a darkened room and a soft bed, with a headache clear down to your knees? My arms wouldn’t move. When I inhaled, sharp pains skewered me from spine to sternum. I was alive, but leaking.

“Hold these,” the first voice, softly feminine, said. “And feed them into the cutter. We’ll have to remove it all, I’m afraid.” Sound of rasping, scraping. Whatever they were chopping off, I hoped I wouldn’t sing falsetto afterward.

The doctors (or whoever they are) remark on how bad his health is, even beyond the bullet holes:

“Such crude dental prosthetics! And he’s in advanced geriosis—see the swollen belly, the sagging tissue around the eyes? What little hair he has is turning gray!

…you should see the scanner—poisonous congestion, ulceration. And the arteries! Even without these bullets in him… he’d be gone in another ten years.”

They notice he’s conscious, and a masculine voice asks him who he is. Win still thinks he’s been flung into the future and that there was a world war in the interim, which accounts for why everything looks so unfamiliar. He tries to explain:

I tried to clear my vision. The guy looked enough like me to get drafted in my place. “Win Bear… Lieutenant, Denver—used to be a city, sixty miles south. Only it’s gone! Blown to—” I stopped, breathing heavily against withering pain. “I’m, well, from the past—a time traveler!”

He frowned perplexedly. Nothing was wrong with my vision. I could make out every hair in his bushy, very familiar eyebrows. “Friend, sixty miles south of here, there’s only Saint Charles Town. Been there, oh, 125 years. Nothing but buffalo before that.”

Win is baffled, and in too much pain to come up with any other explanation. The people treating him are merciful:

“We’re at redline already. The painkillers just aren’t working.”

“What painkillers?” I wheezed past the red-hot pokers in my chest.

… “I give up,” the beautiful voice said. “Lucy, electrosleep—out in a van, a blue case under the regenerator.”

One of the people tending to him comes back with what looks like a tiny gun. She presses it against his neck, and he’s instantly unconscious.

L. Neil Smith did something clever in this section. However, that cleverness is in service of covering up an unsavory political implication, given the realities of human nature. He’s pulled off an authorial sleight of hand to paper over what would otherwise be a glaring, obvious problem with his preferred brand of society.

Here’s the problem: In an anarcho-capitalist world, what would most people do if they heard gunshots outside and found a stranger bleeding to death on their doorstep? Wouldn’t they be more likely to conclude that this is someone else’s feud and they don’t want to get involved?

Would you be eager to take a dying stranger into your house and treat them at your own expense, knowing that some unknown party wants them dead, and knowing there are no police to call if you become the killer’s next target for helping their intended victim? Isn’t it more likely that the average person would say, “This is none of my business, I’m staying out of it”?

The clever part is that Smith concocts one of the very few plausible justifications for involving yourself in a scenario like this. Namely, the owner of this house – the other Win Bear – would naturally be shocked to see his identical twin. He’d want to save the stranger’s life so he can find out what the heck is going on.

Obviously, that’s not going to happen in a realistic world that doesn’t have parallel-universe portals. If not for that only-in-fiction happenstance, the bad guys would have won. Win knows who they are and what they want, but no one else in this world does. If they had killed him, nobody would have stopped them, or even tried to. They would have succeeded with their evil world-domination scheme.

After all, in an anarcho-capitalist society, there’s no government. There are no police. There’s nobody whose job it is to investigate a corpse in the gutter. There could be private detectives (the other Win Bear is one), but obviously, a dead person isn’t going to pay to find out who killed them.

True, if a murder victim has family or close friends, they might hire someone to track down the killer. But that’s just another way of saying that, in this world, access to justice depends on having rich friends. If you have no one who’s willing to avenge you, or no one who can afford to, anyone can kill you without consequences.

In a later chapter, Smith has a handwavy answer to this. He says there are “professionally neutral” civil liberties organizations who investigate unsolved crimes as a pro bono service, “just to make sure no one can murder some friendless wino”.

OK, maybe. But in a society where profit drives everything, how much of a budget do you think they’re going to devote to that, and how high a priority are they going to put on those cases?

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New on OnlySky: The future of drone war

I have a new column this week on OnlySky. It’s about Ukraine’s audacious “Operation Spiderweb” – a covert operation to smuggle military drones deep into Russia, from where they launched attacks on airbases across the country. It succeeded beyond what most people would have thought possible, destroying irreplaceable strategic warplanes that Russia was using to bomb Ukrainian cities, all for an investment of a few hundred cheap drones.

Nevertheless, although we should cheer its success in this instance, this tactic opens up a troubling horizon in the future of war. Ukraine isn’t the only nation that can do something like this. Precisely because it was so cheap and effective – and so difficult to guard against – we should expect more drone-based surprise attacks in the future. How will nations adapt when any cargo container passing over their borders could be a Trojan horse sent by an enemy?

Read the excerpt below, then click through to see the full piece. This column is free to read, but paid members of OnlySky get some extra perks, like a subscriber-only newsletter:

When this story broke, national leaders and military officials all over the world must have shuddered with fear. There’s no reason this strategy wouldn’t work in other contexts.

A hostile nation could “seed” an adversary with drone-packed cargo containers, smuggling them across the border and concealing them near valuable military assets—or important infrastructure like railroads, pipelines or power plants. These robotic sleeper agents could lie dormant for weeks, months, potentially years. Then, at a signal, they’d all deploy simultaneously, launching a massive wave of surprise attacks with the goal of crippling the rival’s military before they know what hit them.

A well-equipped terrorist group could use the same blueprint to strike at soft civilian targets. It would eliminate the necessity of finding religious fanatics willing to be suicide bombers. Just a few such drone bombings could sow mass panic among the population. It’s also readily conceivable that suicide drone attacks could be used to assassinate public figures.

Continue reading on OnlySky…

The Probability Broach: Coffin nails

A smoldering cigarette in an ashtray

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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The Probability Broach: Vegas on steroids

The Probability Broach, chapter 5

In a phone booth in a strange futuristic city, Win Bear has found a number for his doppelganger. Driven by curiosity, he dials it.

To his frustration, he gets a busy signal. However, the phone booth is able to draw him a map to the address he was trying to call. It turns out the other Win Bear’s house is only a few blocks away.

When I emerged, traffic was still heavy, and fast. Looking for a break, I glanced back the way I’d come only minutes ago. A flashing arrow at the curb spelled out PEDESTRIANS and pointed to an escalator that flowed down into a broad, well-lit area lined with shops, then became a moving walkway. Halfway through the trip, I passed a tunnel labeled, paradoxically, OVERLAND TRAIL. Here and there cheerful three-dimensional posters advertised food, entertainment—and tobacco. Prohibition was over! There seemed to be a lot of ads for various intimidating firearms, and something calling itself SECURITECH—WHILE YOU SLEEP. Was that a burglar alarm or a sleeping pill?

Nope, sorry. Not excessive enough.

L. Neil Smith at least acknowledges that there should be ads in his ultra-capitalist confederacy. However, they ought to be a lot more common than “here and there”. Every street corner should look like this:

A bustling city intersection at night, blanketed with neon signs and billboards

In a laissez-faire society without zoning laws or regulations, every vertical surface should be covered with neon signs and digital billboards jostling each other for space. Everything else should be plastered with strata of posters, fliers and handbills. Every business would have an incentive to make their ads bigger, brighter, gaudier and more obnoxious than all the rest, to stand out from their competitors.

Every beautiful landscape and natural wonder should be despoiled with hideous advertisements (which did indeed happen in a less civilized era).

This world shouldn’t be as Smith describes it: a calm, laid-back place with verdant parkland, peaceful residential areas, and charmingly understated commercial districts. This world should look like Las Vegas on steroids.

Forcibly reminded of certain biological facts, I stopped off at a door with appropriate markings, a model of understatement as it turned out. More than the usual monument to the ceramic arts, the rest room was an updated Roman bath: swimming pool, snack bar, even sleep cubicles for rent. I thought of Colfax Avenue hookers who’d love the setup, then noticed that such services—your choice, organic or mechanical—were available at a modest fee.

Sexbots in ancap utopia! Are you even a little surprised?

Perhaps out of some residual sense of propriety, this is the only thing Smith says in this book about sex work, so I won’t dwell on it. I’m not against sex work in principle – as I’ve said before, I believe we own our own bodies, and we should be able to decide what to do with them.

However, it’s essential to acknowledge how exploitative the industry often is, and how much potential for abuse exists. More than almost any other profession, if it’s going to exist, there has to be rigorous oversight and strong worker protections. A world where sex work exists with no legal protections is going to resemble the worst caricatures put about by those who’d like to ban it altogether.

Definitely feeling more like myself, whoever that was (another twinge of curiosity about this “Edward W. Bear”), I ambled along in the afternoon sun, absently aware that the almost-silent vehicles swooshing along beside me in the street produced no noticeable exhaust. Down in the curbing there wasn’t a scrap of garbage.

Now that isn’t even slightly believable.

In an anarcho-capitalist world, by definition, any trash pickup would be a private service you’d have to pay for. On the other hand, there’d be no laws against littering or dumping, because there are no laws against anything. So why not just throw your garbage out the window into the street? Why not dump your business’ trash in the nearest park, or discharge your factory’s effluent into the river? If your car breaks down, why not abandon it on the roadside? Once it leaves your hands, it’s not your problem anymore!

To quote an excerpt from my novel Commonwealth, here’s what would actually happen in a world like the one Smith wants:

MuniSan Incorporated, the private company that had been the city Department of Sanitation, had raised its rates because of shareholder pressure for higher profits. In response, many New Yorkers had canceled their garbage pickup. Instead, they dumped their trash on the street, where it was no one’s responsibility.

It had been a brutally hot summer, and black garbage bags piled up in sweltering heaps. They swelled and split in the sun like overripe fruit, disgorging decaying refuse. Flies and cockroaches swarmed over the stinking mounds; mosquitoes bred in the dirty water that pooled beneath them.

…As the garbage piled up, it clogged storm drains and treatment plants—plastic bags, soggy cardboard, chunks of styrofoam, dirty diapers, congealed lumps of grease and fat, sanitary pads, used condoms, dead animals, tangles of hair. Sewage backed up into the municipal water system, infiltrating the pipes that ran to apartments where people swiped their credit cards to fill glasses and pitchers from the tap.

Cholera and dysentery crept back into New York City. They appeared in the reclamation zones first, but spread slowly into wealthy neighborhoods. Following them came other waterborne diseases: typhoid fever, rotavirus, leptospirosis, norovirus, giardiasis.

…Meanwhile, other diseases reappeared, spread by rats, flies and mosquitoes: first bubonic plague, then malaria, yellow fever, dengue fever, chikungunya, West Nile virus, Zika fever, St. Louis encephalitis. In the feverish heat of the summer, a thousand pathogens found fertile soil, grew and swelled. An old darkness, once banished by public hygiene laws, woke from its long sleep and stretched subtle fingers into the crevices of the city.

…TV opinion segments and letters to the editor cried for someone to do something, but it was unclear who or what. Cleaning up one’s own street would be useless when the problem was citywide, and no individual could afford to pay for the whole city to be cleaned up. So everyone reasoned, and therefore no one solved the problem.

As I emphasized in this passage, public hygiene is a Prisoner’s Dilemma problem. It can’t be solved unless everyone cooperates (after all, a single person can litter and vandalize an otherwise-beautiful landscape that’s seen by thousands). However, there’s always a selfish incentive to skip doing your part and leave a mess behind for other people to clean up. And in an anarcho-libertarian society, there are only selfish incentives.

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New on OnlySky: Is it better not to exist?

I have a new column this week on OnlySky. It’s about the strange philosophy of antinatalism, and how it led to terrorist violence in at least one case.

Antinatalism is a philosophical idea which claims it’s better not to exist, because existence inevitably involves pain and suffering, which should be avoided at all costs. Most antinatalists stop at urging others not to have children, which is a valid choice in line with the principle of individual autonomy.

However, a few disturbed people go further, concluding that life is so intolerable that it’s a positive good to end it – whenever and wherever possible. This is the nihilist mindset that appears to have inspired the bombing of an IVF clinic in California last month. This act of terrorism fortunately killed no one except the perpetrator, but it could easily have resulted in the deaths of innocent people, as well as the destruction of frozen embryos.

Before we pass judgment on the bomber, we need to examine the ideas that motivated him. Does the antinatalist philosophy hold up to criticism? Is it bad to be alive and unethical to reproduce?

Read the excerpt below, then click through to see the full piece. This column is free to read, but paid members of OnlySky get some extra perks, like a subscriber-only newsletter:

In the name of fairness, we should try to steelman the antinatalist argument. Here’s what they’d likely say for themselves.

When scientists run studies on human beings, they have an ethical obligation to do no harm, or at least, not leave the participants worse off than they were before. There’s a dark history of experiments carried out on unwilling or unaware participants that did grievous harm, which is why scientific studies today have to be approved by institutional review boards or other ethical watchdogs.

In the antinatalist view, having children is like an unethical human experiment.

Continue reading on OnlySky…