The Probability Broach, chapter 17
This chapter begins with another of the fake quotes L. Neil Smith loves. This one is attributed to his fictional anarchist philosopher Mary Ross-Byrd:
Nine tenths of everything is tax. Everything you buy has a complicated history of robbery: land, raw materials, energy, tools, buildings, transport, storage, sales, profits. Don’t forget the share you contribute toward the personal income tax of every worker who has anything to do with the process.
Inflation by taxation: there are a hundred taxes on a loaf of bread. What kind of living standard would we enjoy if everything cost a tenth of what it does? What kind of world? Think of your home, your car, your TV, your shoes, your supper—all at a 90% discount!
Government can’t fight poverty—poverty is its proudest achievement!
—Mary Ross-Byrd
Toward a New Liberty
We’ve been over this before, but this quote offers an especially vivid example of Smith’s ideologically-driven economic illiteracy. He thinks that all the money we pay in taxes vanishes into a black hole, providing no value in return.
How did that loaf of bread get to the market or to my house? By truck? Those trucks travel on highways, bridges and tunnels—how did those get built? Who paid the costs of construction? When it snows, who plows the roads to keep them open? When there’s a pothole, who fills it? When there’s an accident, who clears it?
Was there any kind of food safety inspection at the bakery, to make sure they’re not putting toxic alum, chalk or sawdust in the dough to save money? Or do you just have to take the company’s word for it?
Where does the factory get electricity to keep the lights on and run the appliances? Who generates it and how? Who regulates the utilities to make sure their reactors don’t melt down and they don’t spill toxic waste into the drinking water?
Even in a hypothetical scenario where there’s no government and private corporations perform the same services, those services have a cost that isn’t zero. Why wouldn’t those costs be built into the price of bread in the anarcho-capitalist utopia, just like they are now?
Smith’s assertion that everything would cost “a tenth of what it does” if not for government is pure magical thinking. It’s on a level with saying all the money we pay farmers is wasted because crops just spring out of the ground on their own.
In this chapter, Win and his friends are doing their best to alert the world to the Hamiltonian threat, and their efforts have borne fruit. The North American Confederacy’s version of Congress has agreed to meet, and our protagonists are traveling to the seat of government (which isn’t Washington, D.C., as we’ll see shortly) to testify in person.
Rather than one of the NAC’s jet liners (“thousand-passenger fusion-powered titanium monsters that bash their way through near-space at five times the speed of sound”), they’re taking a zeppelin, because zeppelins are cool. Smith describes them as enormous and luxurious—a mile long, like floating cruise ships with lavish suites, shopping malls and restaurants on board, with power supplied by fusion reactors which also generate helium for buoyancy.
However, there’s a tiny problem. As you may remember, everyone in this anarcho-capitalist world goes heavily armed at all times. How does that work with air travel?
Riding the corridor to the elevators, we encountered a security setup not too different from the ones back home. Ed bellied up, drew his Browning, pulled the clip and chamber round. Lucy’s horse-pistol materialized from some region of her person, and Clarissa unsheathed her Webley Electric. Following their example, I unholstered my Smith & Wesson, wondering what would happen next.
At home, the officer would lose control of her sphincters, and forty thousand federal marshals would trample in and haul us away for the next several eons…. Whatever happened to the Fourth and Fifth Amendments at U.S. airports? Or the First, for that matter?
This is one of those spit-take moments you keep running into while reading this book. Smith thinks people have a constitutional right to carry guns on airplanes? On zeppelins, even?!
Note that he mentions the Fourth Amendment—i.e., the right to privacy—implying that it’s a violation of his rights to be searched, even at an airport security checkpoint.
“Excuse me, sir,” the attendant said politely. “Is your ammunition in compliance with aeroline policies?”
Ed nodded. “Frangibles, at under nine hundred feet per second.”
Even a gun-worshipping fanatic like L. Neil Smith recognizes the problems that would ensue if people started blasting away in an airplane cabin. This is his answer to that. In his ancap utopia, you’re allowed to bring guns on planes, but only if they’re loaded with special ammunition that kills people but won’t damage the structural fabric of the vehicle.
Everyone’s weapon passes the safety check except Win’s pistol, which is an antique by the standards of this world:
The official took a hard look at my revolver. Naturally, she couldn’t find it in any of her references. “I’m terribly sorry, sir, would you mind if we took your, er, gun, until you reach your destination?”
Ed grinned smugly. “See the trouble that museum piece causes? Use the cartridges in the yellow box.”
…I reloaded cylinder, speed-loaders, and my derringer—which caused another round of dithering—with this new stuff: bright-yellow plastic bullets. They’d explode into harmless powder on aerocraft-tolerance materials.
Thank goodness. Now we can riddle other passengers with bullets without causing midair explosive decompression. Much better.
Note, however, that the attendant makes only a cursory effort to verify this. She asks them to take out their weapons, inspects them, and asks if the ammunition they’re loaded with is compliant with airline policy. No one gets patted down; no one has to go through a security scanner or send their luggage through an X-ray machine. It all seems to be voluntary.
It’s fair to assume that people who outright refuse to cooperate with inspection would be denied boarding. But if you wanted to bring a noncompliant weapon on board, could you just keep it under your coat and not produce it when asked, like teenagers smuggling outside snacks into a movie theater? Or what if you took regular ammunition, but in the box of a frangible brand? Would anyone check or be able to tell?
In the real world, air rage is a problem every airline has to grapple with: angry, disorderly passengers assaulting each other or the crew. It’s almost inherent to the industry. Expensive tickets, stressful travel plans, uncomfortable seats, jet lag, and alcohol create a pressure-cooker environment in which some people’s worst impulses explode. There’s no scenario in which this gets better if everyone is armed, even if Smith makes the token concession of ensuring they can’t accidentally shoot down the entire aircraft.
Much like the section on traffic regulation (or lack thereof), these are wildly dangerous policies that would cause mass death and devastation if they were ever implemented in the real world. But Smith waves these problems away through the power of authorial fiat, scripting a world where they (somehow) lead to greater safety and security, and then holding that world out as an appealing place where we should want to live. It’s a circular argument, using a fictional scenario as proof of itself.
Image credit: Edward Betts, released under CC BY-SA 3.0 license
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This has to got to be one of the stupidest fictional utopias that I’ve heard of. Smith makes it worse by giving more detail than many, so the stupidity is clearer. It keeps astonishing me how many people seem to think fiction proves something in regards to the real world.
… special ammunition that kills people but won’t damage the structural fabric of the vehicle.
The skin and helium bags of a zeppelin are tougher than a human body?
Smith describes them as enormous and luxurious—a mile long, like floating cruise ships with lavish suites, shopping malls and restaurants on board, with power supplied by fusion reactors which also generate helium for buoyancy.
Tell us this book is goofy satire without saying it’s goofy satire. I mean WTAF?! If a big honkin’ zeppelin is using the helium it generates for buoyancy, how long would it have to run its fusion plant to fill the balloon with enough helium to loft a whole shopping mall and its fusion energy plant? And how hot would the helium be when it comes out of the fusion reactor into the balloon? Did Smith even know how hot a fusion reactor would get? It’s the inside of the Sun!
“Ed bellied up, drew his Browning, pulled the clip and chamber round. Lucy’s horse-pistol materialized from some region of her person…”
Note the contrast between these two sentences: Smith very matter-of-factly describes a man pulling a concealed firearm; then describes a woman doing the same like it’s a stunning magic trick that even her colleagues have yet to figure out. Is Smith oh-so-tastefully trying to imply that the woman pulled the gun (a “horse pistol” no less) out of her nethers? This has the tone of a very young boy to whom women’s clothes, and bodies, are still a frightening mystery that can’t be talked about directly. I know that’s a lot to read into a single sentence, but it really leaped out at me — along with my long-held sense that lots of libertarians, especially the tech-bro types, really don’t know jaque merde about women, and show no sign of wanting to learn either. (*cough*Heinlein*cough*) Did Smith have woman issues? Mommy issues?
I would ask how the zeppelins work but it’s clear from the description it’s magic. The mechanics written by somebody who didn’t know how zeppelins work or what the constraints are. Same for his idea of using fusion power.
Why can’t they demand no weapons on a plane? It’s a private company, they can set whatever rules they want. Constitutional rights don’t go far on private property, particularly when they conflict with function. Some people in the NAC might avoid them because they prefer to keep their weapons but the airlines would be OK with that unless it was on a huge scale. Better to lose the occasional customer then lose a plane/zeppelin.
There are also many problems with Smith’s lethal only to human’s idea. Gun compatibility and having enough different types for all of the guns. Zeppelins had canvas skins covered in metallic paint, not hard surfaces. Interior surfaces of planes and zeppelins are as thin and light as possible. Not to mention windows. Anything sturdy enough to be a threat to a person would be a danger to these vehicles. And you don’t need to shoot a hole in the plane for it to be a problem, you can always shoot the crew.
Having ammunition that is dangerous to people but not to surrounding hardware would also encourage shoot outs. A lot of people would use it all the time because of reduced collateral damage. This he can likely write off as the special ammunition being more expensive.
Yeah, no anarchist would say what Mary Ross-Byrd says. It’s a bastardization of theory at best. Of course, most anarchists want a library economy instead of a money economy (though like all things there are exceptions).
Meanwhile, I shall LOL at Smith saying there is no airport security inspection in his world and then showing us an airport security inspection. Nothing in his cited amendments disallow security checks. So he understands the constitution as much as he understands anarchism. But I thought he didn’t like the constitution anyway. He can’t just cite it only when it is convenient for him.
Surely the sensible thing would be for passengers to voluntarily not bring any weapons aboard for the duration of the flight? He already thinks no one will be tempted to use them, so why would they need them to protect themselves? It’s not like there isn’t precedent for that even in the Old West, where there were certain places that guns were not allowed.
Off topic a bit, but I just want to make sure that you guys don’t perceive my complaints about Smith as just the narcissism of small differences. I do think there are meaningful differences between what I believe and what he did, but if I haven’t made a good enough case for that, please tell me so that I can do better. Thanks.
No worries, mate, I (at least) think you’ve described real ideological differences pretty clearly. And I don’t have to agree with either you or Smith to see your point (though I do think your version is a good deal more realistic, and much less stupidly hateful, than his).
If I recall correctly, in one of the later sequels, there are airlines that compete for customers based on their weapons policies. I wonder if one of them offers to replace their customers’ firearms for poisoned blowdarts so the customers still feel like they won’t be deprived of the ability to kill someone over the duration of the trip.