The Probability Broach, chapter 17

Win Bear and his friends are traveling on a high-tech airship. Smith makes a big deal out of the fact that this anarcho-capitalist society prefers this means of air travel, because zeppelines are more strictly peaceful than jet planes:

U.S. airlines are subsidized; every one of those big tin birds can be instantly converted to some military use, blueprints on handy file at your friendly neighborhood airport. Airships have no such potential; they’re vessels of peace, big, fat, and vulnerable to uniformed strangers with evil intentions. Ask Lucy, who wound up touring Europe by shanks’ mare.

But Smith’s own writing contradicts this. In the Prussian war (this timeline’s equivalent of World War I), the NAC did send a fleet of airships as an invasion force. Lucy’s airship was shot down in a dogfight with the Red Baron, as she mentioned, but that doesn’t change this fact. (Or was Lucy just a military ignoramus who went to battle in a patently unsuitable vehicle? Nothing in Smith’s depiction of her character implies this.)

Ed and Win circulate through the cabin, meeting some of their fellow passengers. To judge from this passage, news of the Hamiltonian world-conquest plot has spread, and people are gossiping about it. You’d think that would make the two of them heroes or celebrities, since they’re the ones who brought it to the populace’s attention. But if they’re the focus of any special interest, Smith never says so:

Naturally not all of them were human. Nuclear blackmail concerned every being on the continent—the entire planet, to judge from languages I heard around me. Some felt more threatened than others: Hamiltonians hold that animals have no place in society except as slaves and breakfast. A quarter of the Congress would be chimpanzees.

Bookmark it for later: You’ll want to remember this passage when Win arrives at the Continental Congress.

To pass the time, Ed and Win take some time to admire the scenery. Their zeppelin, the San Francisco Palace, is like a skygoing cruise ship. It’s huge enough to have casinos and shopping malls on board:

We circled around the gambling tables, plunking ourselves down where we could look outside. Half the Palace, more or less, is a tough, transparent skin stretched over titanium bones. These great windows ran from floor to ceiling, twelve feet. Scenery unrolled beneath us as we plowed northward: “Wyoming” now, a barren cattle-dotted plain in my world, a lushly irrigated breadbasket here.

I’ve previously discussed the paradoxical nature of these fictional libertarian utopias. They have no central government, yet somehow they have roads, bridges and other massive public works, none of which have ever existed in the real world without a government to organize and direct the construction.

In an earlier chapter of this book, I talked about this with reference to the North American Confederacy’s road system. It’s implausible that such a thing can exist in a world where private property rights are absolute and a single stubborn property owner who stands in the way can scuttle the entire project.

Air travel would also pose some issues. With no FAA requiring airlines to file flight plans, who’s to ensure planes don’t collide with each other in midair?

But this line about Wyoming being a “lushly irrigated breadbasket”, which L. Neil Smith treats as a tossed-off reference, is the biggest implausibility of all.

What river would you divert to irrigate Wyoming? The most likely candidate is the Green River, which is a tributary of the Colorado River. But who decided it would be Wyoming, rather than a different region, which gets that water? Who planned this project? Who paid to build the dams, the canals, and the other infrastructure necessary for irrigation? And after all that investment, what would they do if someone else wanted to divert the river in a different direction to water their crops instead?

Deciding how to allocate scarce natural resources is a serious challenge in the real world, so an anarchist world would have to wrestle with it as well. And since Smith set most of this book in Colorado, there was a perfect example at his fingertips.

The Colorado River is the major source of water for the southwestern United States. It’s used for irrigation for agriculture, for hydroelectricity generation, and as a source of drinking water for tens of millions of people.

With so much demand, there’s constant wrangling over how to allocate the river’s water among the seven states it flows through (Utah, Colorado, New Mexico, Wyoming, Arizona, California, and Nevada), plus Mexico. The overarching agreement is a 1922 compact that sets out how the water should be divided.

The problem is that this agreement was made during a historically wet period. Now, with climate change causing hotter temperatures and shrinking mountain snowpacks, the amount it allocates to each of these states adds up to more water than there is.

As you can imagine, this has led to years of tense negotiations that may soon escalate into legal battles. So far it’s been deadlocked, because no state wants to give up its ration of water for its neighbors’ sake. No governor wants to tell angry farmers they have to let their crops wither, or tell angry suburban voters they won’t be able to flush the toilet or brush their teeth.

The stalemate has led to a looming crisis: water levels at the river’s two major reservoirs, Lake Powell and Lake Mead, are dropping so low that the hydroelectric turbines in the Hoover and Glen Canyon Dams could soon stop working. That wouldn’t just be an inconvenience, but a huge economic hit and possibly a humanitarian disaster.

This is a hard enough problem in a world with a government. How could you possibly solve it in an anarchist society like the North American Confederacy?

Defenders of the NAC might say that they could reach a water-sharing agreement through private arbitration. The problem is that, even if an agreement was worked out, it would be purely voluntary; nothing would make it binding. Once all the dams and canals were in place, people could just cheat and take more water than they agreed to. Who would know?

Also, what about people who came along later and weren’t party to the original agreement? Why would they regard themselves as bound by a contract they had no hand in negotiating? The river is right there, after all. What would stop them from just digging a side channel and diverting it for their own use, and too bad for everyone who lives downstream?

In a society where selfishness is the rule and there’s no central authority to enforce conservation agreements, this kind of cheating is all but inevitable. People who live upstream would hoard the water for themselves, turning arid lands into gardens, building shimmering swimming pools and planting lush green lawns. The poor people who live downstream would be screwed. By the time the river reached them, it’d be no more than a silty trickle, if that.

And if you were one of those people and you trudged upstream to protest, you’d undoubtedly be met by a heavily armed force of private security guards. When they have the guns and the water too, how could you hope to fight them?

Smith’s vision of Wyoming becoming an agricultural “breadbasket” is a libertarian fantasy. It might happen in a more eco-conscious world, but in his world, the water wouldn’t be fairly distributed or go to the best overall uses. It would go to the richest, the most powerful, and/or those most willing to cheat or use violence to get what they want.

A more realistic outcome, for an ancap society, would be a cluster of mansions owned by the ultra-rich that take all the water for themselves, turning their walled estates into pleasure gardens, while the rest of the state becomes a parched and barren hellscape.

As I’ve often mentioned, libertarians follow a philosophy that can be called “cornucopianism“. It claims, implicitly or explicitly, that natural resources are infinite and so they don’t need to be rationed or conserved. Their ideology forces them to believe this, because the only alternative is an enforceable agreement for who gets what: in other words, a government, with all the laws, taxes and everything else they despise. But the real world isn’t nearly so obliging, and it doesn’t comply with their rosy vision of limitless resources.

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Other posts in this series:

• The Probability Broach