The Probability Broach: Somebody else’s problem

A statue of the "see no evil, hear no evil, speak no evil" monkeys

The Probability Broach, chapter 23

Having escaped pursuit in last week’s plot-obligatory car chase scene, Win and his friends have set up shop in Saint Charles Town, the North American Confederacy’s parallel version of Denver. That’s close enough to the villains’ hideout for scientist Deejay Thorens to set up her modified Probability Broach, which will let them jam the bad guys’ Broach and prevent them from bringing in their invasion force:

It was dark by the time Deejay sat back, turning knobs and watching the Telecom. Abruptly, the screen blossomed into an intricate moiré pattern. She began making frantic adjustments.

“I think I’ve got something here! Wait—yes, here it is! He’s just warming up again! Okay, I’ve got him. Hand me that meter, Lucy… we’ll know more in a few minutes.”

…She inserted a slender filament into the guts of the machine, plugged the other end into the Telecom, pushing buttons. I jumped three feet as the screen bulged with the proximity-distorted image of John Jay Madison.

…The picture backed off and swooped around the room in Saint Charles, panning 360 degrees to catch Madison’s associates: Skinner, others I recognized from the Continental Congress, finally resting on Bealls himself, up to his armpits in haywired paratronics.

Deejay explains that the interface is one-way; they can see the bad guys, but not vice versa. The villains are having an animated conversation, presumably about how to get their device working and reestablish contact with the evil government of Win’s world.

Deejay started turning knobs again, the viewpoint whirled dizzily. “Forward a bit,” she muttered. “A little more… there! Now I’ll punch up a short program, and—Good! Bealls is still calibrating. When he goes on full power, we’ll match him, foul up his field symmetry, maybe give him some feedback to play with. The best part is, he’ll never figure out what’s going on. He doesn’t know enough field theory yet.”

Clarissa crossed over to the ‘com, dragging me along. We watched Bealls’s distorted, sweaty face as he concentrated. “One thing I don’t understand, Deejay,” she said. “Do we have to watch him every minute, from now on, just to prevent him communicating with the other side?”

“That’s the cockroach in the hollandaise, all right!” Lucy muttered grimly. “Say, y’don’t suppose we could put a couple dozen slugs through this contraption of yours and…”

… “Sorry, boys. It’s a great idea, but we simply don’t have the power. On regular wall current, this Broach is good for about three-tenths-of-an-inch diameter. I can louse up Beall’s operations, but that’ll have to satisfy us until we think of something else.”

“Nuts!” Lucy complained. “Can’t get a fifty-caliber bullet through a thirty-caliber hole!”

I include this dialogue because it shows that the protagonists take for granted something they shouldn’t take for granted: namely, that they’re the only ones in the world who can or will do anything about Madison.

The problem, as Clarissa states, is that they can use Deejay’s technology to scramble Madison’s Probability Broach, but it requires active effort and proximity. Unless Madison gives up, which he’s not likely to do, they’ll have to stay near him and watch him 24/7. It’s a lifetime commitment to keep the North American Confederacy from being invaded.

But wait a minute. Why is it up to these people specifically to do that?

After all, Win and his friends made their case to all the delegates at the Continental Congress and, in theory, all the people of North America. Everyone who saw the films of nuclear war was appropriately shocked and horrified. Our protagonists should have a huge pool of volunteers eager to assist them.

Deejay could train others in the use of her Broach jammer, and they could set up a rotating schedule to watch Madison and block his device whenever he tried using it. This would be an anarchist-friendly solution, even, since it would thwart his evil plan without initiating force or violating anyone’s rights.

But that possibility is never discussed, nor even mentioned as an option. Nor does anyone else seek the protagonists out to offer assistance. It’s as if the entire population of the North American Confederacy has collectively decided that this isn’t their problem, and they’ll leave it up to this small self-selected handful of people to do something about it.

Obviously, L. Neil Smith wrote it this way for plot purposes. He wants his main characters to be the ones who save the day, so he doesn’t have strangers get involved.

However, whether he realized it or not, this is a perfect demonstration of how an anarcho-capitalist society would fail. When selfishness is the rule, there’s a strong incentive to ignore collective dangers in the hope that someone else will deal with them.

It’s the classic Prisoner’s Dilemma: why should I spend my time and resources, or risk my own safety, to solve a problem when all those other selfish jerks will just sit back and get a free ride off my efforts? And because everyone reasons this way, no one does anything.

This is a problem in our society, where commons problems like homelessness, climate change, pollution, groundwater depletion, species extinction due to overharvesting, and other such issues tend to go unsolved until a government steps in. In a society based purely on capitalism, with no authority that can compel people to cooperate, no one will want to be helpful at their own expense. As a result, big problems will fester and multiply unless a few heroic suckers are willing to sacrifice themselves. That’s exactly what we see here.

Bealls starts to power up his device, and Deejay tries to jam it—but recall she said that if her alignment is off by a tiny bit, the two Broaches will go “concentric”, becoming a portal linking two points in the same world. No prizes for guessing that Chekhov’s gun is about to go off:

“Here it comes!” Deejay warned. “I’ve got to be careful now. It tends to drift. Don’t jog my elbow!” She sat tensed at the controls, making minute adjustments. The screen blurred, then sprang into a mind-twisting kaleidoscopic display. “Shit!” Deejay startled all of us, ripping the fiber-optic tube out of the interface. “It’s gone concentric!”

A tiny silvery button popped out of the Broach and sprouted toward us on a slender supporting rod. When the second joint passed the interface, I recognized it. “Not a manuscript!” I whispered hoarsely. “Not even a note! That’s an antenna, an ordinary walkie-talkie antenna!” On impulse I snatched a pair of vise-grips from the bench and clamped them onto the chrome-plated shaft. “Let the son of a bitch figure that one out!”

The antenna stopped sliding into the room, backed up suddenly until the pliers banged against the Broach chassis, arched forward, and retreated again, trapped.

Win chortles at his prank (he starts recounting an obscene joke about a vice squad and a public bathroom), but he’s forgotten something extremely important. If a Probability Broach shuts down while something is partway through the portal, you get a big bang.

Luckily for him, Deejay is quicker on the uptake and realizes what’s about to happen:

“Out!” Deejay screamed in horror, pointing at her instruments. “Get out of here before he shuts the field down!” She scrambled for the exit, dragging Lucy by the gunbelt. I shoved Clarissa through the door behind Ed, just making it to the sidewalk outside, when—

The world erupted in fire and thunder. Windows bulged and splashed, twin balls of fire either side of the door… My hair and eyebrows crisped and singed. The world was hell, a raging, incoherent furious roar.

Yet, even above the explosion we’d escaped, I could hear a distant rumble, see the smoke and flame of a vastly greater cataclysm, a mile across the river in Saint Charles.

And so, the day is saved—not by the heroes’ clever plan or bold action, but by Win’s blundering combined with another sci-fi deus ex machina.

Given how Smith hails firearms as the solution to every problem, you’d think he’d want to dispatch the villains in an exciting, climactic shootout. At the very least, there should have been a final face-to-face confrontation between Win and his archnemesis. But none of that happens. There’s no heroic gunplay, no Dirty Harry monologues, no James Bond-style action-hero quips.

Instead, the bad guys blow themselves up: offscreen, by accident, and without even the satisfaction of realizing what’s about to happen to them. It’s a disappointingly anticlimactic ending.

There’s one more short chapter of TPB, in which Smith tries to wrap up loose ends and summarize the moral of the story. Next week, I’ll deconstruct that chapter and offer some thoughts on the book as a whole.

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New on OnlySky: The energy crisis is coming

I have a new column this week on OnlySky. It’s about the 1970s-style oil crisis we may be about to suffer because of the Trump administration’s ruinous stupidity.

The war that America started but can’t finish is spiraling into disaster. Our military in the Persian Gulf proved to be a paper tiger, and our promises to protect our allies were hollow. Iran already controls the Strait of Hormuz, and its allies the Houthis have seized the Bab el-Mandeb Strait. These are the twin chokepoints for Middle East oil. Now that they have control over both, Iran and its proxies can cut off shipments at will and inflict massive pain and suffering on any country that’s dependent on fossil fuel to run its economy.

It didn’t have to be this way. We should never have gotten ourselves embroiled in this pointless and unwinnable war. On a larger scale, we could have electrified the global economy years ago, switching to clean, dependable green power and severing our dependence on Mideast autocrats. But we didn’t do any of that, and we’re all going to pay the price: shortages, high inflation, and potentially the end of the petrodollar agreement that made America the world’s superpower.

Read the excerpt below, then click through to see the full piece. This column is members-only, so consider signing up! Members of OnlySky also get special benefits, like a subscriber newsletter:

When Iran closed the Strait of Hormuz in retaliation for America’s war, Saudi Arabia had a fallback option. They could transport their oil through a pipeline running east-to-west across the country, to the Red Sea port of Yanbu. But shipping the oil onward from Yanbu to points south and east requires passing through Bab el-Mandeb… which the Houthis now control.

This isn’t a complete blockade, because oil can also travel north through the Red Sea, going through the Suez Canal. That means Mideast oil could still reach Europe, though countries in Asia are in a much worse position. On the other hand, Iran and its proxies can also attack the Saudi east-to-west pipeline… which they did this week, shutting it down for an indefinite time.

With Iran and its allies controlling both straits and bombing oil infrastructure at will, they’ve pinched the arteries of the world economy. This is a disaster for America and its allies. It’s our worst strategic defeat in decades, possibly ever.

Continue reading on OnlySky…

The Probability Broach: The inevitable car chase scene

A wrecked car engulfed in flames

The Probability Broach, chapter 23

We’ve gotten almost to the end of TPB without a car chase. Especially since this is a society with no speed limits or safety regulations, that’s a heck of a missed opportunity to show some good old high-speed carnage. Fortunately for us, L. Neil Smith is about to rectify that.

Win and his friends are headed toward Denver—”Saint Charles Town” in the North American Confederacy’s parallel geography—to get sufficiently close to Madison’s hideout that they can use their Probability Broach to jam his, thereby preventing him from bringing armies or nukes through the dimensional portal.

They’re taking Ed’s hovercraft, riding along “Greenway 2000”, one of the North American Confederacy’s superhighways. Smith describes it as resembling a rounded W—two parallel troughs, one for each direction, covered with “mutated crabgrass” and packed with machinery underneath the ground to supply “guidance, information and entertainment”, as well as induction power for vehicles that propel themselves that way.

They’re flying down the Greenway at 355 miles per hour, with Ed’s super-advanced vehicle navigating autonomously for the most part, when they notice another car approaching rapidly:

A long slender shape flew beside us, paralleling the right-hand road crest, perhaps twenty-five feet off the ground, and dropping to our speed.

“I was an idiot!” Ed growled. “So busy watching Madison it never occurred to me he’d be watching us! Hold on!”

The aircraft pulled ahead, suddenly veered to the left, plopping clumsily into the roadbed. It wobbled a little on its rapidly inflating skirt and rode the camber down ahead of us.

…A rear section of the intruder gaped open—the turbulence inside must have been unbearable—the ugly nozzle of a weapon pointed at us. Ed slammed on the brakes, fishtailed wildly, while the barrel ahead spouted flames. Our windshield starred; a deafening whistle shrieked through the car.

Obviously, the bad guys subscribe to the Imperial Stormtrooper school of marksmanship, so none of our heroes are hit. But the other car is right in front of them, effectively brake-checking them and forcing them to slow down, giving them no chance to outspeed their adversary and get away.

“Any way we can shoot back?” I yelled.

Ed jerked the wheel through evasive maneuvers, skidding up the right bank, then slowly back to the center. “No! If he keeps slowing, we won’t have enough momentum to climb the bank. He’ll have us trapped!”

Still no government help!

In these final chapters of the book, it’s more and more noticeable that Win and his friends are completely on their own. Couldn’t the Continental Congress have given them something? A small force of volunteers? An honor guard to escort them? Couldn’t the delegates have passed the hat to pay for some armed bodyguards, even?

But no. For all their selflessness in warning the NAC of its collective danger, the good guys got nothing whatsoever in return.

Then again, Win and his friends seem as if they’re equally to blame. An earlier passage alluded to “road company traffic cops”, so such things must exist here in some form. Despite this, they don’t attempt to call 911, or whatever the local equivalent is, when they’re being shot at.

Is it because the idea just didn’t occur to them in the heat of the moment, despite characters like Ed and Lucy being NAC natives? Or—a darker interpretation—is it because these private cops won’t intervene in 300-mile-per-hour shootouts, but only turn up afterwards to clean the blood off the highway and ticket the survivors?

I’ve said it before, but for a book that was supposedly written to make the case for anarcho-capitalism, TPB doesn’t paint a very appealing picture of this society. Smith tells us that the NAC is a thoroughly peaceful and civilized place, but then he turns around and writes a scene like this, depicting the highways as Mad Max death courses where another driver might open fire on you in a fit of road rage, and if that happens, there’s not even anyone you can call to rescue you.

Worse, the protagonists are all but defenseless against this attack. Given that everyone in the NAC is so gung-ho about weapons, you might think Ed’s car would have bulletproof windows or built-in guns a la the Batmobile, but it doesn’t.

Instead, Win tells Ed to open the rear hatch and then try to pass the other car so he can get a clear shot at them. Ed comes up with a clever way to do it:

Engines bellowed above the hurricane inside the car. We surged forward, upward, yanking my ears down to my belly-button, and left the ground with a lurch. The other car passed beneath us, then we were down with a bump… I climbed off the floor and rested my gun on the seat back, sighting as the hatch flopped wildly in the wind.

…I laid the glowing dot on a shadowy figure at the controls, pumping the trigger as fast as I could. Slapslapslap! My own side window disintegrated, glass and chrome spouted from the other car, smoke began to pour out. They slowed, spilling dense black clouds, swerving desperately for an off-ramp.

They didn’t make it. The car glanced off a concrete pillar and came apart, smearing itself down the right embankment. Burning shards and a wall of smoke dashed across the road.

It’s the classic Hollywood car-chase scene, through and through. All it’s missing is the single burning wheel rolling out of the wreckage.

It’s not clear who the driver of the other car was—presumably it was another of the Hamiltonians’ disposable henchmen—but what’s especially confusing about this scene is how Madison found out that Ed, Win and the gang were on his tail. He certainly doesn’t have a spy among the protagonists.

Also, this scene implies that Madison was aware they were coming for him, but that isn’t true. As subsequent events in this chapter will show, he has no idea what the good guys are planning and ends up being caught totally off guard. I’m sure Smith didn’t intend this reading, but it’s plausible that Madison actually had nothing to do with this encounter, and this is just a normal Tuesday morning commute in the NAC!

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The Probability Broach: The inevitable deus ex machina

Set design from the play "Andromède" - the gods show up to decree an ending

The Probability Broach, chapter 23

Win and his friends are sitting on the curb, dejected and humiliated, outside the children’s birthday party they just violently crashed. Win narrates that they later “settled out of court” to compensate the kids for the trauma of having guns pointed in their faces.

“Wait!” Something else clicked in my head. “I’ve just had another thought.”

“Did it hurt?” Lucy and Ed asked simultaneously. Clarissa grimaced and put a hand delicately over her mouth. I like loyalty in a woman.

“Okay, wise-asses. Burgess was regional head of the most important federal agency in the country. There were a couple thousand flunkies available to get their hands dirty for him on field operations. So why his personal involvement in this whole thing? Why did he return to the Meiss murder scene? Why did he follow me to Fort Collins? Why did he kill everyone who interfered with him: Meiss, MacDonald, all the attempts on me?”

Lucy nodded impatiently.

“He was up to something on his own,” I finished. “Something he didn’t want others—especially his bosses—horning in on.”

Win concludes that Burgess was most likely keeping the Probability Broach a secret even from the U.S. government, biding his time while he figured out how to exploit it for maximum personal gain. But since Win killed Burgess in a duel at the Continental Congress, Madison and his allies will have to reestablish contact with the other side before they can usher in their invasion force.

This is good news, because it means the North American Confederacy isn’t going to be nuked the day after tomorrow. However, they still have to figure out where the bad guys are hiding out.

Since it’s not in Fort Collins, Win suspects the next logical spot is in Denver, the regional headquarters of SecPol in his world. He calls up Deejay and Oolorie, the scientists who first built the Probability Broach. In an earlier chapter, they mentioned that they were developing a device that could detect when and where someone else is using one. He’s hoping they’ll have it ready by now, and Deejay obliges him:

“Win, I was just about to try your number again. I wanted—”

“We’ve been otherwise occupied,” I grimaced, outlining our recent humiliation and such conclusions as we’d reached. “You mentioned building a device to detect someone else’s use of a Broach?”

“But that’s why I’ve—We finished it this morning. A simple matter of harmonics. We could have saved you all the trouble you got into!”

Apparently, Deejay didn’t try doing anything with this device until Win called her up to ask about it. It’s like a video game, where NPCs with vital quest information just stand around like inanimate objects until the player approaches them and opens a dialog box.

(Side note: Do Deejay and Oolorie feel any sense of guilt, or at least responsibility, for inventing the device that’s the reason their civilization is threatened with nuclear annihilation? Do they have any sentiments similar to Oppenheimer’s famous quote? That’s a moral question that TPB never addresses.)

Deejay asks another pertinent question: once they find the bad guys, what are they going to do? Win says they’ll kick the door down and come in guns blazing, the way he was planning to do with the kids’ birthday party. But Oolorie the cetacean scientist has qualms (much like Lucy, who goes back and forth several times on this—first saying it’s immoral to break into someone else’s house no matter what, then assisting Win in doing so, then saying it’s immoral again):

“Have you not also reasoned that you will be violating their rights, as fully as they plan to violate ours? Would you—”

“Fuck all this philosophy jazz!” I shouted. “This is a matter of survival!”

“And importing unprincipled behavior is an aid to that end? My poor ignorant—”

“I agree, Win,” Deejay interrupted diplomatically. “It’s not only suicidal, but morally wrong, as well.”

“And unnecessary,” the principled porpoise added. “Nothing encourages ethical practices so well as a practical alternative to evil.”

Win asks what they mean by that, and Deejay says they’ve discovered an “interference factor”—a way for one Probability Broach device to scramble another one’s signal. If they can get close enough to where Madison and his henchmen are setting up, they can jam the bad guys’ Broach and prevent them from contacting anyone in Win’s world.

Now the heroes have a plan. But Deejay warns that they’ll have to get close, because it requires great precision. If their alignment is a tiny bit off, the two interfering Broach devices will go “concentric”—i.e., whatever goes into one comes out the other, even if they’re in the same universe. (Think this will be relevant later?)

I looked at Ed, then back at the Telecom. “How difficult would it be to set your machinery up somewhere else?”

She considered. “Providing we had sufficient power? All we’d need is a pinhole, and detection hardly requires—”

“Great! We’re all going on a little trip!”

In the penultimate chapter of this book, the expected deus ex machina has finally made its appearance.

As we’ve discussed, an anarchist world has no good way to counter either an invading army, or a homegrown mafia that tries to seize power over others. Because it doesn’t have a monopoly on force in its own territory, an anarchy can’t effectively defend itself against organized threats.

Despite being a right-wing anarchist himself, Smith seems to agree with this criticism. When his archvillain John Jay Madison made exactly this point, no one was able to think of a convincing response or come up with a plan to counter him. It’s remarkable that a utopian political novel intended to sing the praises of anarcho-capitalism instead gives a clear illustration of how it’s fatally flawed.

To rescue his political philosophy, Smith introduces a last-minute deus ex machina. By using the “interference factor” discovered by the scientists, the protagonists can foil Madison’s plot without having to come up with a way the NAC could defeat an armed invasion. But that doesn’t do anything to establish the plausibility of this philosophy in the real world, which doesn’t have such conveniently magical technology.

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New on OnlySky: Our shady future

I have a new column this week on OnlySky. It’s about the rapid rollout of solar power as a rare bright spot in a world feeling the consequences of climate change.

Renewables are being deployed at a massive and accelerating scale, and they’re poised to become the planet’s dominant energy source in the very near future. But if they’re not going to compete with human beings for living space or farmland, we’re going to need lots of places to put them. This column reviews some of the newer and more creative ideas where they can be placed with relatively little impact – from big-box store rooftops, to parking lot canopies, to capped landfills and brownfields, to solar panels designed to cover canals or float on the surface of reservoirs.

Read the excerpt below, then click through to see the full piece. This column is members-only, so consider signing up! Members of OnlySky also get special benefits, like a subscriber newsletter:

In the summer of 2026, Europe broiled in a record-shattering heatwave that brought triple-digit temperatures to a swath of countries from France and the United Kingdom to Germany and Poland. At least ten thousand people have died from the heat, and devastating wildfires raged across wine country in France and Spain. Parching drought across the continent has sent river levels plunging to record lows, revealing shipwrecks submerged for decades.

In hospitals, the heat is so intense that nurses are passing out and scanning machines are failing—especially since many European hospitals don’t have air conditioning, never having needed it before.

Meanwhile, across the Atlantic, wildfires raging in Canada shrouded major cities in a haze of smoke. Parts of Texas were slammed by the second 1,000-year storm in two years, causing massive floods. The American West is, yet again, having an awful fire season.

But as vast as the scale of the crisis is, we shouldn’t lose hope, because humanity is finally rising to the challenge. Renewables are being deployed at a breakneck pace, and still accelerating.

Continue reading on OnlySky…

The Probability Broach: You and what army?

A black-and-white photo of soldiers marching on parade

The Probability Broach, chapter 22

John Jay Madison and his gang of Hamiltonians have gotten away and are preparing to launch their invasion of the North American Confederacy. It’s up to Win Bear and his friends (and only them, apparently—more on this in a minute) to find and stop them before that happens.

While they’re debating what to do, Win has a lightbulb moment. The Probability Broach links the same geographic spot in both universes, so he reasons that any invasion is going to originate from U.S. government territory in his world. If they find the corresponding spot in this world, that should be where Madison is hiding out.

Fortunately, Win has a map of Colorado from his world that he brought with him:

The map was grimy and blood-stained. I unfolded it gingerly. In these late, great days of the Republic, you never know when you might want to turn Uncle Irving in for operating an unregistered Xerox machine. One advantage to a police state is that it’s easy to find the police: all maps printed in the Land of the Formerly Free are required to indicate local SecPol offices with a brand new little map symbol, a mailed fist grasping an unsheathed dagger. Yech.

But don’t forget, the problem with Win’s world is that bad guys have too many rights!

Consulting the map, Win finds a SecPol outpost smack in the middle of (his) town. He and his friends do some figuring to determine where in this world the corresponding spot would be, then prepare to stage a commando raid. They arm themselves with their biggest guns:

I strapped on my Smith & Wesson, tucked the derringer into what passes for hip pockets, and added the Browning for good measure. I thought about it for a while and added the Bowie knife to my belt.

Lucy had arrived with the mate to her Gabbet Fairfax. One was bad enough, two were even worse. The huge pistols were wearing her instead of the other way around.

…Ed had a spare .375 as I expected, but that wasn’t what caught my eye. He was holding the first two-handed piece I’d seen here, a very, very large-bore Coltomatic, firing clusters of evil-looking fléchettes that could fill an alley full of whistling death at a touch of the trigger.

So that whole Continental Congress really was for nothing, huh?

Since the book never points this out, I will: Despite Win presenting evidence of the danger to the entire population of North America, no one else reaches out to them or offers them any help with this mission. No one volunteers to join the fight, to supply them with backup or extra firepower. No one else even launches their own independent effort to stop Madison. Even with the North American Confederacy facing nuclear annihilation, the entire populace seems perfectly content to leave it up to these four random people to do something about it.

Armed to the teeth, they head out in Ed’s hovercraft to where their calculations say Madison should be hiding out:

“Let’s see that map, Lucy.” Ed looked back over his shoulder. He was running full fans, and I kept watching for road company traffic cops. Hate to get busted doing 175 in a 90 zone.

I quote this paragraph only because Smith’s offhand mention of “road company traffic cops” is the only time in the book that anything like this is mentioned or alluded to.

In an anarcho-capitalist society like this one, there should be private fiefdoms on every block. It should be like the “franchise nations” from Snow Crash, where every business and gated community has its own laws and its own armed security to enforce them. This shouldn’t be a land of untrammeled freedom, but a patchwork of petty kingdoms where the laws change multiple times over the course of a single trip across a city.

They arrive at their destination, a pleasant suburban house with no sign of nefarious intent. But our heroes are too crafty to be fooled by its innocuous appearance:

Ed motioned silently: Lucy should circle around back. He went for a side entrance, Clarissa and I took the front. Halfway up the curving walk, we dropped into a canter. I gained the doorstep, flattened beside the door, and tried the knob. Open.

…We ducked down a short corridor and to the left, weaving, jumping at shadows. I heard Lucy shout something, Ed crashing the side door, just as we exploded into the living room.

“ALL RIGHT!” I screamed. “FREEZE, YOU—”

“Happy Birthday to you, Happy Birthday to you. Happy Birthday, dear…”

“—bastards?” I finished lamely, both pistols pointed from a crouch, Clarissa leveling hers over my shoulder. Ed stared grimly down the barrel of his fléchette gun. Lucy looked like Clint Eastwood in drag. We had ’em covered, dead to rights: about sixteen five-year-olds and their mothers, sitting around a table, birthday cake in the center blazing idiotically away.

This scene is supposed to be funny—traumatizing children with guns for comedy’s sake!—but realistically, it should have ended in a bloodbath.

The very first thing that Smith showed us about the North American Confederacy is that everyone is armed and ready to defend themselves at a split-second’s notice. You have to be, after all, since there’s no state to protect you from wrongdoers.

Even if everyone in the NAC has Lucy’s almost superhuman ability to exercise restraint in a crowded public place, this isn’t one of those. As far as any of these people know, they’re under attack in their own home by armed invaders.

When a burly stranger kicks down your front door while screaming and waving a gun, that’s not the time to stay calm and ask clarifying questions to make sure it wasn’t a well-intentioned mistake. That’s the time to dive behind the table, whip out your gun and start blasting. So why don’t they?

Smith alludes to this possibility by having Win narrate, “I’m grateful we weren’t a year or two later. Around age six or seven, little Confederates begin acquiring handguns the same way I got my first bike”—but none of that explains why the adults at the party didn’t open fire.

This is a consistent problem throughout the book, as in the earlier scene where Win plows through a crowd of people like a football linebacker—somehow without getting shot or stabbed. (Or even challenged to a duel!)

Smith says that guns keep the peace in this world, but he never shows that happening in the only way it could possibly happen. For all that he claimed to love weapons, as an anarcho-capitalist libertarian, he flinched from following through with his own premise.

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The Probability Broach: Checks, unbalanced

A set of balance scales

The Probability Broach, chapter 22

This chapter opens with another of Smith’s fake quotes, but this one is especially eyebrow-raising because it valorizes a real-life murderer:

Despite Hamiltonian claims to the contrary, the Federalist Constitution contained no “checks and balances.” The Executive, the Congress, the Supreme Court, all were tentacles of the same octopus. All received sustenance at the same nipple. All had a single interest in common, power. Look for checks and balances in the marketplace: anyone who hangs out his shingle as a judge and cannot render adjudication satisfactory enough to be paid by those he judges will seek another profession or starve. And that, indeed, is justice.

—Professor Leon Czolgosz
Federalist Fallacies

We’ve been over this before, but to reiterate the gigantic and obvious problem with this scheme: if judges are paid by the people who bring them their cases, they’ll always rule for the person who can afford to pay more. I can’t tell if Smith is so naive that this never occurred to him, or if he knew it was a possibility but ignored it for ideological reasons.

This means that, in the North American Confederacy, the rich can commit crimes with impunity. They can harass, torment and abuse others as much as they like, and if they get sued, they can just write a check to their hired judge to make all the consequences vanish. As the saying goes, if the only penalty for a crime is a fine, then that law only exists for the poor who can’t afford it.

This is evidence for my point that power is like water. In the last chapter, Smith bragged that he’d invented a society where, since there was no government, nobody would have power over others. But he’s wrong. He didn’t find a way to get rid of coercive power; he just changed the form it takes, and ensured there are even fewer checks or balances on how the rich can exercise it.

Ironically, America’s founders weren’t so naive. They thought more deeply than Smith about ways their system could be abused or subverted, and they knew full well that government officials would seek to expand their own power at the expense of others.

That’s what motivated the famous line from the Federalist Papers about how “ambition must be made to counteract ambition”. In other words, by dividing the powers of government among different branches, each one’s natural desire for power would ensure that they’d hold each other in check. No one would want to let the others become more powerful at their own expense.

You could argue that it didn’t work. As we’ve seen in recent decades, the presidency has become steadily more powerful at the expense of the legislature, to the extent that conservatives are arguing that the president is functionally a king with limitless power to break or ignore laws. But the founders were at least cognizant of the problem, which is more than you can say for libertarian tracts like this book.

Getting back to the plot, Win successfully rescued his friends Ed and Clarissa from being frozen to death, but that’s all he’s accomplished. Madison has escaped and destroyed all the evidence of where he went:

Every scrap of paper in the building lay in the wastebaskets, reduced to a fine white ash. They’d been through this before, in a dozen countries, and were good at it. Downstairs was a different story: tangled broken wiring, scarred woodwork, splintered crates as if they’d made the decision to move at leisure, then gotten hurried halfway through.

“They’re rabbitted, all right.” I told Ed as we surveyed Bealls’s empty workroom. “As soon as he’s set up again, they’ll have their weapons and manpower.”

“The question is, where’s he setting up?”

“Lucy, even if we knew,” I answered bitterly, “how could we do anything about it? You people and your goddamned principles!”

Are we perhaps not reading the same book? Because I seem to recall that, just a few pages earlier, Win, Lucy and their hired guards kicked down Madison’s front door and raided his house to rescue their friends.

Why was that an allowable act, according to whatever passes for law in the NAC? And whatever reason they have to justify it, why couldn’t they do the same thing again if they can find Madison’s new hideout?

She kicked at an empty carton. “I dunno. Guess I’d rather have my principles shot from under me than finish ’em off myself. We do have two real live witnesses now. We could make kidnapping charges stick this time.”

Clarissa shook her head, “I’m afraid not, Lucy. We never saw any of the real leaders, just Mikva and his two henchmen. Madison was in Gallatinopolis at the time, with several thousand reputable witnesses.”

Swell, I thought. They could set up, pull whole armies through, and no one could stop them until they started initiating force-and by then…

It seems like L. Neil Smith is coming up with increasingly contrived excuses not to invoke his own legal system. Even if Ed and Clarissa never saw Madison himself, only his henchmen… they were being held captive in his house. How is that not a relevant fact to bring to a judicial proceeding?

We already know that they have no notion of fingerprints or, apparently, forensic evidence in general. Is the North American Confederacy’s justice system so spectacularly useless that you can’t accuse anyone of a crime unless you personally witnessed them committing it, in broad daylight with their face uncovered, while cackling villainously and monologuing about how they were knowingly breaking the law by doing so?

Far be it from me to fix Smith’s plot holes for him, but a better solution would be the one we already saw at the Continental Congress: any judicial proceeding takes time, and that’s the one thing the protagonists don’t have. Even if he’s caught dead to rights, Madison could use procedural technicalities to stall until he gets his Probability Broach working and brings his armies through, at which point it’d be too late.

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New on OnlySky: Abolish the Senate

I have a new column this week on OnlySky. It’s about why we should get rid of the Senate once and for all.

Despite their willingness to fight and die for democracy, despite everything they sacrificed for democracy, the American founders didn’t actually trust democracy. They designed America’s constitutional system to create multiple barriers to the will of the common people. The Senate was one of those.

For a long time, it’s hampered the functioning of the legislative branch, preventing the party that wins elections from being able to govern as it wishes. In our time, it’s become worse than ever, constantly creating artificial crises and paralyzing government shutdowns, and blocking legislation that’s supported by majorities of the public. It’s time to scrap the Senate. But is there any realistic chance of that happening?

Read the excerpt below, then click through to see the full piece. This column is free to read, but members of OnlySky also get special benefits, like a subscriber newsletter:

The biggest problem with the Senate is its electoral malapportionment. Each state gets two votes, regardless of size. The most populous American state, California, has almost 40 million residents; and those 40 million people get the same two votes in the Senate as the least populous state, Wyoming, which has a bit over half a million people. In other words, every resident of Wyoming enjoys almost eighty times as much representation at the federal level as every Californian.

To highlight the absurdity, consider that Los Angeles County alone has more inhabitants than forty U.S. states. But Angelenos still get just two votes in the Senate, and they don’t even have those two votes all to themselves; they have to share them with the rest of California.

In theory, the 26 smallest states—which together account for less than 18% of the U.S. population—could control a majority of votes in the Senate. They could veto legislation supported by the other 82% of Americans.

Continue reading on OnlySky…

The Probability Broach: Breaking and entering

A wooden door with a rusted, antique lock

The Probability Broach, chapter 21

In the last chapter, Win Bear and his friends failed to stop John Jay Madison at the Continental Congress, or even persuade the rest of the North American Confederacy to help in any way. However, they got a clue to the location of their kidnapped friends Ed and Clarissa: a turncoat henchman said they were being held at Hamilton House, Madison’s residence.

Win and Lucy take a “cannonball” transport to get there in record time, and they call Captain Forsyth and the rest of his private bodyguards to meet them there for backup:

A hovercraft on full fans skated up to the curb. Pistols drawn, Forsyth and two of his men jumped out.

I straightened. “Let’s hit the door!” I charged up the steps, bounded onto the porch, drawing my forty-one, and blasted the lock panel with three quick shots. The door creaked open. No one was there to greet us.

“Search the place!” I ran wildly through deserted corridors, nearly shooting several man-size pieces of covered furniture. The entire house seemed empty.

Wait. Why do they suddenly have the right to break into Madison’s house?

The North American Confederacy is supposed to treat private property as inviolable; it’s pretty much the only right they recognize. In an earlier chapter, the protagonists had an intense debate about whether to trespass on Madison’s property to uncover evidence of his crimes. Ed and Win eventually burglarized the place in the middle of the night, sweating bullets the whole time, and only narrowly escaped.

But now Win busts down his front door with no qualms. Why? Because one of Madison’s goons told him he could?

You could write this off as Win being so angry, exhausted and desperate that he no longer cares for such niceties. That would be a perfectly adequate explanation, except that Captain Forsyth and the rest of his squad willingly assist Win in breaking in, with no idea what they’re walking into.

We were told that security companies don’t fight each other in the North American Confederacy; they compel their clients to work together to resolve disputes peacefully. However, that doesn’t seem to be true either. What if Madison had left his hired guards behind? How did they know they weren’t about to kick off a security-company war?

The real explanation is that L. Neil Smith, like Ayn Rand, believes in protagonist-centered morality. Whatever he says about freedom and non-initiation of force, his actual core principle is: “The good guys are allowed to break whatever rules they want because they’re the good guys, and you know they’re the good guys because they say they are.”

This hypocrisy further underlines the point that an anarcho-capitalist society couldn’t work the way Smith insists it would. If his protagonists actually followed its rules, and didn’t have the all-purpose morality exemption their author grants them, the villains would have succeeded in their world-conquest plot.

But regardless, their search comes to naught. The house is deserted; all the machinery Madison was building to create his own Probability Broach has been shipped out. The bad guys have made a clean getaway. There’s no sign of Ed or Clarissa.

They’re about to give their friends up for dead, when Win has a brainstorm. He kicks down the freezer door—the same one where they found the frozen body of Richard Nixon—and Ed and Clarissa tumble out. They’re hypothermic, covered in frost, but alive. Strangely, they’re also wrapped in aluminum foil like mummies.

After Win and Lucy make some hot coffee to help their friends warm up (this is technically stealing Madison’s property, but no one seems to care at this point), Clarissa explains. The foil shielded them, somewhat, from the high-tech “paratronic” freezing rays:

“Paratronic radiation,” Clarissa explained, “the kind used to keep patients in stasis. It damps molecular motion, but metallic objects interfere, slow the process down. It doesn’t matter with something like frozen food, but with patients you have to be very careful. That’s why you didn’t get stasis, Win. Too many bullet fragments. Anyway, we peeled foil off a lot of food in there, and wrapped it around ourselves.” She’d finished her hot drink. Lucy shoved another into her hand. “It wouldn’t have bought us much time, but—”

“Enough to save our lives!” said Ed.

If this freezer is so dangerous to human life, shouldn’t it have an emergency release to open the door from inside?

In the real world, Congress passed a law called the Refrigerator Safety Act for just this reason, to force a redesign of refrigerator doors in response to children getting trapped and suffocating. Of course, an anarcho-capitalist society like the NAC has no one whose job it is to care about dangers like that, so that tracks.

Win and Lucy fill their friends in on how they utterly failed to accomplish anything at the Continental Congress. As Lucy notes, the bad guys didn’t really need to go anywhere: “They had us stopped in Gallatinopolis, and they knew it.”

The only bright spot is that the Hamiltonians (for some reason) neither killed Ed and Clarissa immediately, nor took them away to continue using them as hostages. They’re grateful for the rescue, all the more so because it turns out—at this late date—that Clarissa is in love with Win:

“There we were,” mused Ed, “freezing our asses off in there, and all she could do was blubber about never seeing you again, and how worried you must be. That’s why she thought of the aluminum foil—said it’d give you a little more time to rescue us! Never stopped hoping, right up to when we heard you blow the hinges off the front door. About half an hour after I’d given us up for dead.”

There isn’t really any justification for this, other than that the book is almost over and Smith wanted his hero to get a love interest. Until now, Clarissa has treated Win like a barbarian; she was furious at him when he tortured a prisoner to make him talk. But by authorial fiat, she now reverses her opinion and falls in love with Win, without even attempting to justify what redeeming characteristics she thinks he has.

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The Probability Broach: Cannonball run

An artillery barrel pointed at the viewer

The Probability Broach, chapter 21

Chapter 21 of TPB begins with another fictional quote, this one attributed to “Rosalie Wilderlane” (a reference to real-life libertarian author Rose Wilder Lane, who was also the daughter of Laura Ingalls Wilder):

The source of every human misery, the cause of every war, the great issue before every society for six thousand years has been the question, “Who shall have the power?” The significance of the Whiskey Rebellion is that, for the first time in history, individuals created a civilization in which the answer to that question is “Nobody!”

Impossible.

As I’ve observed before, power is like water. It can’t be squeezed out of existence; it will always take the shape of the society it exists within. In a democracy, power rests with the will of the majority. In capitalism, it’s held by those who have the most money, which they can convert into material resources or into influence to compel others to do their bidding.

Smith clearly doesn’t believe that no one in this society has power. He’s shown massive skyscrapers, road networks, irrigation projects, and other monumental works. The creation of these logically requires some person or group of people with the ability to control and coordinate the labor of thousands or millions of others. That’s what power is. If it’s literally impossible to have war or oppression because no one can exert any control over anyone else, it should also be impossible to build roads, bridges and skyscrapers.

In the last chapter, Madison’s turncoat ally Freeman K. Bertram gave Ed and Lucy a clue to where their friends Ed and Clarissa are being held hostage. For some reason (because the main characters do everything), rather than calling local security to handle it, they’re going themselves. They’re taking the fastest means of transport available in the North American Confederacy, a vehicle used only in emergencies:

Attendants hustled us out of the hoverbuggy toward a stubby metal cylinder the size of a Volkswagen bus. The nose was sandblasted and missing paint, the stern scorched and blistered. Between them was an oval hatch, and the legend Columbiad. Then we were through the six-inch hull, being belted into deeply cushioned seats. The machine’s interior was almost featureless: two couches in tandem facing a Telecom screen, no windows, and, when the door slammed shut like a coffin lid, dimly lit by a few instrument pilots.

Smith tells us that this method of transit is called a “cannonball”. It consists of a tunnel with the air pumped out to create a vacuum, and liquid hydrogen and oxygen poured in behind the vessel and ignited to accelerate it to immense speed. Win quips, “Now I knew what a rifle shell feels like.”

As the vehicle began moving ponderously, a man appeared in the screen, head and shoulders, wearing coveralls like the attendants who’d sealed us in. “Columbiad, Traffic Control. We’ll have you chambered in a moment. Please don’t touch any controls, keep your arms and legs within the couches. You’ll be pulling close to six G’s. Questions?”

The vehicle slanted downward ominously, rocking from side to side. “Where will this frammis dump us out?” Lucy asked unperturbed.

The controller glanced down at his keyboard. “Right now you’re simply routed for LAP. You have a specific destination in mind?”

“How about eighty-nine Tucker Circle?” I asked sarcastically, trying to ignore my heartbeat. He punched his console, paused, punched some more, then looked up.

“We’ll shunt you into the underground system, to the south-east corner of that block. Be prepared to exit quickly—I could only get a thirteen-second window between two scheduled trains. Your restraints will release when you drop below five mph, door-releases to your left will be illuminated. Good luck. Keep your hands and feet inside the couches.”

This may be a nitpick, but I have to say it: Did no one ask Win and Lucy to sign liability releases before getting into this contraption?

The text itself compares this mode of transport to being shot out of a giant cannon. Even if nothing goes wrong and the vessel doesn’t explode catastrophically, or miss its target and splatter them across the landscape, the immense G-force could certainly cause a fatal heart attack or a stroke in someone who’s in poor health. And to cap it all off, when they land, they only have thirteen seconds to get out—presumably before they get hit by a train!

I don’t care how advanced the NAC is, this must be an incredibly dangerous way to travel. Even if they have no laws governing whether this or any other form of transportation can exist, we know they have civil liability suits against the makers of harmful products. Smith brought this up himself as a solution to how an anarcho-capitalist society could put a stop to pollution. If one of these cannonballs blows up, shouldn’t the passengers’ next of kin sue this company out of existence?

An invisible hippopotamus suddenly draped its full weight the length of my body. I tried screaming, but couldn’t even breathe. My bruised arm began burning; I couldn’t move to see whether it hung over the edge of the couch. Too late anyway, I figured. I found myself wishing I’d taken time to arrange certain private parts a little more carefully. I was going to have bruises in some strange places.

…Another sudden lurch and the deceleration eased off. Suddenly we were in an ordinary subway tunnel. We rocked, gasping and screeching, to a halt. I let the belts fall from me, saw Lucy hit the door, and followed her into the coolness of a shopping center, up the escalator as fast as our elbows could push us, and out, blinking in the sunlight.

I’d left my coat in North Dakota. I wondered who was paying for the ride.

I’m assuming L. Neil Smith just put this part in because he thought it was cool, but it says a lot about how his anarcho-capitalist society manages risk. Namely, it doesn’t.

Libertarians are supposed to be against initiating force. In any vaguely rational society, that should include not subjecting your neighbors to unreasonable risk of harm. If you build a shooting range on your property, you should have to build walls and backstops, and not just assume that no stray bullet will ever miss the target and crash through the windows of the kindergarten next door.

The NAC as Smith depicts it is a far wilder and more chaotic place. It’s a society where anyone can do anything, regardless of the danger it poses to others. Individual freedom reigns supreme, to the extent that you can swing your fist regardless of whether someone else’s face is in the way.

We saw this in the chapter about highway safety, or rather the lack thereof. You can drive a car powered by nuclear reactors, speed at hundreds of miles an hour, or drive drunk without a problem. But this chapter makes the problem even more glaringly obvious.

I mentioned the personal liability of the travelers who willingly board these vehicles, but there’s also the collective risk imposed on everyone by a means of transport that amounts to firing giant artillery shells across continental distances. What if one of these cannonballs misses its target and comes crashing through your roof? What if they collide with one of those big fancy zeppelins? You think people complain about the noise and hazards of living near an airport—imagine what it would do to your property values to live underneath their firing trajectory!

Who on earth built this? How did they test it? How did they fend off the inevitable onslaught of complaints and objections, in a society where every angry NIMBY is armed and has the power to take justice into their own hands? Smith neglects these questions for the sake of cool, which only highlights how deeply unrealistic his utopia is.

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