New on OnlySky: Cities without cars

I have a new column this week on OnlySky. It’s about the curse of car dependence, and whether there’s another way for us to live.

Middle-class American life is built around the car. The assumption is that everyone owns a private vehicle and uses it to drive everywhere they go. Alternative methods of transit, like bike lanes, mass transit, and even sidewalks and crosswalks for pedestrians, are an afterthought at best. When this assumption is baked into the layout of towns and cities, the result is a self-fulfilling prophecy. We make driving easy and everything else all but impossible, so of course most people choose to drive. The consequences are pollution, gridlock, deaths in traffic accidents, and all the other ills of car culture.

But it doesn’t have to be this way. We used to have walkable, human-scale neighborhoods, and if we so choose, we can start building them again. In a suburb in Arizona, there’s an urban experiment in progress which aims to prove that life without cars isn’t just viable, but better.

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 member-only posts and a subscriber newsletter:

When you look at places where people want to live, they look very different.

These desirable places aren’t sprawling suburbs fed by rivers of highway traffic, or impersonal strip malls and chain stores, or wastelands of concrete with buildings set far apart from each other.

They’re towns and neighborhoods that are built on a human scale. They’re charming, character-rich, and most important, walkable.

They have public green spaces, like parks and gardens, with shade trees and fountains. They have pedestrian-friendly boulevards where people can stroll, and public squares and plazas where they can sit. The boulevards and the plazas are lined with buildings that have small businesses like cafes, restaurants or bookshops on the ground floor and living space above.

We haven’t built places like this in a long time. But in Arizona, the builders of Culdesac are trying to start doing it again.

Continue reading on OnlySky…

The Probability Broach: Roosevelt the warmonger

President Franklin Roosevelt sitting at a desk

The Probability Broach, chapter 9

Having fended off his nighttime attacker, and with extra security in place, Win resumes mending from his injuries using the North American Confederacy’s advanced medical tech.

While he’s healing, he does some research on Ed’s computer, trying to understand why this world turned out so differently from his own:

Who can explain their own times and the past that created them? I don’t remember enough from high school and a junior college curriculum in police science. What little I can parrot is just a hodgepodge of other people’s opinions.

Hell, they revise it every year. I never did figure out what caused World War I, and with each decade World War II seems more FDR’s doing than Japan’s. If I didn’t understand my own world, how could I understand this one?

Ed and Clarissa didn’t have quite the same problem. For them, there’d never been a World War II; no Roosevelt I could discover had ever scored higher than dogcatcher.

This was one of those lines that made me raise my eyebrows. Blaming World War II on Roosevelt?

Arguably, you could blame World War II on the victors of World War I, including Woodrow Wilson, who imposed punitive terms on Germany that created a sense of national humiliation and fed a desire for revenge. But why FDR? How could he possibly be responsible when the U.S. didn’t join WWII until it had already been raging around the world for two years?

It turns out that this is a common opinion among libertarians. The Libertarian Institute published an essay, “Roosevelt’s Infamy“, which asserts that FDR wanted the U.S. to enter World War II and schemed to provoke Japan so as to create a casus belli:

FDR began his machinations by doing everything he could to provoke the Germans into attacking U.S. vessels in the Atlantic. In that way, he could exclaim, “We’ve been attacked! Now, give me my declaration of war!” But the Nazi regime knew what FDR was up to and refused to take the bait.

…That was when Roosevelt turned to the Pacific, in the hope that a Japanese attack on the United States would give him a “back door” to the war against Germany.

That’s what FDR’s oil embargo against Japan was all about. Japan had invaded China and was occupying the country. Its war machine necessarily depended on a continuous supply of oil. The purpose of FDR’s embargo was to prevent Japan from acquiring that badly needed oil.

FDR’s oil embargo was remarkably successful. It maneuvered Japan into a position of having to make a choice: Either invade the Dutch East Indies to secure its oil supplies or meekly withdraw its military forces from China.

…Not surprisingly, Japan decided to invade the Dutch East Indies rather than withdraw from China. But Japan knew that the invasion stood the risk of the U.S. Navy interfering with its operations in the Dutch East Indies. That was what the attack on Pearl Harbor was for—to knock out the U.S. Pacific fleet so that Japan would have a free hand in securing those oil supplies in the Dutch East Indies.

The Mises Institute agrees, in an article titled “How U.S. Economic Warfare Provoked Japan’s Attack on Pearl Harbor“:

When Germany began to rearm and to seek Lebensraum aggressively in the late 1930s, the Roosevelt administration cooperated closely with the British and the French in measures to oppose German expansion. After World War II commenced in 1939, this U.S. assistance grew ever greater and included such measures as the so-called destroyer deal and the deceptively named Lend-Lease program. In anticipation of U.S. entry into the war, British and U.S. military staffs secretly formulated plans for joint operations. U.S. forces sought to create a war-justifying incident by cooperating with the British navy in attacks on German U-boats in the northern Atlantic, but Hitler refused to take the bait, thus denying Roosevelt the pretext he craved for making the United States a full-fledged, declared belligerent—a belligerence that the great majority of Americans opposed.

…The Roosevelt administration, while curtly dismissing Japanese diplomatic overtures to harmonize relations, accordingly imposed a series of increasingly stringent economic sanctions on Japan… Roosevelt and his subordinates knew they were putting Japan in an untenable position and that the Japanese government might well try to escape the stranglehold by going to war.

This is an astonishing position for libertarians to take.

Libertarianism is supposed to be founded on the non-aggression principle, which says you can’t use violence against someone unless they start the fight. Then you can strike back to defend yourself.

There’s a patently obvious fact that’s missing from these analyses: Even if FDR wanted to involve the U.S. in WWII, he didn’t start the war. The Axis nations did that, by coming up with imperialist, supremacist ideologies that justified their desire to control the world, then followed through by invading neighboring states – Poland in Germany’s case, China in Japan’s – and treating the conquered populaces brutally.

Why doesn’t that count as use of force? Why didn’t it justify U.S. involvement, to assist in defense of the countries that were under attack?

In essence, these libertarians are arguing that Imperial Japan was entitled to whatever resources it needed to expand its empire, and that Roosevelt refusing to sell those resources to them was an act of violence that justified the attack on Pearl Harbor. It’s like saying, “I have the absolute right to trade with you, and if you won’t sell me what I want to buy, I can shoot you.”

This should be anathema to a principled libertarian. Somehow, it doesn’t bother them. These groups claim to be anti-aggression, but it seems that as long as someone other than the U.S. starts the war, it’s fine by them.

I was going to draw an equivalence to today’s conservatives pretending not to know who started the Russia-Ukraine war, but they make this comparison themselves:

As an aside, it’s worth mentioning that more recently, U.S. officials, operating through NATO, maneuvered Russia into having to make a similar choice: Either accept Ukraine’s membership in NATO, which would enable the Pentagon to station its nuclear missiles and troops along Russia’s border, or invade Ukraine to prevent that from happening.

Again, this is a bizarre stance for a professed libertarian to take. They’re saying that Ukraine wanting to join NATO as defense against a Russian invasion was an aggressive act that justified that very invasion. In black-is-white libertarian-land, if someone takes steps to defend themselves against you, that justifies you attacking them.

(Ironically, there are factions on the socialist left who make the same error as these right-wingers. They both assume that only the U.S. has agency, and that our choices determine how the rest of the world reacts, so anything that happens must be our fault.)

To be clear, I don’t think the U.S. is responsible for policing the world, or that we have a moral obligation to overthrow every oppressive regime. We don’t have the power to do that, and it often ends badly when we try, as our prolonged failure in Afghanistan made painfully clear.

However, a reasonable middle ground is that we can, at least, not support regimes that wage war on others or oppress their own people. We can peacefully express our disapproval and limit their power through trade embargos and sanctions. That position seems like it should be congenial to libertarian thinking. However, actual libertarians don’t agree.

Again, why Roosevelt in particular? What did he do to earn L. Neil Smith’s enmity?

The libertarian hatred of FDR is also on display in Ayn Rand’s writings, and that gives a better view of their reasoning. Libertarians will tell you they loathe FDR because his New Deal was a massive government imposition on the free market. That’s closer, but still not the truth.

The true reason for their hatred, I think, isn’t because the New Deal was a government imposition on the economy, but because it was an effective one. Most of the New Deal programs are still in existence today, and they’re so popular that even conservatives are reluctant to touch them.

In other words, they hate FDR because he showed that government can work well, which goes against their anti-state ideology. They want to tear down his record by proving that everything he did was driven by sinister motives. But in order to do that, they’re forced into siding with the most infamously evil regimes in history.

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The Probability Broach: Blood on the highway

A wrecked car engulfed in flames

The Probability Broach, chapter 8

Speaking as a policeman, Win Bear is still incredulous that the anarcho-capitalist North American Confederacy has no such thing as license plates or driver’s licenses. He’s disturbed that his counterpart, Ed, is nonchalant about it:

How could I explain that licenses are necessary to public safety, especially when his culture apparently found no use for such a concept? “Look here, Ed, how many people get killed on your roads every year?”

… “No idea at all.” He reached for the Telecom pad. “Last year, around five or six hundred if you discount probable suicides.”

“What? Out of what population—and how many of them drive?”

More button-pushing. “Half a billion in North America, and maybe three vehicles for every person on the continent.”

This passage is a nested onion of implausibilities. Let’s unpeel them one at a time.

First: How does Ed – or anyone – know how many people are killed by car accidents in the North American Confederacy?

There might be media coverage of some car crashes, especially spectacular ones, but there’s no reason to believe it would be comprehensive. There’s no census, no Social Security Administration, no government agency keeping track of people. There are no police whose duty it is to investigate fatal accidents. There’s no requirement to report a death, and no central registry to report it to.

So, again: Where does Ed get this number from? Shouldn’t the only possible anarchist answer to this question be “I have no idea”?

Second: How can it possibly be true that the NAC has fewer traffic fatalities than our reality (which suffers around 40,000 traffic deaths per year)? Smith never even tries to justify this. Just think of what doesn’t exist here, in a society with no laws about what you can drive or how.

There are no speed limits. Not just the highways, but every road is an Autobahn. You can floor the gas pedal and roar at top speed through quiet residential neighborhoods where kids are playing. You can do wheelies in front of a school or drag-race through crowded streets for fun. (Even Germany is contemplating speed limits for its famous Autobahn, to reduce pollution and prevent deadly crashes.)

Since there are no driver’s licenses, there are no restrictions on who can drive. You can get behind the wheel if you’re a little kid, or if you have impaired vision, or if you have seizures. You don’t have to pass any test to prove you know what you’re doing.

There are no drunk driving laws. You can get behind the wheel blackout drunk, or high as a kite, or stoned on whatever recreational substance you like.

There are no laws regulating the size or shape of cars. In fact, you can intentionally make them more dangerous. You can mount a bulldozer blade on the front to push other vehicles out of the way. You can put spikes on your bumpers to defend against other drivers, as I suggested previously. You can add rocket boosters to go faster, and too bad for anyone who’s behind you when you hit the afterburners.

Or, in a less fanciful example, you can drive cars so massive and heavy that anyone you hit is almost certain to die. In the U.S., pedestrian fatalities have been rising, and our national obsession with heavy trucks and giant SUVs is the reason why.

You don’t have to have crumple zones, airbags, anti-lock brakes, or any of the other safety features that governments have mandated from years of hard-won experience. You can own a car that turns its passengers into projectiles, or explodes in a violent fireball, if it collides with something. (After all, safety features cost money! Why not leave them out to get a cheaper price? I know I’m a good driver, so nothing bad will happen to me.)

You can drive any kind of weird or experimental vehicle you want, whether or not it’s been through safety testing. You can roll out computer-controlled driving with insufficient testing, and use your customers as crash test dummies.

In flavor text from a later chapter, Smith not only agrees with this, he doubles down on the idea that you can drive literally anything you like, including cars powered by dynamite or on-board nuclear reactors:

North Americans adore any contraption that moves under its own impetus; they’ve harnessed every conceivable form of energy (and not a few inconceivable ones) to propel that most fantastic of their inventions, the private ground-effect machine. Steam and internal combustion compete with electricity and flywheels; there are fables of “hoverbuggies” run by enormous rubber bands, caged animals, charges of dynamite; and now, nuclear fusion. Secretly playing Prussian Ace in a cloud of turbodust or reading quietly while computers guide them along the Greenway at 300 miles per hour, they don’t care much about the power source. Within the portable privacy of their road machines, they have tapped a greater source of energy, the inner contemplation of a powerfully creative people, which is the source of all their lesser miracles.

The obvious fallback for an anarcho-capitalist would be to say that there’s no government which makes laws, but the private companies that presumably own the roads do mandate safety features. However, if this is Smith’s solution, he never says so, and excerpts like the one above suggest the opposite.

People in the North American Confederacy appear unused to any rule that restricts their freedom to do as they wish. As you may remember from last week, Ed is unfamiliar with the concept of license plates – suggesting that no private entity requires anything like it either.

What this shows is how L. Neil Smith’s brand of anarchy implies a radical rejection of basic political theory.

In standard political thinking, people agree to come together and create society, giving up some rights in exchange for the protection and benefits that the state offers. You can conceptualize this as a spectrum. On one end is absolute liberty – freedom in its raw and primal sense, where there are no rules except the law of the jungle. On the other end is an all-powerful totalitarian state, which guarantees safety and order by controlling everyone’s lives.

Few people would go to either extreme. But most of us would agree that some rules and some kind of governance are necessary. We just differ about which point along this spectrum strikes the most desirable balance.

However, Smith denies this framework altogether. He seems to believe that there is no tradeoff between liberty and safety – that, by getting rid of all laws, we somehow become safer as well. It’s “you can eat your cake and have it, too” as a political philosophy.

If he made an argument for how or why this win-win scenario could arise, that would be one thing. But he doesn’t. His position doesn’t come from any reasoned argument or consideration of the evidence, but through pure magical thinking.

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The Probability Broach: Nine-tenths of the law

A black-and-white fingerprint

The Probability Broach, chapter 8

Win Bear was attacked in the middle of the night, but he successfully defended himself. The attacker got away, but left his weapon behind: a big knife, “almost a short sword, fully eighteen inches from pommel to point, razor-sharp halfway along the back.”

Ed Bear, his parallel-universe twin, calls it a Rezin. It’s this world’s version of a Bowie knife, only here it’s named after Jim Bowie’s brother. He offhandedly mentions that in this world, the Battle of the Alamo was a victory for Texas, resulting in Santa Anna’s death and the establishment of the “Republic of Texas”.

Ed congratulates Win – “you’ve won yourself a handsome Rezin” – because apparently in this anarchist society, when you take something from someone in combat, that makes it yours.

“So I’ve got myself a genuine Rezin. Spoils of war, and all that?”

“You think its former owner will come back and claim it? Besides, it’s the custom.”

However, Win says he doesn’t want the blade, because he’s clueless about knife fighting. (He prefers guns.)

Ed is going to dispose of the knife, but Win realizes it could be a clue:

“Fingerprints!” I hollered. “Don’t screw up the evidence!” I flipped a corner of the blanket over and picked it up by the blade.

… “Fingerprints?” Ed protested. “What kind of evidence is that?”

I sat, trying to take it in. “Look—our worlds may have differences, but this ain’t one of ’em! No two fingerprints are—”

“I’ve heard that theory, but what good does it do? We still have to catch the culprit, and if he’s already caught, what’s the point?”

“Jesus Christ! Don’t you people keep any kind of records, licenses, anything that uses fingerprints for identification?”

“People wouldn’t stand for such a thing. I wouldn’t.”

You have to give L. Neil Smith points for ideological consistency. As a libertarian, he’s opposed to government ID records on principle; but at least he’s willing to acknowledge that this creates problems for catching the perpetrator of a crime. As Win snarkily comments, “Anarchy has its drawbacks, especially for cops.”

In another passage, Win asks if there’s any other way of tracing the car that shot him:

“Okay,” I said, enmeshed again in therapeutic wiring. “Fingerprints are out.” Ed was having coffee and pie. I was sucking vitamin-sludge through a flex-straw, and not liking it. “What about the Frontenac? Anyone in the neighborhood—Lucy maybe—remember the license plates?”

“What’s a license plate?”

You could always ask the filmmakers of the Atlas Shrugged movies. Hilariously, their semi-anarchic utopia did have license plates.

The absence of license plates is logical for an anarchy, although it again raises the question of what Ed actually does at his private-eye job. If there are no fingerprint databases, no license plates, no other official records or means of identifying people… what steps are left to take?

Ed says that such a database would be pointless because it wouldn’t help them catch the culprit. But without these kinds of evidence, how could you ever know that you have the right culprit?

If a crime is committed by a person with a known grudge against their victim, you can imagine steps a private investigator might take. But in the case of a random crime where the criminal has no personal connection to the victim, like a mugging or a burglary, it seems there’d be nothing to do. There’s no way to identify, trace or locate people.

That leads to another important question, which this chapter skates around: If you steal something from someone, do you just get to keep it? Is “stealing” even a meaningful concept in a world with no laws?

Ed tells Win that he can keep the knife as “spoils”, saying this is the custom in the North American Confederacy. How far does that custom extend?

To illustrate the issue, let’s conjure up a scenario.

When we met Ed Bear, he was about to leave on a three-week vacation. As we saw, it’s not that hard to break into someone’s house, especially if you have an expensive “defeater” to silence their burglar alarms.

Imagine that while Ed is away on vacation, someone breaks into his house, moves all their stuff in, throws his away, and changes the locks. When he gets back, he’s greeted by an unpleasant surprise: a stranger occupying the property he thought was his, and claiming to be the rightful owner.

In an anarcho-capitalist society like the North American Confederacy, what could you do about this?

In our world, there are official government records, like deeds and titles, that you can bring to the court to prove you’re the rightful owner of a piece of property. In the NAC, there are no such records. Even if there were, there’s no legal system you can appeal to. There’s nobody with the power to adjudicate who owns what.

What other options are there? The obvious one is to perform a self-help eviction: round up a posse of armed friends to back you up, break into your own house, and toss out the squatter by force. However, that has an unpleasant corollary: you can take over your neighbor’s property the same way. If you outgun them, they’d have no recourse.

This squatter scenario is just the tip of the iceberg, when it comes to the chaos that would ensue in a society with no rules and no records.

Imagine a person who owns a big, expensive house (or some other valuable piece of property) dies with no will, and all their descendants start arguing about who should get it. With no court system to settle the dispute, it would be a free-for-all. In fact, even if there is a will, who’s going to enforce it? Wouldn’t the first person who gets into the empty house and barricades the door get to claim it?

Or imagine a landlord-tenant dispute. If you rent a room in your house to someone else, do you have the power to evict them if they’re messy, disruptive, or violent? Or if you’re the renter, can you take the position that if you live there, you have the right to do anything you want in your space and no one’s going to tell you otherwise? What if a landlord raises the rent and the tenant refuses to pay? Does it end with a shootout?

For someone who calls himself a Propertarian, L. Neil Smith has no clear way of solving these extremely foreseeable problems. Without a legal system that holds a monopoly on force and follows knowable rules, the only other possibility is might makes right. If you steal something, it’s yours. The old proverb is that possession is nine-tenths of the law, but in an anarcho-capitalist society, it’s closer to ten-tenths.

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The Probability Broach: Constant vigilance

Two white stone statues in a sentry position

The Probability Broach, chapter 8

For the second time since arriving in this world, Win Bear has narrowly escaped being murdered – this time in his bed, while he was still recuperating from the last attack.

The intruder was wounded in the struggle, but got away. Win’s counterpart, Ed, is searching for any evidence that he left behind:

He examined the empty window frame, leaning outward for a moment. “He left his ladder behind. Wait a minute… something here just below the sill.” He held up a plastic box the size of a cigarette pack, hanging from a skein of wires. “A defeater. Damps the vibrations caused by forced entry. Complicated, and very expensive. Only the second one I’ve seen since—”

“If that thing makes a humming sound, he should demand his money back. That’s what gave him away.”

“Excess energy has to be given off somewhere—heat or sonics. Maybe it just wasn’t his day.”

I snorted, surveying the shambles. “You didn’t see him lying on the ground out there?”

“No. Missed him by a mile. He probably picked up a fanny full of splinters, though.” He nodded toward the shattered window.

L. Neil Smith doesn’t linger on the implications of this passage, but I will: There are businesses in this society making products whose only use is to assist people to rob and kill others. There’s no purpose for a “defeater” that doesn’t involve crime.

Like several places in Atlas Shrugged, the author is saying one thing even as his own writing shows something else. Smith insists that the North American Confederacy is a peaceful utopia, where crime is virtually unknown because everyone carries the means of self-defense. People with criminal intent – he wants us to believe – are deterred by the knowledge that all their potential victims are armed.

What it actually shows, just as a critic of anarchism might point out, is that life without laws or government is far more dangerous. Widespread gun ownership doesn’t prevent crime; it just incentivizes criminals to get even bigger guns to overpower their victims. Weapons and other devices that would be banned in our world (in civilized countries, at least) are completely legal to manufacture and own.

You can put spinning spikes or flamethrowers on your car’s wheels, Mad Max-style, to get revenge if some jerk on the highway tailgates you. You can bury land mines in your front lawn or rig up lethal booby traps around your property, protecting against intruders but also endangering innocent visitors. You can set up machine guns or artillery pieces aimed at your neighbor’s house, just in case he does something that annoys you.

The next line drives this point home. Ed is apologetic about Win’s latest brush with death:

“My fault, really. I considered putting on extra security, but decided the autodefenses would be enough. Now I’ve let you get attacked again, in my own home.”

Ed’s house has “autodefenses”, not further described. Does everyone have these? You wouldn’t pay for something if you had a reasonable expectation of never needing it.

It goes to show, again, how the writing undercuts its own premises. Smith insists that everything is cheap in the NAC because anarchy is more efficient. There’s no wasteful government leeching off people’s productivity, so they get to keep everything they earn.

But his own plotting shows the opposite. Without a government, life isn’t cheaper. People just have to pay out of their own pockets to supply all the services that a government would normally provide.

You have to supply your own security, and if those “autodefenses” aren’t enough, you have to hire people to patrol your house (which Ed does after this scene).

If you care about your house burning down, you have to pay for a private firefighter service. You have to pay for private school instead of attending public school. You have to be your own bank regulator, investigating any bank you do business with to determine if they’re likely to collapse and lose your life savings. You have to be your own consumer-safety advocate, inspecting every product you buy to see if it’s toxic, flammable, or otherwise hazardous. You can probably think of more examples.

Given Ed’s description of the defeater as “expensive” and better than his home defenses, there’s yet another unpleasant implication. In this anarcho-capitalist utopia, everyday life is an arms race.

If you can outspend someone and buy tech to overcome their defenses, it’s completely feasible to kill them. Or to put it another way: if someone wants you dead and they have more money than you, you’re in big trouble. And if you’re poor (and can’t afford your own private security or a house with “autodefenses”), you have no chance at all.

After all, there’s no higher authority to investigate or hold criminals accountable. If you’re lucky enough to catch an assailant in the act, you can shoot them. But if a thug or a hitman succeeds in murdering their victim, they get away scot free. If Win’s midnight attacker had succeeded in murdering him in his bed, he could have escaped safe in the knowledge that no consequences would follow.

Even if the victim has friends or family who can afford to hire a private investigator, it’s unclear what that person would be able to do, since there’s no legal system. (Smith takes a stab at answering this question later in the book – his solution involves private arbitration and restitution or exile as punishments – but it has some very obvious holes, which we’ll go into.)

What it adds up to is this: if you’re living in Smith’s ancap society, you have to be on guard against attack at any moment, for your entire life. You have to protect yourself, because no one else will protect you. Win would have been killed, if not for the stroke of luck that he happened to be awake when the hitman broke in, and that’s a good template for how things would work in the North American Confederacy.

There’s good reason to be paranoid in this world. Everyone is armed, and everyone ought to be on a constant hair trigger, for fear that some casual encounter could be a robber or a murderer about to make their move. This society shouldn’t be peaceful and civilized, but a melee of bloody violence.

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New on OnlySky: The fertility freeze

I have a new column this week on OnlySky. It’s about the declining birth rate, not just in the U.S., but around the world.

In a wide cross-section of countries, fewer women are having kids. There’s widespread fear over what this means for the future, but too many commentators treat this as a strictly economic issue without delving into the cultural reasons for it. The answers should be obvious, to anyone who takes the time to think about it: soaring inequality that makes child care increasingly unaffordable for working parents; women’s healthcare bans that directly threaten the lives of anyone who’s pregnant; cultural reasons which mean fewer men than ever are willing to be dependable partners.

Are we locked into an unstoppable downward spiral? Or is there still time to turn this trend around?

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:

According to CDC data, the U.S. fertility rate in 2024 ticked down to an all-time low of 1.599 children per woman.

It’s not only the U.S. that’s in this situation; it’s a worldwide trend. Declining birth rates and aging populations in the wealthy nations of Europe and Asia are a well-studied phenomenon. However, the birth rate is also declining in middle-income and developing countries like Colombia, Chile, Cuba, Egypt and Sri Lanka.

Fertility keeps falling faster than demographers’ estimates, forcing them to revise their projections downward year after year. While previous projections forecast that the world population would start to shrink by the 2080s, it may now begin by 2055. Possibly even sooner.

Continue reading on OnlySky…

The Probability Broach: Smoke ’em if you got ’em

An old patent-medicine ad for heroin

The Probability Broach, chapter 8

After debating alternate histories with Ed, and contemplating the possibility that his own universe no longer exists to return to, Win is sleepless with worries:

I had a hard time sleeping that night. I was exhausted, and not only from exertion and gunshot wounds. Clarissa’s wonderful machines were healing me at a rate that taxed my reserves and made me ravenous about every forty-five minutes. But sleepy I was not. Lying around in bed all day wired up like Donovan’s brain is not exactly conducive to a solid night’s hibernation.

I’m not the warm-milk type, and booze has never helped me sleep. This anarchist’s Disneyland apparently hadn’t any prescription laws. Ed’s medicine cabinets contained everything from aspirin to morphine.

I’ll give Smith points for consistency, at least, for highlighting an implication of his worldbuilding that some authors might shy away from depicting. In an anarchist society, there’d be no such thing as controlled substances. Anyone who wanted any drug, from cocaine to heroin to crystal meth, would be able to buy it over the counter.

Now picture it from the other side of the cash register. In an anarcho-capitalist society, there’s nothing stopping you from making drugs that are as addictive as you can possibly make them and selling them to everyone, including kids.

Given what we know about how capitalism works, every company under the sun would rush to do just that. Why struggle with competition, why subject yourself to the whims of the market, when you can rake in obscene profits by cultivating a customer base that literally can’t stop buying your product?

We’ve seen this exact thing play out in the real world, most infamously with tobacco companies. For decades, they schemed to get their customers addicted. They deliberately took steps to make cigarettes more addictive: genetically modifying tobacco plants to contain more nicotine, or adding bronchodilator chemicals to speed the absorption of nicotine into the body.

Another destructive story of corporate greed producing human tragedy is America’s opioid epidemic. By many accounts, it began with OxyContin. Purdue, OxyContin’s manufacturer, promised it would provide 12-hour pain relief with minimal addiction risk. However, many people complained that it wore off too soon, leaving them to suffer as they counted down the hours.

Instead of having patients take the drug more frequently – which would surrender their claimed advantage over other painkillers – Purdue told doctors to prescribe bigger and bigger doses. This created a rollercoaster of highs and lows that, for many people, was a prelude to addiction. Instead of providing a steady level of relief, it trains the brain to crave the next hit of the drug. This paved the way for desperate people in withdrawal to seek out even stronger opioids, like heroin and fentanyl.

Last but not least, there’s Feel Free. It’s a tonic sold in gas stations and smoke shops. Its manufacturer describes it as a “plant-based herbal supplement” and markets it as a healthy and natural alternative to alcohol, and it comes in a blue bottle that looks like an energy drink. But it’s not caffeine: it contains kratom, a plant with natural opioid-like compounds.

Many consumers of Feel Free report an intense addiction that sets in almost immediately, coupled with debilitating withdrawal symptoms if they try to stop. A class-action lawsuit has been filed against the maker for allegedly concealing its health risks and addictive potential.

But, again, in an anarchist society, there’s no such thing as consumer-protection laws. There wouldn’t even be these safeguards, as flimsy and inadequate as they are. Makers of dangerous, addictive drugs could conceal the risks, could market and sell them in any way they like, and there’d be nothing that anyone could do about it. This makes it all the more implausible that there are no poverty-stricken or homeless people in Smith’s North American Confederacy: you can easily blow any amount of money and ruin your life on drugs.

As I’ve said before, I’m not a prohibitionist. I’m skeptical of any law that tries to control what consenting adults do with their own bodies. Addiction isn’t a sign of poor character; it’s a medical problem, and it should be treated as one.

Of course, people who drive drunk, steal or commit other crimes to feed a drug habit may have to be imprisoned, both for everyone else’s safety and so they can be compelled to get treatment. But putting people in prison simply for using drugs doesn’t solve anything. It makes a bad situation worse by forcing addicts into the shadows and making them afraid to get help. It furnishes a ready excuse for aggressive overpolicing of minorities and the poor. It feeds a black market where criminal gangs wage turf wars over territory and adulterate their products with toxic additives – all problems that America has experienced firsthand during its long, violent history of prohibition.

However, here’s where I draw the line: there are good reasons society shouldn’t permit some people to profit off of other people’s addictions.

In my ideal world, no recreational chemicals would be banned. But advertising would be forbidden, there’d be stringent safety regulations, and drugs with high addictive potential (especially alcohol and tobacco!) could only be sold at cost, not for profit, with added taxes to fund the treatment of those who need help. This eliminates the incentive for companies to try to get their customers hooked.

Getting back to the book: for whatever reason, Win chooses not to avail himself of Ed’s medicine cabinet. He lies awake, tossing and turning. However, in yet another of those author-scripted convenient coincidences, his insomnia saves his life:

Lying restlessly in the dark, I tried arguing Ed’s terminal out of something to read. Then I heard it: a humming, soft but unmistakable. I might have slept through it. I turned. In the dim backlight of distant street lamps, I could make out a shadow against the windowpane.

…The window, hinged at the top, opened outward. A shadow silently threw its leg over the sill. One step across the floor, two, three. Starlight glinted on naked steel.

Win has a derringer – a miniature gun with only one shot – under his pillow. He tries to draw it without alerting the intruder that he’s awake:

He was on me! A huge knife swung in a glittering arc and I twisted the gun to bear as his blade tangled in the wiring around me, skittered along the cast on my arm, and was deflected. The derringer went off in a blinding explosion, missing his face by a handspan. I dropped the gun from stinging fingers, grabbing at his wrist. He jerked it back-I let him, pushing the razor-sharp edge toward his face. It caught under his jaw, pivoting where it bit, slicing flesh and corded muscle, spraying us both with blood.

…Suddenly he let go, ripped himself from my failing grasp, and dived head-first out the window as—Slap! Slap! The glazing dissolved in a million crystalline shards.

The lights came on. Ed slumped against the door frame, a spidery wisp of smoke drifting from the muzzle of his .375. I sagged back into the sweat-soaked bed; Clarissa’s careful circuitry a dangling ruin. The bloody knife lay on the blanket, millimeters from my shaking, gun-bruised hand. Ed’s glance traveled from my blood-streaked face to the foot-long blade. “Don’t you know better than to try shaving in the dark?”

The fact that Ed is so nonchalant about a home invasion – going so far as to make action-hero-style quips about it – suggests that he’s used to it. That would make sense. In a society with no police and no government, where the only law is what you can get away with, these kinds of crimes ought to be common.

As we’ll see in a later chapter, L. Neil Smith implausibly insists this isn’t the case and that crime is actually very rare in his lawless, laissez-faire paradise. But if the average citizen of the North American Confederacy never has to fire a gun at a would-be murderer, why would his protagonists be so unfazed?

Smith probably didn’t mean anything by this line, other than trying to establish the badass credentials of his heroes. But in a meta sense, it could be seen as a big, glaring hint that this world isn’t as peaceful as its author wants us to believe it is.

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The Probability Broach: White people’s histories

"Scene at the Signing of the Constitution of the United States" by Howard Chandler Christy

The Probability Broach, chapter 7

Win and Ed Bear, twin selves from different parallel realities, are comparing biographies. They’re trying to determine how the two of them can be so similar—”We look alike, have the same name, pursue much the same vocation. In some sense we might be the same person”—when their respective worlds are so radically different.

Win asks Ed if he knows about Chicago:

Ed grinned. “I’ll say I do. It’s the biggest city in the world!”

…He removed an object from the bookcase, fourteen inches long, maybe ten wide, half an inch thick. Sort of an overweight clipboard with a screen and keyboard. At the foot of my bed, the mountain glade disappeared, replaced by a map of North America.

I’ll give L. Neil Smith a point for this one: he pretty accurately predicted iPads and other tablet-style computers. (Then again, so did Star Trek.)

On Ed’s big-screen map, the geography of the continent is the same, but its political organization is entirely different:

All of North America, from the Isthmus to the Arctic, seemed to be one country: the North American Confederacy—no state or provincial boundaries, Chicago was indeed the biggest apple, rivaled closely by Los Angeles and Mexico City. There wasn’t any Washington, D.C., and Manhattan, in tiny, barely visible letters, seemed nothing more than a sleepy Indian village.

Ed and Win determine that they were born in the same place – although in Win’s world (“our” world), it’s the city of Denver, and at the same spot in the NAC, there’s only a tiny rural town.

Win’s parents are deceased, but Ed’s parents are living and retired to the Pacific Northwest. In both realities, both their parents are Ute Indians. Win points out that this is where the name “Utah” comes from:

“I hadn’t made the connection. But you’re right, they’re from Indian stock. Doesn’t mean very much, does it?”

“It never did to me,” I said, “but to some…” I thought about Watts and of the Arab-Vietnamese gang rumbles on my own beat. “Where I come from, people kill each other about it, sometimes.”

“Another difference between our histories?”

“Or between our people.”

This is as close as Smith ever comes to broaching the topic of racism – by implying that it doesn’t exist in the North American Confederacy. Ed Bear doesn’t think ethnic distinctions should matter, and he’s puzzled why anyone else would.

That would be commendably tolerant, except that the next thing Smith writes blows this out of the water:

“Win, why should we… I mean, why should both our worlds, if they diverged so long ago, have produced—”

“A pair of identical gumshoes? I’ve been thinking about that. Maybe because we’re both Indians.”

“I don’t understand.”

“Well, I never set much store in being ‘Native American’—neolithically ignorant while the rest of the world was out inventing the wheel, gunpowder, carbon steel. Hell, if our esteemed ancestors had been able to get along with one another thirty days running, they could have thrown Pizarro and Cortez out on their hairy asses and developed a real civilization.”

This is another running theme with libertarians, going back to at least when Ayn Rand referred to Native Americans as “savages” who deserved to be wiped out because they didn’t have capitalism. Libertarian ideology has to come up with some explanation for why it was morally permissible for white settlers to displace and massacre the original inhabitants of the New World.

Smith carries on this tradition by calling the indigenous Americans “neolithically ignorant” and saying that they lacked “real civilization”. As more recent scholarship has shown, nothing could be further from the truth. Indigenous Americans had civilizations that were at least as large and complex as the Europeans of their era – in some cases, more so.

His implication is that the Native Americans deserved to be conquered because they were too primitive and fractious to unite against European invaders. But wait a minute – I thought Smith was against government!

If the Native Americans didn’t have a unified civilization, doesn’t that mean they were an anarchy? And aren’t anarchies supposed to be naturally superior to invaders operating on behalf of a tyrannical ruler, like a king?

In fact, the conquistadors didn’t take over because of their superior weapons (though that certainly played a part), but mostly because they carried diseases the Indians had no resistance against. Those germs annihilated whole civilizations before Europeans ever set eyes on them. If not for that fluke, history might have turned out very differently.

Be that as it may, Win suggests, the fact that they both have indigenous ancestry explains why they’re the same when so much else is different:

“I don’t know exactly where our histories diverged… But those histories are mostly white people’s histories, right? I mean, George Washington got killed in the Whiskey Rebellion, that’s what Clarissa tells me… [but] whatever the White-Eyes were up to back East, that wouldn’t affect what our ancestors were doing!”

He nodded. “Not until much later, and by that time—”

“By that time our heredity—in each world—would be pretty much unaltered!”

It’s a clever hypothesis – and, to be fair, the book never presents it as anything more than Win’s speculation – but we know it can’t be right, because plenty of white people are essentially the same in both worlds. Richard Nixon makes an appearance later in the book. Also, Ayn Rand, H.L. Mencken, John Wilkes Booth, Robert A. Heinlein, and other familiar historical figures are mentioned in the appendix, which presents an abbreviated timeline of the NAC’s history.

Let’s revisit the topic of race one more time. On one occasion, when responding to what he called a “preposterous charge” of racism, Smith said this:

“The hero of my first novel, The Probability Broach, and my second, The Venus Belt, is a full-blooded Ute Indian whose wife is a freckled strawberry blonde and whose best friend is the 137-year-old Mexican widow of a Russian prince. These are the books that also introduced sapient chimpanzees, gorillas, porpoises and killer whales to science fiction…”

He writes as if having a Native American protagonist automatically disproves accusations of racism, even though said protagonist has no personal or cultural connection to his people and demeans his own ancestral civilization as primitive.

More relevant is this: as far as I know, there are no Black people in TPB. There are no Asian people. It’s said that Mexico has joined the North American Confederacy, but we never meet any Hispanic people. (Lucy, who we met briefly, is described as Mexican, but apparently only in the sense of being white with Spanish ancestry, like Francisco d’Anconia in Atlas Shrugged.)

Smith thinks that having sentient non-human characters displays his open-mindedness. Actually, it emphasizes the point about his bias. Like some other science-fiction writers, he evidently found it easier to conceive of talking chimpanzees, gorillas, dolphins, robots and aliens than human beings whose skin isn’t white. It seems he’s willing to countenance one or two token minorities, but only as long as their ethnicity means nothing and has no role in their characters or the plot.

In fact, Smith also missed an opportunity to argue for his own beliefs. He could have shown how much better everyday life was for people of color in a utopia of freedom where slavery was peacefully abolished. Instead, unnervingly, it seems as if minorities have simply disappeared.

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The Probability Broach: Charity cases

A net of woven rope strands

The Probability Broach, chapter 7

Win Bear has come to terms with the fact that he’s no longer in his own world, but the North American Confederacy, an anarcho-capitalist society where American history took a different track. He hasn’t traveled forward in time like he initially thought, but, as he puts it, sideways:

…either my whole life until now had been some kind of dope dream, or somehow history had shifted sideways. Correction: I had been shifted sideways in time.

…And where, oh, where, was the world I’d been born into, grown up in, loved and hated? Did it still exist?

L. Neil Smith has Win express at least some angst about this possibility. As he says to his counterpart Ed, “Suppose Meiss’s machine just sort of held me in place while my own world was ripped out from under me and yours slipped in to take its place!… How do I know that whatever change in history created your world didn’t destroy mine?”

Under the circumstances, I’d agree that this is a reasonable human reaction—except for the fact that it rings false to the character. Win never misses his own world or regrets leaving it. Nor does he express the slightest desire to return to it. This world is superior in every way to the one he came from.

There’s also no one in his world that he cares about, loves, or misses. He’s conveniently divorced (and actually, the text says his ex-wife died in a car crash after divorcing him). He has no kids, no family, and no friends. If there had been someone in his world he cared about, this might present a greater dilemma, but Smith’s scripting him to have no attachments allows this concern to be summarily dismissed.

(Just as a contrast, I’ll say that this is a major concern of Rae Robinson, the protagonist in my novel Commonwealth. Even if you’ve escaped the world of suffering and made it to utopia, what happens to the people you’ve left behind?)

Win’s story sounds crazy, as even he admits. But Ed says there are some points in his favor, besides the otherwise-inexplicable fact of their identical appearances.

One piece of evidence is the gun Win had on him, a Browning, which he took from a government thug who accosted him in Meiss’ lab. Ed says that manufacturing firearms requires heavy industry—and while his world has a Browning gun company, they didn’t make this one:

“Well, look at mine. It’s a Browning, too.” He hauled a .45-sized pistol from under his poncho, popped the magazine, and shuffled the chamber round onto the bed. It was beautiful, a soft dull gray with slimmer, cleaner lines than an Army Colt.

… “Your Browning,” Ed said, “is made of steel, smaller, but heavier than mine, which is almost entirely titanium. The last steel firearms were made in this country over sixty years ago—I looked it up. Mine was manufactured by molecular deposition, electron discharge—processes that don’t leave toolmarks. Yours, though they’ve done a first-class job, was obviously cut from a solid slab, another method obsolete for generations. No offense.”

Between Win’s overnight healing of near-fatal injuries and now objects made by “molecular deposition” without tools, the NAC’s technology is superior in every way. This is in keeping with Smith’s belief that government funding somehow holds innovation back, rather than supporting it—so in his view, a world without any government would be radically more advanced.

But if this is the case, why doesn’t it play out the same way in our world?

Why are the nations with the most advanced science and technology also the ones with the strongest and most stable governments? Shouldn’t developing nations with weak, uninvolved, or nonexistent governments be hotbeds of innovation? Why is Silicon Valley in California, rather than Oklahoma? Why is Europe more advanced than Somalia or South Sudan?

Ed nodded. “I see. Well this morning while you were sleeping, I ‘commed Browning and took the liberty of showing them this thing. Made by antiquated methods, yet no antique. It caused quite a sensation. I suspect they’d offer you a pretty tenth-piece for it.”

I laughed. “Might need a grubstake at that. I can’t go on being a charity case forever.”

…He smiled reassuringly. “Don’t worry about charity. Just take it easy so your bones will knit straight.”

This is a very noteworthy passage, if only because it touches on something that this book otherwise never addresses. Namely, in an ancap society with no public safety nets, what happens to people who are unable to work?

Up to this point, as I noted earlier, Win is subsisting on the charity of these people he’s just met. Ed drove off his attackers, Clarissa treated his wounds, and he’s staying at Ed’s house while he recuperates. So far, they’ve asked for nothing from him in repayment. It’s no spoiler to say that they never do.

That’s extremely convenient for Win, who’d otherwise be in a dire predicament. He’s a stranger in a strange land—no house, no possessions, no money except pocket change, no transferable skills (there are no police departments here!), no family or friends he could turn to.

But while he was fortunate to find people willing to support him indefinitely for free, that can’t be the case for everyone. What happens to you in this world if you’re orphaned as a child, or contract a serious chronic illness, or become disabled in an accident, or lose your job and burn through your savings, or pledge all your assets to a business that goes bust?

If you run out of money, do you have to beg in the gutter? Are there debtors’ prisons? Dickensian workhouses where the destitute are put to slave labor? Or are you just expected to die?

As I said, the issue never comes up in TPB. There are no homeless people pushing shopping carts, no hobos riding the rails, no beggars or panhandlers on street corners, no mentally ill or drug-addicted people living on the streets. There are no ghettos, no tent cities, no shantytowns, no Hoovervilles. It’s a subject that Smith steers well clear of. He doesn’t explain why none of these unfortunates exist, so much as he just sweeps the whole issue under the carpet.

If you asked L. Neil Smith, I suspect he’d fall back on his (economically implausible) insistence that everything is cheap and no one is poor in the NAC. Even if you’re starting over from scratch, you can walk into any business, get a job on the spot, and start rebuilding your life within days.

But even if that were true, it beggars belief that no one falls through the cracks, in a society where there’s no one whose job is to prevent that. There must be misfits, outcasts and pariahs. There must be people who suffer the burden of discrimination, or who get cheated, defrauded or scammed out of their life savings.

No society yet has completely solved the problem of helping and protecting everyone equally. But in a state with public safety nets, progressive taxation and anti-discrimination laws, there are at least some options open to the least fortunate. By design, Smith’s supposed utopia has none of these. The only thing it offers is “sink or swim”.

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New on OnlySky: The future of antisemitism

I have a new column this week on OnlySky. It’s about how the definition of antisemitism is being stretched and muddied, and in an irony of ironies, it’s Jewish Zionists who are responsible for it.

Israel’s genocidal war in Gaza has spurred sharp criticism from around the world, as well as calls for arms embargos, boycotts and sanctions. In an attempt to forestall these criticisms, defenders of Israel have been arguing that denying the nation the right to do as it wishes is inherently antisemitic and prejudiced against Jews. In other words, they’re saying that Jewish people and Israel are one and the same. This is an old antisemitic trope called “dual loyalty”, but ironically, now being used by the people it was once wielded against.

This tactic isn’t new, but it’s sharply increased in volume since the October 2023 Hamas terrorist attacks. In this column, I argue that this isn’t only cynical, isn’t only false, but profoundly dangerous to Jewish people everywhere. It cheapens a rightfully serious accusation and robs it of its moral gravity. What’s worse, it plays into the hands of real antisemites, allowing them to camouflage themselves in the crowd.

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:

Incidents like these are why it’s so important to recognize antisemitism for what it is—so that it can be effectively resisted, so people who repeat antisemitic tropes out of ignorance can be enlightened, and so the electorate won’t be swayed by it. We can and should call it out wherever it rears its head.

That’s why we have to face a painful paradox: when it comes to the continuing agony of Gaza, Israel’s most fervent defenders are the ones muddying the water. They seek to define criticism of the actions of Israel as anti-Jewish prejudice.

Continue reading on OnlySky…