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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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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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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