The Probability Broach: Coffin nails

A smoldering cigarette in an ashtray

The Probability Broach, chapter 5

Win has almost reached his doppelganger’s address in the parallel world he’s stumbled into. He’s walking through a residential neighborhood, “elaborate in architectural extremes”:

Victorian and Edwardian gingerbread sat grandly between the baroque and a sort of Swiss-chalet style—ornate, almost rococo, but taken all together, neither garish nor intimidating. Just different. The homes were set back deeply from the road, on enormous lots with gracefully curving rubber driveways winding through gardens and wrought-iron fencery. If Edward W. Bear lived like this, being a P.I. must pay better here than it did in my jurisdiction.

One thing we’ll see more of is Smith’s insistence that everything is cheap in this society, including land. A person who works an ordinary job can live in a mansion and own a fleet of cars.

We’ll discuss the plausibility of this in more detail later. For now, I’ll simply point out that capitalism is premised on scarcity: either naturally occurring, or created artificially by rent-seeking and monopolies.

It can’t be the case both that all goods are cheap and also that everyone is affluent, because in a capitalist economy, my spending is your income and vice versa. If everything is low-priced (as we’ll see below with the cigarettes), then the people who sell those goods are making very little money, by definition. Someone here must have to be poor.

However, Smith breezes past this and writes as if there are no tradeoffs at all. In an economic Lake Wobegon fantasy, he believes you can have a society where everyone is richer than average.

Here, the underground crossings ran to neighborhood groceries, stationery, and candy stores—the kind of mom-and-pop operations nearly killed off by city zoning back home. I took another fling, stopping for some cigarettes, my first decent ones in almost five years. Two copper pennies for the most expensive in the place.

I haven’t emphasized it until now, but one of the reasons we’re supposed to believe Win’s United States is a dystopian, oppressive regime is that it bans tobacco.

As we saw last week, when Win saw signs advertising cigarettes, he exulted, “Prohibition was over!” In a previous chapter, he mentioned a “Confiscation Act” to Jenny Noble – although practically everyone smokes illegal cigarettes, including Win himself, and he says he refuses to enforce anti-drug laws unless he absolutely has to.

It’s no coincidence that Smith considers tobacco bans a mark of evil. Much like living in Colorado or worshipping gold bars, smoking is one of those arbitrary fetishes that an unusual number of libertarians share.

As I covered in my review of Atlas Shrugged, Ayn Rand absurdly argued that smoking was rationally proper. She claimed it was symbolic of human supremacy over nature, representing the power of a tamed fire held in the hand. Obviously, the real explanation is that she was addicted to nicotine. She concocted a superficially “rational” justification for something she wanted to do for less-than-rational reasons.

Ayn Rand never acknowledged the health risks of smoking (even though she had lung cancer later in life) or the responsibility of the tobacco companies that profit from sickening their customers. L. Neil Smith carries on that tradition of silence. In TPB, cigars and cigarettes are a symbol of individual freedom, nothing more. He never breathes a word about how they’re bad for you.

Even at the time Atlas Shrugged was published, the tobacco-cancer link was understood. TPB has even less excuse. It was published in 1980, well after the evidence had mounted to the point where it was completely unreasonable to deny it.

Of course, this is an ideologically motivated omission. If some products were both addictive and inherently harmful, there’d be a legitimate argument to restrict them. Smoking bans couldn’t just be waved off as yet another overreach by a tyrannical, power-hungry government. At the very least, you’d have to admit that there were real tradeoffs involved in regulating tobacco – something that Smith is never willing to do.

His saving throw is that his ancap utopia has super-advanced medical technology, and can doubtless cure any disease caused by smoking without difficulty. However, that’s not the case in the real world. We shouldn’t take political lessons from a fictional society that doesn’t suffer from problems we still have.

Now, to be fair, I don’t support tobacco bans either. I’m not a smoker, but I’m a fan of individual autonomy. Absent a compelling reason, people should have the right to choose what to do with their own bodies. Also, as America found out with alcohol and then again with cannabis, laws that ban recreational drugs often do more harm than the problem they’re trying to solve.

Of course, people who smoke can be charged higher insurance premiums and other sin taxes to account for the increased risk they’re assuming, and we can and should limit tobacco advertising, especially the kind targeted at children. Also, the right to put nicotine into your own body doesn’t imply a right to make others breathe your secondhand smoke, so no-smoking laws in public places are perfectly fine.

The chapter ends on a cliffhanger, just as Win finds what he’s looking for:

At long last a fancy scrollwork signpost announced PLACE d’EDMOND GENÊT. My stomach tightened, my mouth went dry. Who was this other Edward Bear?

All of a sudden a 747 was trying to land on my back! I whirled; a long black hovercraft tore down the street, coming my way fast. It bellowed, riding a tornado as other drivers bumped up over the sidewalk, swerved and slid to avoid being hit. Six feet above the ground, the monster covered blocks in seconds, sending a hideous roar ahead and a shower of sparks. Bullets sang around my head.

…I wrestled the automatic free from my coat and thumbed the hammer back, jerking the trigger again and again as the machine slid crazily around the corner. It was like a dream where nothing you do has any effect.

Win runs up the driveway, toward the house. The garage door starts opening, as if someone is expecting him, but too late:

My face slammed into the rising door as the bullets slammed into my body. Blood splashed the panel in front of me! The bottom edge rose past me… the pavement rose and smacked me in the face.

It’s no spoiler to say that Win doesn’t die here. But it does give us an opportunity, in the next chapter, to explore what an anarcho-capitalist philosophy has to say about medical care.

New reviews of The Probability Broach will go up every Friday on my Patreon page. Sign up to see new posts early and other bonus stuff!

Other posts in this series:

The Probability Broach: Vegas on steroids

The Probability Broach, chapter 5

In a phone booth in a strange futuristic city, Win Bear has found a number for his doppelganger. Driven by curiosity, he dials it.

To his frustration, he gets a busy signal. However, the phone booth is able to draw him a map to the address he was trying to call. It turns out the other Win Bear’s house is only a few blocks away.

When I emerged, traffic was still heavy, and fast. Looking for a break, I glanced back the way I’d come only minutes ago. A flashing arrow at the curb spelled out PEDESTRIANS and pointed to an escalator that flowed down into a broad, well-lit area lined with shops, then became a moving walkway. Halfway through the trip, I passed a tunnel labeled, paradoxically, OVERLAND TRAIL. Here and there cheerful three-dimensional posters advertised food, entertainment—and tobacco. Prohibition was over! There seemed to be a lot of ads for various intimidating firearms, and something calling itself SECURITECH—WHILE YOU SLEEP. Was that a burglar alarm or a sleeping pill?

Nope, sorry. Not excessive enough.

L. Neil Smith at least acknowledges that there should be ads in his ultra-capitalist confederacy. However, they ought to be a lot more common than “here and there”. Every street corner should look like this:

A bustling city intersection at night, blanketed with neon signs and billboards

In a laissez-faire society without zoning laws or regulations, every vertical surface should be covered with neon signs and digital billboards jostling each other for space. Everything else should be plastered with strata of posters, fliers and handbills. Every business would have an incentive to make their ads bigger, brighter, gaudier and more obnoxious than all the rest, to stand out from their competitors.

Every beautiful landscape and natural wonder should be despoiled with hideous advertisements (which did indeed happen in a less civilized era).

This world shouldn’t be as Smith describes it: a calm, laid-back place with verdant parkland, peaceful residential areas, and charmingly understated commercial districts. This world should look like Las Vegas on steroids.

Forcibly reminded of certain biological facts, I stopped off at a door with appropriate markings, a model of understatement as it turned out. More than the usual monument to the ceramic arts, the rest room was an updated Roman bath: swimming pool, snack bar, even sleep cubicles for rent. I thought of Colfax Avenue hookers who’d love the setup, then noticed that such services—your choice, organic or mechanical—were available at a modest fee.

Sexbots in ancap utopia! Are you even a little surprised?

Perhaps out of some residual sense of propriety, this is the only thing Smith says in this book about sex work, so I won’t dwell on it. I’m not against sex work in principle – as I’ve said before, I believe we own our own bodies, and we should be able to decide what to do with them.

However, it’s essential to acknowledge how exploitative the industry often is, and how much potential for abuse exists. More than almost any other profession, if it’s going to exist, there has to be rigorous oversight and strong worker protections. A world where sex work exists with no legal protections is going to resemble the worst caricatures put about by those who’d like to ban it altogether.

Definitely feeling more like myself, whoever that was (another twinge of curiosity about this “Edward W. Bear”), I ambled along in the afternoon sun, absently aware that the almost-silent vehicles swooshing along beside me in the street produced no noticeable exhaust. Down in the curbing there wasn’t a scrap of garbage.

Now that isn’t even slightly believable.

In an anarcho-capitalist world, by definition, any trash pickup would be a private service you’d have to pay for. On the other hand, there’d be no laws against littering or dumping, because there are no laws against anything. So why not just throw your garbage out the window into the street? Why not dump your business’ trash in the nearest park, or discharge your factory’s effluent into the river? If your car breaks down, why not abandon it on the roadside? Once it leaves your hands, it’s not your problem anymore!

To quote an excerpt from my novel Commonwealth, here’s what would actually happen in a world like the one Smith wants:

MuniSan Incorporated, the private company that had been the city Department of Sanitation, had raised its rates because of shareholder pressure for higher profits. In response, many New Yorkers had canceled their garbage pickup. Instead, they dumped their trash on the street, where it was no one’s responsibility.

It had been a brutally hot summer, and black garbage bags piled up in sweltering heaps. They swelled and split in the sun like overripe fruit, disgorging decaying refuse. Flies and cockroaches swarmed over the stinking mounds; mosquitoes bred in the dirty water that pooled beneath them.

…As the garbage piled up, it clogged storm drains and treatment plants—plastic bags, soggy cardboard, chunks of styrofoam, dirty diapers, congealed lumps of grease and fat, sanitary pads, used condoms, dead animals, tangles of hair. Sewage backed up into the municipal water system, infiltrating the pipes that ran to apartments where people swiped their credit cards to fill glasses and pitchers from the tap.

Cholera and dysentery crept back into New York City. They appeared in the reclamation zones first, but spread slowly into wealthy neighborhoods. Following them came other waterborne diseases: typhoid fever, rotavirus, leptospirosis, norovirus, giardiasis.

…Meanwhile, other diseases reappeared, spread by rats, flies and mosquitoes: first bubonic plague, then malaria, yellow fever, dengue fever, chikungunya, West Nile virus, Zika fever, St. Louis encephalitis. In the feverish heat of the summer, a thousand pathogens found fertile soil, grew and swelled. An old darkness, once banished by public hygiene laws, woke from its long sleep and stretched subtle fingers into the crevices of the city.

…TV opinion segments and letters to the editor cried for someone to do something, but it was unclear who or what. Cleaning up one’s own street would be useless when the problem was citywide, and no individual could afford to pay for the whole city to be cleaned up. So everyone reasoned, and therefore no one solved the problem.

As I emphasized in this passage, public hygiene is a Prisoner’s Dilemma problem. It can’t be solved unless everyone cooperates (after all, a single person can litter and vandalize an otherwise-beautiful landscape that’s seen by thousands). However, there’s always a selfish incentive to skip doing your part and leave a mess behind for other people to clean up. And in an anarcho-libertarian society, there are only selfish incentives.

New reviews of The Probability Broach will go up every Friday on my Patreon page. Sign up to see new posts early and other bonus stuff!

Other posts in this series:

New on OnlySky: Is it better not to exist?

I have a new column this week on OnlySky. It’s about the strange philosophy of antinatalism, and how it led to terrorist violence in at least one case.

Antinatalism is a philosophical idea which claims it’s better not to exist, because existence inevitably involves pain and suffering, which should be avoided at all costs. Most antinatalists stop at urging others not to have children, which is a valid choice in line with the principle of individual autonomy.

However, a few disturbed people go further, concluding that life is so intolerable that it’s a positive good to end it – whenever and wherever possible. This is the nihilist mindset that appears to have inspired the bombing of an IVF clinic in California last month. This act of terrorism fortunately killed no one except the perpetrator, but it could easily have resulted in the deaths of innocent people, as well as the destruction of frozen embryos.

Before we pass judgment on the bomber, we need to examine the ideas that motivated him. Does the antinatalist philosophy hold up to criticism? Is it bad to be alive and unethical to reproduce?

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:

In the name of fairness, we should try to steelman the antinatalist argument. Here’s what they’d likely say for themselves.

When scientists run studies on human beings, they have an ethical obligation to do no harm, or at least, not leave the participants worse off than they were before. There’s a dark history of experiments carried out on unwilling or unaware participants that did grievous harm, which is why scientific studies today have to be approved by institutional review boards or other ethical watchdogs.

In the antinatalist view, having children is like an unethical human experiment.

Continue reading on OnlySky…

The Probability Broach: Mo’ money, mo’ problems

Money of various denominations and countries

The Probability Broach, chapter 5

Dizzy and baffled, stumbling through an unfamiliar world with no clue where he is or what’s happened to him, Win spots something he recognizes:

…lower and wider than I was used to, with tinted panes in a wrought-iron latticework, and a fancy Kremlinesque spire pointing skyward:

TELECOM

Whatever that meant. Nothing orients you faster in strange territory than browsing through the phone book. There wasn’t any door. I took two steps down into the booth and the street noises went away.

…No phone book. Just like back home. No telephone, either: just a simple matte-finished panel like sandblasted Corningware. Underneath was a keyboard. I plunked myself down on the broad upholstered bench and abruptly the screen had letters on it:

—NEED ASSISTANCE?—
The Grand Combined Director of Greater Paporte!
Gray, Bell, & Acme Communications Systems

As we tour this anarcho-capitalist fantasy world, one way to spot the authorial sleight of hand is to keep an eye out for what’s missing. This is a good example. This phone booth is far too neat and clean. Where’s the graffiti?

The impulse to make your mark is as close to universal as it gets. People from every era find it an irresistible temptation: whether it’s rude remarks directed at your rivals, boasts about your sexual prowess, fond memories of the dead, or the simple desire to leave something of yourself for the future.

Humans have put carvings and paintings on the walls of caves, on the stones of temples and cathedrals, and on the trunks of old trees. There’s graffiti on the walls of Pompeii and Herculaneum, inside Egyptian pyramids, and in the Church of the Holy Sepulchre, left by Christian crusaders.

Graffiti persists despite efforts to stamp it out. In an anarchy where there are no police and private property is only a convention, it should be omnipresent. Every surface should be covered with it.

Win pecks at the keyboard, and an animated avatar appears on the screen (“a pleasantly stereotypical old-timey operator, crisply pretty in a high-collared blouse and headset”). He’s a little startled to be talking to a cartoon, but he takes it in stride:

“Could you give me Long Distance? The Denver Police… This is Lieutenant Win Bear.”

“One moment, please Lieutenant Bear.” The screen blanked, then she reappeared. “I’m sorry, we have no records for a Denver Police in either local or trunkline memories. Are you sure you’re using the correct name?”

That stopped me. “What do you mean? Try ‘Denver, City, and County of.'”

Her face registered good-natured exasperation. “I’m very sorry, sir. I’ve accessed 36,904 listings: but no ‘Denver, City and County of.'”

Win is sure there must be an error in the phone system. He asks the animated operator what her directory covers:

“Sir, we list over seven billion individuals and organizations currently contracting with some twelve thousand telecommunications companies on this planet, the Moon, Mars, and Ceres Central. I am confident to sixteen decimals that there is no ‘Denver, City and County of’ in the known solar system. May I be of further assistance, or would you prefer a live operator?”

These interplanetary colonies are alluded to several times in this book, but L. Neil Smith never tries to justify how they can exist. Who on earth footed the bill for them?

A government, which marshals and directs the productive capacity of millions of people, can build something huge, complicated and costly – like a pyramid, an interstate highway system, or a space program, or a lunar colony. But there’s no realistic way a private individual could finance this, unless there are plutocrats so gigantically wealthy they might as well be kings.

In a libertarian world where money reigns supreme, everything has to be done for the sake of profit. There might be philosophical reasons for establishing a colony on the Moon or Mars – scientific curiosity, a belief that our destiny lies in the stars, a desire to spread out so humanity won’t go extinct in case of planetary catastrophe – but there sure as hell isn’t an economic reason for it. There’s nothing on another planet that we can’t get more easily on Earth.

Win is starting to form a hypothesis about what’s happened to him. Given the high-tech look of everything (“some artist’s conception of Tomorrowland”), plus the mention of space colonies, he concludes that this is the future. He wonders if the explosion he survived was the first nuke of World War III, and the force of the blast flung him through time. Or was the unfamiliar gadgetry in Vaughn Meiss’ lab a prototype time machine?

He looks up Otis Bealls, wondering if the man or any of his descendants might be alive. There’s no one by that exact name in the directory, but:

The cursor dot slide-whistled up and down the page uncertainly.

Then, in the right-hand column across from the Beallses, it caught me, right between the eyes:

BEAR, EDWARD W., Consulting Detective
626 E. Genêt Pl.		ACMe 9-4223

Win is dumbfounded to see his own name and his own (“more-or-less correct”) profession in the phone book of a strange futuristic city. Driven by irresistible curiosity, he punches in the number.

The machine displays a prompt: “PLEASE INSERT ONE TENTH COPPER OUNCE”. Win doesn’t know what kind of money that is, but he rummages through his pockets and finds the silver coin he took from Meiss’ lab. He puts it in the slot, and the machine accepts it.

There’s something that’s missing in this scene. It’s subtle, but look again at this seemingly innocent transaction. How is it possible that the phone booth only accepts one kind of coin – which, conveniently, just so happens to be a coin of the kind Win has on his person?

As we’ve discussed, this sort of thing should be a massive problem in an ancap society. There’s no central bank, no treasury, no government with a money-printing monopoly. Anyone who wants to coin their own money, can – and there’s a powerful incentive to do so, namely seigniorage, the power to profit by creating money on demand.

There should be dozens, if not hundreds, of currencies in circulation. There should be competing coins in different sizes and combinations of precious metals, as well as paper notes, gemstones, IOUs, electronic cash, carved stones, wampum beads, and more esoteric valuables. (In a later chapter, Smith does indeed say that there are competing private currencies, but we never see this.)

Trying to do business in this place would be a logistical nightmare. Imagine trying to buy something at a store, but being unable to, because the Venn diagram of currencies the merchant accepts and currencies you use has no overlap. Imagine having to check a hundred wildly fluctuating exchange rates every time you want to buy groceries.

Imagine how hard it would be to tell if an unfamiliar coin or bill is counterfeit – or, even if it’s not, whether its issuer has the reserves it claims to back the currency with. Imagine your life savings suddenly wiped out because the issuing bank went bust and your money is now worthless. Even coins of precious metal can be debased with less-valuable alloys.

Not least of all, imagine workers trapped in a cycle of exploitation and debt slavery because their employer pays them in company scrip that’s only accepted at its own overpriced stores. Again, under anarcho-capitalism, there’s every incentive to do this and no regulator that can prevent it.

L. Neil Smith never considers these problems because, like most libertarians, he doesn’t grasp that the economy is a construct of society. He thinks all the rules and norms he’s used to just arise naturally – like rivers and rainclouds. He can’t fathom that they come from the government he despises.

New reviews of The Probability Broach will go up every Friday on my Patreon page. Sign up to see new posts early and other bonus stuff!

Other posts in this series:

The Probability Broach: Kindergarteners packing heat

A small child holding a large assault rifle

The Probability Broach, chapter 5

Win sits up, dizzy and bloodied, his head throbbing from the explosion that hurled him into the air. He remembers fleeing from a hail of gunfire and escaping through what he thought was an emergency exit. But his surroundings bear no resemblance to that violent scene:

Through my personal haze, the scene was tranquil, bearing no relationship to the meat grinder I’d just been through: a broad emerald lawn and a five-foot hedge stretched endlessly in the distance. On the other side, a corrugated metal shack showed robin’s-egg blue. The air was warm, heavy with the scent of dark earth and growing things, dappled with sunshine and shade amid small groves of enormous trees; benches and sidewalks somehow tinted tones of red, orange, or yellow.

…Here and there, other people were dancing, talking in small groups, lying in pairs under leafy canopies, moving gently with the music. They wore a bewildering variety of costumes: bright swirly cloaks, skirts or kilts, trousers and tunics—riots of color strewn like shining flowers across the forested lawn.

…A hand on my shoulder—I started. A dark, pretty girl in orange bellbottoms stood behind me. “Are you all right?” she asked, almost apologetically… A sheathed dagger, needle slim, hung from a jewelled chain around her tanned and slender waist.

Unable to comprehend what’s happened, Win can only assume he was somehow thrown clear by the blast (“the Enquirer’s headline would read, POLICEMAN THROWN HUNDREDS OF FEET BY EXPLOSION, LIVES!”).

He croaks that he’s all right and staggers off, hurting and bewildered. People stare at him as he stumbles through the park, and as his head clears, he looks back at them. The first thing he notices, after the unfamiliar clothing styles, is that everyone is armed:

Whatever the local ordinances were, I saw more low-slung handguns, more dirks and daggers, than in a dozen B-westerns and swashbucklers spliced together reel to reel. I found myself grabbing convulsively at my left armpit more than once. Fort Collins sure had changed!

…There hadn’t been a hardware collection like this since the Crusades were catered. Women and children sporting arms right along with the men.

In case it isn’t obvious, Win has entered a parallel universe. It’s L. Neil Smith’s anarcho-capitalist utopia, the North American Confederacy. The NAC is a society with no government, no laws and no police. Everyone is responsible for their own safety, hence why everyone is carrying weapons. At any moment, you might have to defend yourself against someone trying to rob or kill you, and no one’s coming to help you if you can’t.

You might think that a lawless, heavily armed society would be like the Wild West. It should be a place where the threat of violence is always hanging in the air like thunderclouds, where every stranger is regarded with suspicion and hostility, and every encounter takes place through narrowed eyes and hands hovering above pistol grips. Smith insists that isn’t the case:

Something was missing—the barely concealed hostility and fear that haunted my city streets. These people never seemed to push or jostle, never avoided looking at one another. They’d nod politely—even speak!—and they carried their heads high, unafraid of the world around them. It sent shivers down my spine.

This is the “an armed society is a polite society” thinking that’s ubiquitous among gun-worshippers. It’s also completely false.

As ultra-violent America proves by its own bad example, putting more guns in more hands makes society more violent, not less. There will always be angry, unstable people who erupt at the slightest provocation. There will always be abusers and psychopaths who have no qualms about lashing out at others to get their way. In a world where nobody is armed, these confrontations might end in yelling, curses, or at worst, a brawl. In a world where everyone is armed, they’ll end with bullets.

And that’s what happens in the real world, where people know that calling the police is an option when you’re in danger, and where the threat of legal consequences deters people from choosing violence. In Smith’s world, going for your gun is the first and last resort. There’s every reason for lethal violence to be more common, and no reasons for it to be less. His North American Confederacy shouldn’t be a peaceful, well-mannered utopia; it should be a war zone.

But wait – among that panoply of armed strangers, did he mention children? Yes, children:

Even more jarring were the weapons—men and women alike, little people, children. I passed one obvious kindergartener carrying a pistol almost as big as he was! Was there some danger here I wasn’t seeing?

…Yet these people seemed so full of cordiality. Could the source of their pride and dignity be nothing more than the mechanical means of dealing death they carried?

Okay, look.

There’s a reason we don’t let children do things like drink alcohol or drive, and it’s not because we live in an overbearing nanny state. It’s because their brains are still developing and maturing. Kids exhibit a combo of intense emotions, lack of common sense, and impulsive behavior that can be hard for parents to manage at the best of times.

As the father of an 8-year-old boy, I can attest that kids are capable of being intelligent, sweet, compassionate, and insightful. They’re also prone to being stubborn and contrary for no good reason, ignoring directions they’ve been given a hundred times, doing dangerous things out of sheer carelessness, and throwing huge tantrums over inconsequential problems. They stick things in electric outlets, walk into traffic, try to pet strange animals, run up and down the stairs. My son once touched a cactus to see what would happen.

And he’s old enough now to occasionally reason out the consequences of his actions. Smith is proposing that even younger children should be trusted with deadly weapons. I wouldn’t even trust a kindergartener with a permanent marker!

Then there are the teenagers. Again, it’s not just the government passing arbitrary laws because they hate freedom. The frontal cortex of the brain, which is involved in foresight and self-control, isn’t fully developed in teens. That’s why they’re prone to impulsive, risky behavior like dangerous driving, drugs and unsafe sex. (The free market also recognizes this; that’s why they pay higher car insurance rates.)

You can imagine how disastrous it could be to add easily accessible, unregulated firearms to the mix. What happens in anarcho-capitalist world if you’re the parent of a teenager and you ground them for bad behavior? Can they threaten to shoot you?

Libertarians reflexively assume that humans are perfectly rational beings who carefully weigh the benefits and drawbacks of every decision, even in cases where it’s obvious that assumption is false. This is the most shocking example. Owning a firearm, much less carrying it around, demands a level of care, discipline and vigilance that most adults don’t possess.

Kids die, all the time, from finding and playing with their parents’ guns. In the past few years, guns have become the #1 cause of death for U.S. children and teenagers. It takes a willfully perverse mind to look at this carnage and conclude the only problem is that there aren’t enough kids packing heat.

Image credit: Public domain, via NARA/DVIDS

New reviews of The Probability Broach will go up every Friday on my Patreon page. Sign up to see new posts early and other bonus stuff!

Other posts in this series:

New on OnlySky: Resurrecting the chestnut

I have a new column this week on OnlySky. It’s about how human carelessness wiped out a beloved tree, and whether we can bring it back from the dead.

The American chestnut tree used to be part of the fabric of everyday life in the United States. Its nuts were a reliable and abundant source of food for humans, livestock and wild animals. Its timber was used to build homes, ships, railroads, and more. But in the early 1900s, an imported fungal blight destroyed it in the wild and drove it to the edge of extinction.

Almost since the chestnut was decimated, plant scientists have tried to bring it back, breeding and genetically engineering new varieties that they hope are resistant to blight. And now, after decades of labor, these efforts are beginning to bear fruit. A New York nonprofit is distributing a thousand (hopefully!) healthy, blight-immune hybrid seedlings to anyone who wants to plant and care for them. Can we restore it to the wild and bring back the glory days of the chestnut? Should we even try?

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:

To restore the chestnut, we’d have to make it resistant to blight. There are two approaches that have been tried to achieve this.

One is traditional hybridization, the same method used by farmers for millennia to breed plants with desirable characteristics. Plant breeders cross the blight-resistant Chinese chestnut with its American cousin, then backcross the hybrid with American chestnuts. They repeat this process over multiple generations, with the goal of creating a tree that has the blight resistance genes of the Chinese chestnut, but is otherwise almost identical to the American chestnut.

The disadvantage of this method is how much time it requires. It’s essentially a form of guided evolution, and evolution doesn’t run on human timescales. It takes about seven years to breed each new generation of trees, plus years more to grow them and evaluate whether they can fend off the blight. Plant scientists have been working on breeding blight-resistant chestnut trees since 1922, and their efforts are still ongoing.

Continue reading on OnlySky…

The Probability Broach: Self-hating government scientists

The Probability Broach, chapter 4

Win has found some enigmatic clues in Vaughn Meiss’ office, but nothing conclusive. He goes into the next room, which is the dead scientist’s laboratory:

Vaughn Meiss’s lab made all the stereotypes come true. Remember The Fly? It was just like that—strung with wires and insulators, bulky pilot-lighted cabinets looming in the twilight. Only the posters were out of place. One on the back of the door read, GOVERNMENT SCIENCE IS A CONTRADICTION IN TERMS—AYN RAND and, penciled below: Ayn Rand is a contradiction in terms.

L. Neil Smith never misses an opportunity to slip in a gibe at the government… except that Vaughn Meiss, prior to his death, was literally a government scientist. He was working for Colorado State University!

As I covered in my review of Atlas Shrugged, government research has given us inventions like nuclear power, space flight, GPS and the internet. To that list, we could add the World Wide Web, hyperlinks and web browsers (created by Tim Berners-Lee at the European physics laboratory CERN), the inactivated-virus flu vaccine (developed by Jonas Salk at the University of Michigan with funding from the U.S. Army), magnetic resonance imaging (invented by Paul Lauterbur at Stony Brook University, part of New York’s public SUNY system), and many more.

This history of innovation doesn’t fit with libertarian dogma that only the free market can create anything new or useful, so they train themselves to ignore it. In fact, L. Neil Smith is so well-practiced at ignoring it that he can write a scene like this with a straight face – where a character invents something revolutionary while working for a government institution, all while decrying government science.

There are multiple levels of hypocrisy here he’s blind to. It’s the same sawing-off-the-branch-you’re-sitting-on vibe as Trump voters who work federal jobs because those are the only good jobs on offer in their fading rural counties, while at the same time yelling about waste and fraud and demanding the government be radically cut back.

As Win is poking around a console (“seemingly the command post, covered with knobs and dials”), he hears footsteps at the door, which he locked behind him when he entered:

Then a crash! The door bulged, glass shattering into paint-covered fragments. The forty-one flashed into my hand as I ducked behind the console. Again! The doorjamb burst, splinters flying, and a cataract of data disks fountained to the floor. A man stood framed in the doorway, tossed his fire-extinguisher battering ram aside, and drew a weapon from his right hip.

The man enters the room, but without spotting Win hiding behind the console. Win gets the drop on him:

As he drifted past, I swapped the Magnum to my left hand, laid the muzzle on the back of his neck, and rose. “Stand easy, asshole!” I whispered, trying to keep an eye on the door. He turned abruptly. I grabbed, jammed my thumb between the hammer of his automatic and the firing pin. The weapon pointed at my guts, the hammer fell. Pain lanced through my hand but the pistol failed to fire. I wrenched it away, smacked him backhand across the face with mine. Blood spurted, black in the dark, and he crumpled.

The stunned thug falls against the console, and his jacket snags on a control. Lights light up, circuits whir into life, and there’s a rumble from across the room. He hears Otis Bealls yell “No! No!”, just as someone else standing in the doorway starts shooting wildly at him:

My forty-one roared and bucked, roared again. The machine gunner was blasted out the door, blood streaming in his wake like crepe-paper ribbons, and slammed into the wall behind…. More company through the door, guns blazing—Bealls was still yelling in the background. I fired—saw things shatter, people fall—and ran for the fire exit, plunging into darkness. Bullets buzzed and pinged behind me. I scrambled down a passageway, feeling dizzy, twisted. Instead of stairs, I found blue sky. I was at the bottom of a freshly excavated hole—like a grave.

Win scrambles out of the hole into “green grass and sunshine”, just as there’s a violent explosion and he’s sent flying into the air.

I’ll say this for L. Neil Smith: he can write a solid action sequence. I had no trouble picturing this sequence of events in my head. Aside from the obligatory bad guys missing every shot, it’s also fairly realistic. (As opposed to Ayn Rand action scenes, where the characters can deliver monologues mid-firefight.)

I still have questions, though. The most important is, why wasn’t Vaughn Meiss’ lab sealed? If its contents were vital to national security, why did the bad guys leave it unlocked and unguarded for just anyone to wander in? They should have sent their goons to cordon it off and confiscate its contents the same day they killed him.

Also, when they found out Win was looking where he shouldn’t have, why did they burst in with guns blazing? Why not just walk in, identify themselves as federal agents and arrest him?

They could have taken him away to somewhere they could interrogate him at leisure, to find out what he knows. That seems preferable to the shoot-first-and-ask-questions-later approach – except, of course, it wouldn’t have given Smith the opportunity to write this very manly and violent fight scene.

If it wasn’t clear, the thug that Win knocked against the console accidentally switched on the machinery, opening a portal to a parallel universe. When he ran for what he thought was the “fire exit”, he passed through that portal and into another reality.

Everything in this book up to this point has been a prologue. Beginning in the next chapter, this book achieves escape velocity – rising from mundane political satire into psychedelic anarcho-libertarian fantasyland.

L. Neil Smith has said what he dislikes in our current politics, but now he’s going to present his alternative. In spite of his best efforts to make it seem reasonable and attractive, it’s a wild parade of absurdities and begged questions. Stay tuned!

New reviews of The Probability Broach will go up every Friday on my Patreon page. Sign up to see new posts early and other bonus stuff!

Other posts in this series:

New on OnlySky: In vivo gene editing

I have a new column this week on OnlySky. It’s about the future of genetic medicine – which, after decades of promise, has finally arrived.

CRISPR technology gives us the power to edit the DNA inside a living cell. We’re already using it to cure some inherited disorders, like sickle-cell anemia. But those are inherently easier to treat, since we can harvest stem cells from a person’s body, do the genetic edit in the controlled environment of a lab, and make sure that everything is working as intended before we transfuse them back.

The holy grail of genetic therapy is the ability to modify DNA within the body, known as in vivo gene editing. In a new paper published this month, a team of scientists claims to have done just that. With this technique, they appear to have saved the life of a baby born with a rare and deadly genetic disease. More studies are still needed, as is always the case in science; but if this result holds up, it’s certain that more cures for previously untreatable conditions are soon to follow.

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:

Time was short, and with KJ facing brain and organ damage, his parents and doctors decided to try an experimental treatment rather than waiting for a transplant. The doctors sequenced his genome to determine the exact mutation he had, then designed a personalized base-editing therapy. Rather than using a virus to carry the gene editor, which can provoke a harmful inflammatory response, they encapsulated it in lipid nanoparticles that are taken up by cells and release their contents into the interior.

They engineered human cell lines in a petri dish to carry the same mutation, and dosed them with the gene editor to prove that it altered the DNA as intended. They tested it on mice and monkeys for safety and efficacy. Then, in February 2025, when KJ was six months old, they infused the gene editor into his body—and held their breath.

Continue reading on OnlySky…

The Probability Broach: Visit sunny Colorado

A majestic mountain range, with woodlands in the foreground

The Probability Broach, chapter 4

As part of his investigation into Vaughn Meiss’ murder, Win Bear wants to examine his office at the university. Otis Bealls, Meiss’ department chair, notes that Win doesn’t have a search warrant but agrees to show him around anyway.

Win is more than a little suspicious of Bealls’ suddenly cooperative attitude. He suspects a trap, but having come this far, he doesn’t want to leave without taking a look:

Vaughn Meiss’s office was a cinder-block cubicle in a nest of cinder-block cubicles along a cinder-block hall, all painted a depressingly familiar government gang-green. Bookcases teetered to the ceiling on all four walls, and a desk heaped with books and papers was crammed into the middle somehow. On the ceiling, over crumbing acoustic tile, he’d taped a Propertarian poster: IRS—IT REALLY STEALS!

…One strange datum: the desk was piled with histories covering the Revolution and two or three subsequent decades. Bookmarks—campus parking tickets going back to 1983—indicated special interest in Alexander Hamilton, the Federalist Party, and, by golly, Albert Gallatin.

Gallatin, you may remember, is the man whose face is on the strange gold coin Meiss was carrying when he died.

Win doesn’t seem to have consulted an encyclopedia, but in our world, Albert Gallatin was a real person. He was a politician and diplomat of America’s founding generation, a Swiss-born immigrant who was elected to Congress and served as Thomas Jefferson’s Secretary of the Treasury. He also played a role in negotiating a resolution to the Whiskey Rebellion (more on this later).

Another curious thing: in an absolutely jam-packed office, one drawer of the desk, the second on the right, was conspicuously empty, or almost so—a half-empty box of Norma .357 Magnum ammunition, 158-grain hollowpoints; a felt-tip pen bearing the odd inscription LAPORTE PARATRONICS, LTD., LAPORTE, N.A.C., TELECOM GRAY 4-3122; a single pistol cartridge in an unfamiliar caliber marked D & A Auto .476; and—another coin! This one was about the size of a quarter:

ONE HALF METRIC OUNCE
SILVER 999 FINE
THE LAPORTE INDUSTRIAL BANK, LTD.

The other side was even weirder, a ferocious-looking elder in a Karl Marx beard:

LYSANDER SPOONER
A.L. 32-110 ARCHITECT OF LIBERTY

Strangely, Win never speculates about what any of this means. The most he does is make a mental note to go to Laporte later to look for these businesses.

When a detective finds a clue like this, you’d think his brain would go into overdrive to figure out the crime. There aren’t many innocent explanations for someone minting their own money in secret—especially when those coins are found together with a bunch of bullets.

Shouldn’t he suspect a counterfeiting ring testing its equipment? Or some sovereign-citizen-esque plot to topple the United States and replace the dollar, like the German Reichsbürger plot of 2022? That would even fit with the involvement of SecPol.

In his internal monologue, Win brags about how good at his job he is (“In a business lucky to solve one out of twenty, I get my man about half the time”)—but that’s a case of “tell, don’t show” on the author’s part. Win never solves this, in the sense of deducing the solution from the clues he has. A few pages from now, he quite literally stumbles across the answer by accident.

These dubious clues in my pocket, I resolved to stop by the city of Laporte after I finished here. If it was the Laporte in Colorado, something definitely funny was going on. Six or seven miles northwest of Fort Collins, Laporte boasted fewer than five thousand inhabitants—an unlikely place for a bootleg mint, industrial bank, or paratronics factory—whatever that was.

In reading this chapter, I had a feeling of deja vu. Why are libertarians always drawn to Colorado?

In Atlas Shrugged, Ayn Rand described Colorado as the last redoubt of freedom when the rest of the world had been plunged into communism. She placed her secret capitalist utopia of Galt’s Gulch there, hidden in the Rocky Mountains.

The U.S. Libertarian Party was founded in Colorado in 1971. Libertarian thinker Robert LeFevre founded his unaccredited, pro-capitalism “Freedom School” there in the 50s.

And now there’s The Probability Broach, which takes place entirely in Colorado—both the dystopian version, and the parallel-universe Colorado that’s an anarcho-capitalist paradise. The fact that L. Neil Smith lived in Colorado himself is probably part of the reason, but still. Is it just a coincidence that libertarians keep settling there and placing their stories there?

This is only speculation, but I wonder if it’s inspired by Colorado’s geography. As I’ve said before, libertarianism is an ideology of the frontier. It’s premised—whether its advocates realize it or not—on the belief that there’s no need to get along with your neighbors, because you can always pull up stakes, move away and start over somewhere else.

The Rocky Mountains, which are the dramatic backbone of the state, are like a visual metaphor for this idea. They’re a natural boundary, majestic and beautiful yet isolated and forbidding. As opposed to, say, the Great Plains states, which are wide-open and flat and have no obvious place to go where others can’t follow you, the Rockies seem to promise escape to anyone who’s tired of putting up with civilization. That’s exactly what Ayn Rand used them for, of course.

Colorado’s history of gold rushes and silver booms may also play into its libertarian inclinations. There’s nothing more libertarian than the idea that you can get rich overnight by yourself in the wilderness.

Even though mining is no longer the basis of the state’s economy, those cultural memories linger. To a political ideology that worships gold, it will always be tantalizing to dream that the secret to enormous wealth is out there, just waiting for an adventurous person to find it.

New reviews of The Probability Broach will go up every Friday on my Patreon page. Sign up to see new posts early and other bonus stuff!

Other posts in this series:

New on OnlySky: The future of dying

I have a new column this week on OnlySky. It’s about the future of dying, and whether we should be able to take the decision into our own hands.

New York could soon be the eleventh U.S. state to legalize medical aid in dying, or MAID, for the terminally ill. Polls show the general public supports it by huge margins. However, it’s faced opposition from special interests: religious groups are against it because they believe our lives belong to God (by which they mean themselves); and disability-rights groups are against it because they fear people will be pressured to end their lives as a cheap alternative to costly medical treatment and social support.

The religious objections are easily dismissed in a secular society. The disability-rights objections, less so. Their fears aren’t frivolous, not in a capitalist society that values people primarily for how much they can afford to spend. Nevertheless, I argue that there’s a fundamental and overriding question of autonomy to consider. Can we be forced to do what others think is best for us? Do we own ourselves, and thus have the right to choose how we live our lives, including the choice to depart on our own terms – or do we not?

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:

If we have a freedom, we can choose how to exercise it. That choice necessarily includes the right not to exercise it. Freedom of speech implies the freedom to remain silent. Freedom of religion implies the freedom to be an atheist.

Just the same way, freedom to choose what we do with our lives implies the freedom to stop living. It’s the ultimate declaration of self-ownership and autonomy.

No one other than me can tell me what my purpose is, what brings me joy, or what makes my life worth living. If I decide—with clear mind and heart—that I no longer wish to continue, shouldn’t I have the right to make that choice? Is it fair or just to deny all people their liberty because it might be misused or abused in some cases?

Continue reading on OnlySky…