The Probability Broach: Metal detectors cause terrorism
Some parts of the author's worldview are almost reasonable, while others are way out there. And he doesn't know which is which.
https://freethoughtblogs.com/daylight/2025/04/11/tpb-metal-detectors-cause-terrorism/
The Probability Broach: Free-market mafiosi
Why anarchist societies are inherently unstable.
https://freethoughtblogs.com/daylight/2025/04/18/tpb-free-market-mafiosi/
The Probability Broach: Superfluous villainy
The bad guys in this book are more evil than they have any reason to be.
https://freethoughtblogs.com/daylight/2025/04/25/tpb-superfluous-villainy/
The Probability Broach: Smoke gets in your eyes
"In the anarcho-capitalist utopia that Smith fantasizes about, it would obviously be impossible to have environmental protection laws. Anyone could pollute to their heart’s content: spew smoke into the sky, pour raw sewage in rivers, dump trash in the ocean, bury toxic waste where it leaches into the soil.
Obviously, for-profit businesses can and have done all these things. They’ve caused a litany of infamous disasters, from Love Canal to Cancer Alley to the Donora death fog to the Exxon Valdez to Deepwater Horizon. But Smith is so dead-set on blaming government for every evil, he shoves that history under the rug and pretends that the state – not private actors chasing profit in an unregulated market – is solely responsible for pollution."
https://freethoughtblogs.com/daylight/2025/05/02/tpb-smoke-gets-in-your-eyes/
The Probability Broach: Education isn't efficient
"An 'efficient' policy would be to only spend our resources on educating those who stand to benefit the most. You could imagine a society that administers a test to children at a young age, sends those who score best to well-funded elite schools, and consigns everyone else to menial labor and serfdom, Brave New World-style. That would be 'efficient' in the sense Smith means. But civilized countries don’t do that, and for good reason."
https://freethoughtblogs.com/daylight/2025/05/09/tpb-education-isnt-efficient/
The Probability Broach: Visit sunny Colorado
"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."
https://freethoughtblogs.com/daylight/2025/05/16/tpb-visit-sunny-colorado/
The Probability Broach: Self-hating government scientists
"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."
https://freethoughtblogs.com/daylight/2025/05/23/tpb-self-hating-government-scientists/
The Probability Broach: Kindergarteners packing heat
"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."
https://freethoughtblogs.com/daylight/2025/05/30/tpb-kindergarteners-packing-heat/
The Probability Broach: Mo' money, mo' problems
"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.
...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."
https://freethoughtblogs.com/daylight/2025/06/06/tpb-mo-money-mo-problems/
The Probability Broach: Vegas on steroids
"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)."
https://freethoughtblogs.com/daylight/2025/06/13/tpb-vegas-on-steroids/
The Probability Broach: Coffin nails
"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."
https://freethoughtblogs.com/daylight/2025/06/20/tpb-coffin-nails/
The Probability Broach: Good samaritans
"In an anarcho-capitalist world, what would most people do if they heard gunshots outside and found a stranger bleeding to death on their doorstep? Wouldn’t they be more likely to conclude that this is someone else’s feud and they don’t want to get involved?
Would you be eager to take a dying stranger into your house and treat them at your own expense, knowing that some unknown party wants them dead, and knowing there are no police to call if you become the killer’s next target for helping their intended victim? Isn’t it more likely that the average person would say, 'This is none of my business, I’m staying out of it'?"
https://freethoughtblogs.com/daylight/2025/06/27/tpb-good-samaritans/
The Probability Broach: Affordable care
"Health care is the classic case of a market failure, because critically ill people can’t afford to take their time and shop around for the best deal. They have no choice but to go to the first doctor available and agree to whatever price they demand. In turn, the doctor should charge that patient as much as they can possibly pay – up to and including a lifetime of debt slavery.
That doesn’t happen here, but only because libertarian novelists have their characters play nice and cut each other sweetheart deals, rather than taking their beliefs to their logical, ruthless conclusion."
https://freethoughtblogs.com/daylight/2025/07/04/tpb-affordable-care/
The Probability Broach: Good guys with guns
"The real purpose of these 'good guy with a gun' scenarios isn’t to win over skeptics with the case for gun ownership. It’s to feed the egos of people who already own guns. It tells them that they’re lone heroes in a dangerous world, self-deputized to defend law and order from the scary outsiders all around."
https://freethoughtblogs.com/daylight/2025/07/11/tpb-good-guys-with-guns/
The Probability Broach: The man who killed Washington
"Unlike many libertarians and conservatives who wave the flag and proclaim that the U.S. is a glorious beacon of freedom, Smith takes the opposite stance. He believes that all governments everywhere are oppressive tyrannies, our own not excluded."
https://freethoughtblogs.com/daylight/2025/07/18/tpb-the-man-who-killed-washington/
The Probability Broach: Charity cases
"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?"
https://freethoughtblogs.com/daylight/2025/07/25/tpb-charity-cases/
The Probability Broach: White people’s histories
"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."
https://freethoughtblogs.com/daylight/2025/08/01/tpb-white-peoples-histories/
The Probability Broach: Smoke 'em if you got 'em
"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?"
https://freethoughtblogs.com/daylight/2025/08/08/tpb-smoke-em-if-you-got-em/
The Probability Broach: Constant vigilance
"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."
https://freethoughtblogs.com/daylight/2025/08/15/tpb-constant-vigilance/
The Probability Broach: Nine-tenths of the law
"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?"
https://freethoughtblogs.com/daylight/2025/08/22/tpb-nine-tenths/
The Probability Broach: Blood on the highway
"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."
https://freethoughtblogs.com/daylight/2025/08/29/tpb-blood-on-the-highway/
The Probability Broach: Roosevelt the warmonger
"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. 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."
https://freethoughtblogs.com/daylight/2025/09/05/tpb-roosevelt-the-warmonger/
The Probability Broach: Who lives, who dies, who tells your story
"In our world, defeating slavery took the bloodiest conflict ever fought on American soil. Does Smith expect us to believe that all this death and devastation was unnecessary? Could Abraham Lincoln have prevented the Civil War if only he’d been a better speechwriter?"
https://freethoughtblogs.com/daylight/2025/09/12/tpb-who-lives-who-dies-who-tells-your-story/
The Probability Broach: Villainous authoritarians
"This created a Prisoner’s Dilemma situation. Each state had a selfish incentive to sit out and let the others do the unpopular work of raising revenue—and because they all reasoned the same way, almost none of them ever did. In 1786, Congress requested $3.8 million from the states to pay national obligations, and got... $663."
https://freethoughtblogs.com/daylight/2025/09/19/tpb-villainous-authoritarians/
The Probability Broach: Indian trouble
"In this libertarian-friendly alternate history, the Native Americans were still displaced by white colonizers - but they were happy to move and no one felt any resentment over it."
https://freethoughtblogs.com/daylight/2025/09/26/tpb-indian-trouble/
The Probability Broach: Ook ook
"I mean no disrespect to our ape cousins when I say that they’re not intelligent in the same sense or to the same degree as humans."
https://freethoughtblogs.com/daylight/2025/10/03/tpb-ook-ook/
The Probability Broach: Crime and punishment
Break out the thumbscrews.
https://freethoughtblogs.com/daylight/2025/10/10/tpb-crime-and-punishment/
The Probability Broach: Go directly to jail
"In this society, the CEOs and top investors of security firms would literally be above the law. They’d be in charge of private armies that answer only to them, like mafia dons or feudal lords in the days of old. Needless to say, TPB never depicts the extremely foreseeable abuses that would arise from this arrangement."
https://freethoughtblogs.com/daylight/2025/10/17/tpb-go-directly-to-jail/
The Probability Broach: Justice for sale
"The overarching idea of anarchism is that there should be no coercive power relations or hierarchies. That sounds good in theory, but only until some antisocial asshole is making your life miserable and there’s no way to make them stop."
https://freethoughtblogs.com/daylight/2025/10/24/tpb-justice-for-sale/
The Probability Broach: Might makes right
"What would actually happen, if we abolished the state and no one had a monopoly on force, is that all the historical factors that led to the creation of states the first time would play out again. The most wealthy and powerful would gather small armies of thugs to themselves, becoming local warlords or robber barons."
https://freethoughtblogs.com/daylight/2025/10/31/tpb-might-makes-right/
The Probability Broach: Cracks in utopia
"The best way to learn about a civilization, real or fictional, is to look into its cracks—to ask who it’s not serving, and why."
https://freethoughtblogs.com/daylight/2025/11/07/tpb-cracks-in-utopia/
The Probability Broach: Whose streets? Our streets!
"Reading libertarian novels is like watching a magician’s act. You know you’re being fooled; you just have to spot the sleight of hand when it happens. Often, it’s a casual mention of something that logically shouldn’t exist in their world."
https://freethoughtblogs.com/daylight/2025/11/14/tpb-whose-streets-our-streets/
The Probability Broach: Economies of scale
"Smith doesn’t want readers to picture a cyberpunk dystopia where colossal, amoral megacorps carve up the world, and most people are impoverished peons who live in company-town slums and spend their lives in indentured servitude to their employers."
https://freethoughtblogs.com/daylight/2025/11/21/tpb-economies-of-scale/
The Probability Broach: Fair cop
"Why would an accused criminal be so obliging as to put up a bond, if there’s no authority that can force them to do so?"
https://freethoughtblogs.com/daylight/2025/11/28/tpb-fair-cop/
The Probability Broach: Too much freedom
Nothing's more libertarian than a Dust Bowl.
https://freethoughtblogs.com/daylight/2025/12/05/tpb-too-much-freedom/
The Probability Broach: Robots do nothing
John Henry would've been pleased.
https://freethoughtblogs.com/daylight/2025/12/12/tpb-robots-do-nothing/
The Probability Broach: What have the Romans ever done for us?
"You can’t just look at one side of the ledger and assume all the money you spent on compliance is wasted. What dollar value do you place on having clean air to breathe, clean water to drink, healthy food to eat that isn’t tainted or adulterated, and roads that aren’t littered with the smoking wrecks of unsafe vehicles?"
https://freethoughtblogs.com/daylight/2025/12/19/tpb-what-have-the-romans-ever-done-for-us/
The Probability Broach: The myth of the lone genius
The persistent libertarian delusion that one smart guy can do everything by himself.
https://freethoughtblogs.com/daylight/2025/12/26/tpb-the-myth-of-the-lone-genius/
The Probability Broach: Blue sky
We owe many of our most valuable breakthroughs to pure curiosity-driven research that wasn’t undertaken to serve a commercial purpose.
https://freethoughtblogs.com/daylight/2026/01/02/tpb-blue-sky/
The Probability Broach: Non-state violence
Is it only governments that wage war and commit violence? You wish.
https://freethoughtblogs.com/daylight/2026/01/09/tpb-non-state-violence/
The Probability Broach: Backyard WMDs
Building weapons of mass destruction with no oversight. What could possibly go wrong?
https://freethoughtblogs.com/daylight/2026/01/16/tpb-backyard-wmds/
The Probability Broach: Shame, shame
"It's a recent and modern innovation in ethics to hold that you can't punish people for their opinions, no matter how offensive."
https://freethoughtblogs.com/daylight/2026/01/23/tpb-shame-shame/
Adam Lee
