Visions of Liberty Part 1

Visions of Liberty.

edited by Mark Tier and Martin H. Greenberg.

AN ENEMY OF THE PEOPLE . . .

Granddad told me about Amanda Green, a teacher in a small town near San Francisco. When she didn't show up at school one morning, someone went to see if she was hurt-and found her house trashed, all her files and computer gone, but no sign of her.

And her valuables untouched. No ordinary burglars.

Her neighbors knew nothing. But they'd heard the familiar sounds of the sirens and car doors slamming and thumping feet in the middle of the night . . . and they'd closed their houses up tight.

A terrorist, claimed the HSS, inciting her students to rebel against the state.

A homely grandmother, a dedicated teacher, loved by her students, and respected by the community, a terrorist? For teaching her students the meaning of life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness?

Amanda Green was the spark that lit the fire. It started quietly, like a burning ember, as groups held sporadic protests here and there. Only to be brutally repressed by the HSS police.

The TV coverage inflamed the nation. Within days millions of people across the country were parading with signs saying "Liberty or Death," "Don't Tread on Me," and even "Taxation is Theft."

-from "Renegade" by Mark Tier Baen Books also edited by Mark Tier & Martin H. Greenberg Give Me Liberty

Introduction: Visions of Liberty

by Mark Tier

Imagine we're on a plane; we've crossed an ocean, we've landed; we're taxiing up to the gate. As we file off the plane we have our pa.s.sports ready.

But something rather strange happens: no one wants to look at them. We see no official-looking types of any kind.

Perhaps we have to get our luggage first. But as we come down to the baggage carousels we don't see any customs or immigration officials; nor do we see any barrier between us and the outside world. We can pick up our bags and walk straight out of the terminal off an international flight into a taxi. Which is exactly what we do.

Welcome to Freelandia, a country-perhaps it's better to call it a place-which is truly free: there's no government to invade and restrict our liberties. Of course, Freelandia doesn't exist (yet) except in my imagination.

And in science fiction, the literature of the imagination. Where else can we skim across the surface of black holes, dive into the sun, and journey to the beginning, the end, and the edge of the universe? And visit a society without government that works.

Could that be possible in reality, not just in science fiction? After all, if you counted the number of societies without government on the fingers of one hand, you wouldn't even open your fist. And if government disappeared, wouldn't the result be anarchy? Chaos? Isn't government an essential prerequisite of peace and order?

If we were to travel back in time, some ten or twenty thousand years, before the development of agriculture and the beginnings of civilization, we wouldn't find any governments as we know them today.

h.o.m.o sapiens were hunter-gatherers, living in tribes of some hundred or so people. Yes, tribes have rulers too. Chiefs and shamans. But tribal chieftains rarely have the power toforce their decisions on the members of their tribe. They are more like leading citizens who rule by moral suasion and consensus rather than police power.

That all changed with the development of agriculture some ten thousand years ago. For the first time, a few dozen square miles of land could support human populations much larger than a hundred-odd hunter-gatherers. For the first time, our ancestors stayed fixed in one place.

For the first time, there was something to loot.

Pick up any history book and you'll find a record of kings, princes, shahs, chiefs, emperors, czars and their battles. What were they fighting over? Today, governments will tell you they're fighting for freedom.

But freedom is a very recent phenomenon. The concept of freedom originated with the Greeks and Romans, but did not become a part of the political landscape until the Renaissance just a few hundred years ago.

Even today, words that we take for granted like "freedom," "rights," "liberty," and "free will" simply have no counterparts in most of the world's languages. For most of the world's people, these concepts just don't exist.

No medieval king or Indian maharajah ever fought for freedom. They fought to keep their power or to expand it. Their prize: the surplus they could extract from the peasantry that financed the building of their glittering palaces and ornate churches and temples. Today's major tourist attractions-the pyramids of Egypt, the Taj Mahal, the Angkor Wat, Notre Dame-were all built by forced or slave labor for the pure benefit of the rulers. There was no pretense that "we're doing this for your own good."

Many times, kingdoms and empires were overrun by latter-day hunter-gatherers. The Greeks and Romans called them barbarians; the Europeans called them Huns; the Chinese called them Mongols.

They came with only one objective: to loot as much as they could. And sometimes they stayed; after all, a steady stream of loot in the form of taxes can be more attractive than the spoils of hit-and-run raiding.

The greatest of these was Genghis Khan. His empire collapsed upon his death but his grandson, Kublai Khan, established the first alien dynasty to rule all China-the Yuan (12791368). History, of course, is written by the victors, so Genghis Khan and Kublai Khan were transformed from bandit leaders into great princes. After all, onlylosers remain barbarians.

From the agricultural revolution until the Renaissance, mankind had the choice of rule or be ruled; to be the oppressed or the oppressor. The idea of freedom-that you should neither rule nor be ruled, but be left alone to pursue your own happiness in your own way, and grant others the same right-did not exist, just as it still doesn't exist in most parts of the world.

When you are ruled you have no rights. You are property. Such is the meaning of "the divine right of kings," the ideology which flowered in Europe in the Middle Ages. Kingdoms did not have citizens; they had va.s.sals. Under "the divine right of kings," everythingand everybody in the kingdom belonged to the monarch. Kings fought each other for territory and to the victor went the divine right to rule. In China, when a new dynasty was established they said that the old one had lost "the mandate of heaven." In j.a.pan, as in Thailand, the ruler was thought to be the representative of G.o.d on earth. All these names are no more than Orwellian double-speak to dress up and legitimize the reality that might was right.

We can trace the origin of government back to the first thug who spied the opportunity to live a life of ease on the backs of the peasants. His spiritual successors are still in our midst today, with names like Lenin, Stalin, Mao Zedong, Pol Pot, and Idi Amin-and those petty bureaucrats who love to flaunt their power over you whenever you have some dealing with a government agency.

A revolution in the idea of government began with the Renaissance, was crystallized by John Locke among others, and came into being for the first time in human history with the American Revolution. The idea: that government should serve man instead of man serving government; that rulers should be the people'sservants, not their masters. That people have theinnate right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness, and that the purpose of government is to defend those rights, not to invade them for the benefit of the few at the top.

But how to create such a government? Because what sets government apart from every other organization is that it is the legal instrument of force within a society. No other group has the right to use force except in self-defense, and the people who do we call criminals.

When so much force is concentrated in one organization's hands, how can you limit its use? And you must , if you want to live in a free society; only the initiation of force can divert you from the pursuit of your own happiness. Only the initiation of force can threaten your life. The greatest danger to your freedom is not some foreign power-it is your own government. When Thomas Jefferson said "the price of liberty is eternal vigilance," it was the government of the United States that he was warning his fellow citizens to be vigilant against.

The solution of America's founding fathers was to delineate and restrict the role of government. Via the Const.i.tution and the Bill of Rights they clearly (they thought) laid down what government could do, saying that everything else was reserved to the people.

Unfortunately, the imperative of every human organization is to grow. Businesses grow by making more sales and gaining market share; a.s.sociations grow by signing up more members; governments grow by expanding their power.

This never happens overnight; government grows by salami tactics, slice by slice. For example, when the income tax was introduced in 1913 no one in his right mind would have suggested a top rate of 90 percent. In fact, there was considerable support for capping the income tax at 4 percent. This was shot down by those who argued that specifying such a maximum rate would mean the income tax would rapidly rise to that (then) horrific level. Can you imagine living in a world where an income tax of 4 percent is unthinkable!?

So the government of the United States has grown, slice by unnoticeable slice, till it bears scant resemblance to the government at the country's birth.

Perhaps there is some other way to put a government's use of force into a straitjacket from which it cannot escape. To the best of my knowledge, no one has ever come up with a convincing, workable proposal along these lines.

As Ayn Rand put it inThe Fountainhead : "The only way in which we can have any law at all is to have as little of it as possible. I see no ethical standard by which to measure the whole unethical concept of a State, except in the amount of time, of thought, of money, of effort and obedience, which a society extorts from its every member."1 If the initiation of force is unethical, then it logically follows that government, as we know it, is also unethical. But that, of course, does not answer the question: Could a society without government actually work? If it's hard to imagine a world in which a 4 percent income tax is unthinkable, it's much harder to imagine how a governmentless society could avoid breaking out into a civil war, or simply degenerating into chaos.

That's a common view; after all, the word "anarchy" is generally used to mean "chaos in the absence of government." But that's to a.s.sume, mistakenly, that government is the source of law and order.

On January 24, 1848, the California gold rush began. But it took eighteen years for the U.S. Congress to enact a mining law to regulate such discoveries. Meanwhile, gold production in California boomed.

How could that have happened without a governmental framework to recognize mining claims, register t.i.tles, and regulate disputes?

The miners created their own. They established districts, registries, procedures for establishing and registering a claim and buying and selling claim t.i.tles, and a system for resolving disputes. Officers were usually elected, including the recorder of claims. Their private arrangements were recognized in California state courts; and Congress's 1866 statute "explicitly noted that all explorations for minerals would be subject to those 'local customs or rules of miners in the several mining districts' that were not in conflict with the laws of the United States."2 This is just one of many historical examples of what Friedrich Hayek calls "spontaneous order,"

demonstrating that neither government nor even leaders are needed for order to appear.

So perhaps Freelandia is possible after all. And thanks to the rich imagination of science fiction authors, we can visit a plethora of Freelandias.

Although there's a strong individualistic streak within science fiction, until recently very few stories were set in a completely free society. One reason, perhaps, is that all fiction thrives on conflict and a truly free society is so peaceful that there's not very much to write about. So in stories like Eric Frank Russell's cla.s.sic " . . . And Then There Were None," the conflict comes from outside, in the form of invaders from an authoritarian empire. (You'll find this story-and some other cla.s.sics of this genre-in this book's companion volume,Give Me Liberty ,also published by Baen Books.) Another example is James Hogan's (in my opinion) sadly neglectedVoyage From Yesteryear. L. Neil Smith has been very prolific in this area, two of his novels,The Probability Broach andPallas , winning the Prometheus Award for Best Libertarian Fiction. In his most recent book,Forge of Elders , humans meet aliens who are, horror of horrors, capitalists!

Here in this volume are nine more visions of liberty, all set in societies without governments that work.

As you'd expect from the fertile minds of science fiction authors, each is very different from the others.

They are not Utopias. Like real life, there's pain and suffering, as one story here (I won't tell you which one) tragically shows us.

And there are visions of how, in the words of Aristotle, life could and should be. A cornucopia of Freelandias that I hope inspire and entertain you as they have me.

1Ayn Rand,The Fountainhead (Plume, New York, 1994), pp. 101-102 2Hernando de Soto,The Mystery of Capital (Basic Books: New York, 2000), pp. 146147

The Unnullified World

by Lloyd Biggle, Jr.

The world was named Llayless. Its princ.i.p.al community-in fact, its only community of any size-was a desert mining center named Pummery. A number of narrow-gauge electric railway lines left Pummery through tubes built to protect their tracks from the swirling sands. When they reached the steep slopes of the surrounding mountains, they emerged to become cog railways.

At one of the railheads, swinging down from the single pa.s.senger car that was attached to an interminable string of empty ore cars, Birk Dantler encountered a sign that announced Laughingstock Mines. A short distance beyond it, he found a tiny town nestled amidst the clutter of the mining operation.

There were machines to load ore into the railway cars. Farther up the slope, there were machines extracting ore from the mountain. Other machines were bringing ore to the railhead. The town was little more than a spread of small worker's cottages except for a neat, prefab building that housed the mining offices, and, standing next to it, another prefab building that was, unmistakably, a school.

All of this represented a substantial capital outlay for a mining claim on a remote world, which meant that the mines collectively known as Laughingstock were productive enough to provide that capital.

Dantler went directly to the mining office and asked a clerk for information. The clerk looked at him narrowly. "You got a reason for being here, fellow?"

Dantler presented his credentials. The clerk glanced at them and winced. "GBI? You're a Galactic Bureau of Investigation Officer? What's the Inter-World Council want with us?" When Dantler did not answer, he shrugged and grinned. "Your credentials say anyone who doesn't cooperate with you will be deported instantly, and that's reason enough to cooperate. You must know personally all of the many skeletons in the Llayless Mining Corporation's closets to be able to pry a doc.u.ment like that out of it." He returned the credentials. "What is it you want to know?"

"Nothing complicated, I'm sure. Where is the mine called Last Hope?"

"That's fairly complicated until you get through the Laughingstock diggings. After that there's a path. I'd better draw you a map." He went over it with Dantler, and when he was satisfied that his directions were clear, he leaned back and scrutinized Dantler's energy-charged form, taut face-no one had ever called him handsome-and neat, conservative dress. "You prepared for a long walk?" he asked.

"Isn't there any transportation?"

"There are a couple of pack mules, but they're kept on the other side of the mountain. Figure on a long walk."

"How do they bring the ore out?"

"Slowly and with great difficulty. When they've acc.u.mulated enough, they load the two pack mules and fill two or three handcarts. All the men they have take the day off and haul ore. The Llayless Mining Corporation built them a short siding off our railway line, and it keeps an ore car parked there. When they get it filled, the Corporation hauls it away and leaves an empty for them. That's as much as it's willing to do for a marginal operation. The men at Last Hope confidently expect the vein they are working to get richer instead of playing out as most marginal mines do. All miners are optimists."

Then he leaned over his desk to look at Dantler's feet. "At least you've got st.u.r.dy shoes. As I told you, it's a long walk. I've never tackled it myself, no reason to, but those who have say it's a good ten miles, and half of that is a steep climb up to the pa.s.s. It's best to make a two-day trip of it, and you have to figure on an uncomfortable night. There's no hotel or bed and breakfast place-no houses at all, in fact.

And you'll be lucky if they can provide you with a sleeping bag, but you'd be an idiot to try to find your way back here in the dark. You got urgent business with the Last Hope?"

"I think it's urgent," Dantler said. "I'm investigating a murder."

The clerk nodded thoughtfully. "I did hear something about that, but it must have been two or three years ago. You just getting around to investigate now?"

"G.o.d's mill grinds slow but sure," Dantler said and left the clerk staring after him perplexedly.

Dantler found the path without too much difficulty and began to climb. It led steeply upward through a dense forest of native trees with large, ovate, yellowish leaves and s.h.a.ggy green bark with strips of red in it. They seemed to exude fresh-smelling oxygen. Without them, the climb into thinner air would have been far more difficult.

When he reached the top, he discovered that the steep descent was almost as difficult as the climb. It was late in the day when he finally reached the Last Hope diggings. There was a scattering of holes with heaps of dirt around them. He walked on, past several small tents, past a makeshift corral from which the two mules eyed him suspiciously, past a more ambitious digging that had produced a tunnel burrowed into the mountain.

Suddenly he received a sharp blow on the head that nearly knocked him senseless. He reacted instinctively, twisting as he fell, somersaulting into a thick growth of shrubbery, and coming to his feet ready for action.

There were three bearded, shabby-looking men facing him. All of them were armed with whatever they had been able to grab when they saw him coming. One brandished the handle of some kind of hand-operated machine. Another had a piece of firewood. The third had an ax raised high over his head.

They began to edge forward.

Dantler's head ached, and when he brushed his hand across a swelling lump, it came away b.l.o.o.d.y. He sensed that the men were about to rush him, so he decided to act before they did and talk afterward. He drew a small electronic pistol from an inner pocket and sprayed them.

They were halted in their tracks. One at a time they toppled forward and lay twitching on the ground.

Dantler noticed a spring nearby, and he went to it, drank deeply, and washed the blood from his head.

Then he seated himself on a convenient boulder and waited. He felt exhausted, and his head throbbed fiercely. He wanted to lie down with the three men and twitch for a few minutes, but he couldn't spare himself that luxury.

As the charge began to wear off, his victims displayed the usual reactions. They rolled over onto their backs. They flexed arms and legs. They touched their faces and wriggled tingling fingers. None of them had come through his ordeal unscathed. One, a man with a long gray beard and a fierce-looking mustache, had a b.l.o.o.d.y nose from his fall. Another, with a blond beard, had smacked his forehead on a stone. It was already a black and blue swollen lump. The third, with a neatly trimmed black beard and newish-looking clothing, was going to have a splendid black eye.

Finally the man with the mustache, sat up. He stared at Dantler.

"Bashing a visiting stranger over the head is a perverted kind of hospitality," Dantler observed pleasantly.

"Or were you expecting someone else?"

The other two men struggled to sitting positions. "What'd you do to us?" the man with a blond beard asked.

"Something a trifle more civilized than the bashing you had in mind," Dantler said. "I trust that one dose will be sufficient."

"h.e.l.l, yes," the man with the mustache said. "Who are you?"