Martin H. Greenberg - Mark Tier - Visions of Liberty

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Visions of Liberty

Table of Contents

Introduction: Visions of Liberty

The Unnullified World

The Right's Tough

The Shackles of Freedom

A Reception at the Anarchist Embassy

According to Their Need

Pakeha

Devil's Star

Renegade

The Colonizing of Tharle

About the Authors

Visions of Liberty

edited by

Mark Tier and

Martin H. Greenberg

This is a work of fiction. All the characters and events portrayed in this book are fictional, and any

resemblance to real people or incidents is purely coincidental.

2004 by James P. Hogan.

A Baen Books Original

Baen Publishing Enterprises

P.O. Box 1403

Riverdale, NY 10471

www.baen.com

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ISBN: 0-7434-8838-5

Cover art by Carol Heyer

First printing, July 2004

Distributed by Simon & Schuster

1230 Avenue of the Americas

New York, NY 10020

Production by Windhaven Press, Auburn, NH

Printed in the United States of America

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

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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 passports 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.

Homo 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.

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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 (1279–1368). 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 vassals. 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

Japan, as in Thailand, the ruler was thought to be the representative of God 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.

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The solution of America's founding fathers was to delineate and restrict the role of government. Via the

Constitution 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; associations 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 assume, 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

titles, and regulate disputes?

The miners created their own. They established districts, registries, procedures for establishing and

registering a claim and buying and selling claim titles, 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.

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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

classic " . . . 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 classics 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. 146–147

The Unnullified World

by Lloyd Biggle, Jr.

The world was named Llayless. Its principal 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 passenger 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

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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 document 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 accumulated 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 sturdy 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 pass. 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?"

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

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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 shaggy 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 bloody. 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 bloody 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."

"Hell, yes," the man with the mustache said. "Who are you?"

"As I said, a visiting stranger. I walked ten miles over the mountain to ask the favor of some information.

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I wasn't expecting this kind of welcome. I have credentials issued by this world's factor. Perhaps you

would like to examine them." He held one of them under the man's nose. "As you see, a word from me,

and the Last Hope mine will have exhausted its last hope. All of its employees will leave Llayless on the

next ship. I was hoping I wouldn't have to use it. Are you ready to talk?"

"No reason not to. We thought you were a whacker."

"What's a whacker that makes him deserve that kind of reception?"

"Whackers kill miners and take over their claims."

"Really. Are there whackers on Llayless?"

"Don't know of any, but we've encountered them elsewhere. Better to act first and then ask questions."

"Only yesterday I talked with Jeffrey Wallingford Pummery, who is the esteemed—I hope—factor of

the world of Llayless and he told me Llayless was the most law-abiding world in the galaxy."

The man laughed derisively. "That's a good one. Llayless has got no government. It's got no laws—just a

few regulations about mining. If it had laws, there would be no one to enforce them. It's got no law

officers. It's got no judges and courts. On my mining claim, I'm the law—that's what my contract says.

The only law on Llayless is what the person who controls a bit of ground can enforce at the end of a

stick."

The man with the black beard had recovered enough to get to his feet and hobble around. "Never

expected to get stunned out here in the mountains," he said resentfully. "What's this information you

want?"

"I want to hear all about the murder of Douglas Vaisey by Roger Lefory."

"Never heard of either of them," the man with the black beard said. "What's that got to do with us?"

"Walt is a newcomer," the man with the drooping mustache explained to Dantler. "The murder happened

before his time. I thought all that was dead history."

"Murders are never dead history."

"What do you want to know?"

"Everything," Dantler said. "By the way, who are you?"

"Kit Grumery. I'm the claim owner here. Everything I know about that murder won't take long to tell.

My men work on shares, see. They get fed but nothing fancy. They make their own sleeping

arrangements. Beyond that, whatever the ore smelts down to is divided into shares. It's hard work and

poor pay, but we all hope to hit a mother lode and get rich. Lefory and Vaisey were working for the

Laughingstock, and they came here taking a gamble on sharing in something big. Dougie was a nice kid, a

good worker. Lefory was a loafer. He took so many breaks it sometimes was hard to say whether he

was working or not, and he had a hell of a temper. He and Dougie got in an argument over Lefory not

doing his fair share, and Lefory charged at him and brained him with a hand ax. Killed him instantly.

That's all there was to it."

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"Not quite all," Dantler said. "What did you do then?"

"Did what I always do when a worker is killed. Mining is dangerous work. Death doesn't happen often,

but it does happen, and there's a procedure to follow. We buried Dougie—I can show you his grave if

you like. Regulations don't call for it, but we held a bit of a ceremony for him. Shorty Klein—he's

working further up the mountain today—has an old Bible, and he read a couple of passages and did a

prayer, and I carved a marker for Dougie's grave myself. As I said, he was a nice kid, and I liked him.

That's all, except that I also took care of the paperwork."

"What sort of paperwork?"

"Every death has to be reported to the Llayless Record Section. It insists on knowing who's still on the

planet. I also figured what Dougie had coming from his work share, and I filled out the form the Record

Section requires and sent it down to Pummery along with a voucher for the money due Dougie and the

few trifles of personal effects he owned. The Record Section is supposed to cash in a dead man's return

ticket and put the amount received with the other assets the man had. Everyone arriving here has to place

on file a fully paid return ticket to the world he came from or they won't let him off the ship."

"I know about that," Dantler said. "I suppose it's sort of a guarantee he won't become a public charge."

"Right. Records is supposed to cash the return ticket and send the money along with all of his other

assets to his designated beneficiary. Whether it actually does this I couldn't say. And that's the whole

story."

"You didn't report the murder to the police authorities?"

"What police authorities? I just told you—Llayless has got no government. It's got no authorities, police

or any other kind. Who would I report it to?"

"Then a murderer can't be arrested and brought to trial?"

"Who would arrest him, and who would hold his trial? There's no police. There's no court. There's no

judge. There's no jail for wrongdoers. Actually, it was a dirty shame. Dougie was well liked, and Lefory

was a jerk. Everyone was angry about what happened."

"But you let him carry on scot-free as though he hadn't done anything?"

"I wouldn't say that. We shouldered him right out of camp."

"How did you do that?"

"No one would talk with him. No one would work with him. No one would eat with him—we form

teams and take turns cooking. No team would have him. No one would kip with him. After a couple of

days of that, he left. Sneaked out of camp early one morning and walked over the mountain to the

Laughingstock. It was almost a day before anyone missed him."

"That seems like a rather mild punishment for a murderer," Dantler observed dryly. "What happened to

him after that?"

"He got a job at the Laughingstock. Llayless's mines are always short of labor. But we let the

Laughingstock workers know about him, and he didn't stay there long. Probably they shouldered him,

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VisionsofLibertyTableofContentsIntroduction:VisionsofLibertyTheUnnullifiedWorldTheRight'sToughTheShacklesofFreedomAReceptionattheAnarchistEmbassyAccordingtoTheirNeedPakehaDevil'sStarRenegadeTheColonizingofTharleAbouttheAuthorsVisionsofLibertyeditedbyMarkTierandMartinH.GreenbergThisisaworkoffiction.A...

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