Accurate.
Well, let’s see…
“I’m from a place where the worst someone can do to you is forget to say thank you.”
- Lucy MacLean, Fallout
There are four principal reasons:
1. MY DESIRE TO THROW MY FIST ENDS AT MY FACE.
While the Transcend is not fully coextensive with the Empire, an overwhelming majority of Imperial citizen-shareholders are Transcendent constitutionals, which forms a perfect-trust society inside the extremely-high-trust one.
(When I say perfect-trust society, I mean that very literally. Members in the collective consciousness don’t betray each other for, fundamentally, the same reason that your liver doesn’t decide to screw over your spleen.)
2. AGE AND CUNNING.
The Empire is a very old and well-established society, on the one hand; and on the other, it’s one that understands the very fundamental libertarian truth that you live and prosper almost entirely in accordance with your ability to cooperate and coordinate.
As such, it has very good institutions to make that work. You can’t just hang out your shingle and start operating as inspectors; as mentioned above, you’re interacting with a complex set of guilds and independent reviewers and metareviewers and insurers, et. al., carefully structured, evolved, and time-tested to make sure that everything runs smoothly and correctly¹.
It’s very hard to subvert.
I have not read the Freehold books myself, but the eponymous polity sure isn’t that old, and based on the author’s position in your OP and the quote at the end of the link:
From there, I wondered how such a story would work in the Freehold universe, which, despite some parties alleging it to be a “utopia,” bears several significant resemblances to the era of robber barons and exploitative management. There are many things done better by the free market. However, some things actually do require government infrastructure to effect properly. Whether or not quality standards for spaceship inspections are among the latter probably depends in part on who’s arguing the point, and if they intend to be aboard. Even if one can settle up economically afterward, duel or seek vengeance, it’s probably better to have the intact ship in the first place.
…it certainly doesn’t appear that they understand the latter, either. With all due respect to Mr. Williamson, some of us have spent time thinking about how certain things can be achieved without the point of a gun, at least among people who aren’t sufficiently unenlightened to defect in the single-player prisoner’s dilemma.
[Now, to be fair, you could maybe, in theory, make something like the accident happen - but you’d have to a secure a deliberately incompetent non-guild, non-reviewed starship maintainer to look after your safeties-bypassed ship, run without hull or operational insurance, find a non-guild-codicil and non-cover-requiring starport to operate out of, stick to non-cover-requiring areas of space, find an unlicensed and uncovered - for otherwise they would lose said licenses - non-guild crew to run it, and dig up passengers willing to pay no mind to their insurers’ warnings that stepping aboard this thing will void their tort, health, and incarnation insurance on the grounds that they aren’t paying for Fucking Idiocy Cover.
At which point most legal claims will be laughed out of court on the grounds that having bypassed every single system and institution designed to prevent this sort of thing from happening - brother, you asked for it!]
3. GOLDEN RULE, MOTHERFUCKER.
Their culture is much less favorable to the criming. There’s a reason “defaulter” is close to the worst insult in their lexicon.
I mean, seriously, you can’t throw a rock on Earth without some dipshit explaining that it’s for a good cause/the poor dears can’t help themselves/it’s because of oppression/poverty causes crime/it’s okay because it’s a corporation, maaaan/eat the rich/kill the poor/in their culture…/virtue is only owed to the virtuous/honesty is white supremacic colonialist bullshit/but they’re the outgroup/it’s not a big deal, why so uptight?/etc./etc./etc. ad thoroughly naus.
Imperial culture, being strongly intolerant of bullshit and brain worms even when they’re dressed up as nuance, considers all these arguments carefully and then throws them out of the airlock. You are a sophont, ergo you have free will and the ability to recognize and choose the Good. You chose poorly. That is the thing and the whole of the thing. Selah.
(It’s helped by a couple of things: first, that local law is much more concentrated on the mala in se, i.e., genuine ethical issues, makes it both much clearer and easier to respect; and second, that rather than let it be something people are expected to pick up essentially by osmosis, they actually go to the trouble of formally teaching ethics. By the time you reach majority, you’ll be thoroughly schooled in game theory, decision theory, ethical calculus, etc., etc., and thus all the reasons why, if you wish to have a civilization worth living in, one does not defect.
That this also does wonders to reduce the appalling moral effects of relativists, pragmatists, and, of course, the absolute worst is what you might call gravy.)
4. WE SMRT.
It’s fairly noticeable, when one thinks about it, that most crime is committed by morons. (Specifically, I note, including this kind of white-collar crime. I mean, seriously, what did they think was going to happen? Things that can’t go on forever don’t. Playing chicken with the odds is not a viable long-term strategy.)
Which makes it very relevant that there, the triple-teams of eugenics, eumemics, and eutechnics have been systematically and preemptively amputating the left-hand side of the bell curve for many generations, on the grounds that providing the best for your descendants means creating that eutopia in which all the children will be above average, dammit.
This has quite the salutary effect.
It should be noted, of course, that these systems aren’t perfect. The Empire does produce some criminals. It’s just that by the nature of the people and the environment, they have to be extremely competent, professional, ingenious, and subtle. (My go-to example here is usually: see Leverage, now multiply by transhumanism.)
It’s also not a bad reference for types of crime you might see: always grand heists and grifts, never the petty kind. That’s because they’re a proud race, and dislike being called petty² almost as much as they dislike actually being it.
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It also helps that you’re working with a structure composed of professional (in the technical sense) contractors, not non-professional employees.
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Don’t say things like that. That’s how you get your desk stolen during your inauguration.
)