Those are interesting questions, but the main value of the book is its detailed depiction of a truly free society. This book is the answer to people who just cannot bend their minds around the idea that things could be different. Voyage doesn't prove anything, but it's an interesting, exciting, and effective tool for prying open a mind that has been rusted shut. It can be the first stepping stone for a real voyage of discovery. The ship finds a habitable planet, Chiron, and starts incubating embryos while robots go down to the surface and start up mining and manufacturing facilities.
Many years pass and Earth fails to bomb itself back into the stone age.
They don't even bother creating a government. And so the stage is set for a conflict between peoples, weapons, and ultimately world-views. While the story is written with plenty of humor, with characters we'd like to meet in real life, battles in space, and all the elements of a great SF epic, all of these things are merely the means by which Jim Hogan entreats the reader to reconsider his or her assumptions about society, economics, and even what it means to be human in this universe. Interestingly enough, and in spite of the heroic Chironians never having invented government on their planet, Jim does not call himself an anarchist. He refers to himself as a Jeffersonian .