By Dawn's Early Light

by Jason Fuesting

  “It’s been shown that state-driven central planning works, Eric,” Doctor Lainz insisted. “If it didn’t, the Protectorate would have failed a long time ago.

  “Sure, economically speaking, Marx’s philosophy works in small groups, but as you scale the number of people up, self-interest begins to play a larger and larger part until eventually there isn’t enough collective buy-in, a sense of personal responsibility to the group to keep the machine running smoothly. People see others getting the same benefit for less work, so they adjust their output accordingly. Everything slowly starts to grind to a halt.”

  Doctor Lainz began to open his mouth just as Eric added, “Before you say it though, you’re right, the Protectorate does not practice Marxism or old school Communism anymore. Even you guys were bright enough to figure out most aspects of his work were more or less intellectually fraudulent. Here’s the thing though, the Protectorate did fail. You just don’t know about it.”

  “Excuse me?” Doctor Lainz said.

  Eric had gotten his attention with that. More than a few others as well, Leah included.

  “Control the communications, remember? That goes for communicating history, too. I can’t blame you for not knowing, no one here was ever taught it happened. But it did. The Protectorate of Man? Originally the People’s Protectorate of Mankind and, when it failed, what came out the other side was your Protectorate. The Confederacy, too, by the way.”

  “Be that as it may,” Doctor Lainz said, “Nothing you said supports what you’ve said or counters what I said.”

  “I’m getting there, Doctor Lainz. Patience. See, the original Protectorate construct actually was Marxist. It lasted almost a hundred years, almost as long as the biggest example of state Marxism before that did the first time it was tried. And just like that first example, per Turing’s documentation, it survived mostly by extracting wealth from its productive systems to smooth things over for the least productive ones. Redistribution of wealth on an interstellar scale. There were forced labor camps, criminal work camps, massive taxation, forced unionization, dictated price restrictions, dictated wages. That being the natural end state of Marxism right before it all falls apart as I was talking about earlier. Directly, your argument only stands with the data you had access to, but that data was incomplete.”

  Lainz pulled a chair out and sat down, brow furrowed the entire time.

  “If that’s the case, then how did it change? Why?” Lainz asked. The wind had been taken out of his sails.

  Maybe there’s still hope for this guy.

  “For the record,” Turing interjected, “It ended rather suddenly.”

  Turing coughed into his hand before continuing, “The records were rather incomplete on specifics, but it resulted in a civil war between, essentially, the Marxist true believer hold-outs and those that would make the Protectorate what it is today.”

  So that’s how you’re going to spin that? Eric mentally chuckled and then said, “Which is what you’d expect when the breadbasket you’ve been raiding starts to object to being handled roughly. The political reality in the remnants changed though, Doctor Lainz.”

  “From what to what?” Wesley asked.

  “From blind faith in the State’s ability to miraculously fix any problem to one more concerned with the realities of actually fixing any problem,” Eric looked to Turing to confirm he wasn’t stepping on how Turing wanted to spin the unfortunate details. At Turing’s nod he continued, “As a Protectorate sociologist, you’re familiar with the concepts of Marxism, communism, and socialism, yes?”

  “Of course,” Doctor Lainz.

  “How about fascism?” Eric asked. Lainz nodded. “In short, the People’s Protectorate was a socialist construct with strong communist features. The new Protectorate on the other hand knew the lies in Marxism. They had no other choice but to acknowledge them, but they had help. Not every person who was Inner Party from the beginning was a Marxist. More than a few held beliefs that eventually lead to strongly nationalistic fervor. When the dust had settled, the shadow civil war Turing was politely circling around, that cabal had grabbed the reigns of the new Protectorate. They spun a nice socialist illusion far and wide, but the fascists stay in the shadows most of the time. That allows people to believe the illusion most believe in today. Luckily, your fascists were smart enough to realize that they needed a working form of economics. State control still exists, but it’s far looser and less blindingly obvious than direct dictation. Less Soviet era Russia, more communist China or Nazi Germany.”

  Doctor Lainz sat, scratching his chin, so Eric continued, “I touched on the idea of how advocates of liberty in the Protectorate are labeled anarchists, give me a few minutes to clarify. While anarchists have hotly disputed this assertion throughout the centuries, government is a necessary evil. There are no valid alternatives, as all the alternatives end in violence over a startlingly immediate timeframe compared to the presence of a government. Disputes will arise, we are human after all. How can those disputes be easily, effectively, and quickly resolved without an agreed-upon third party to mediate? What if outside forces threaten the whole? How else can you form an effective defense composed of a disparate but ideologically aligned people in a short time, much less maintain it for any period? A room full of self-made kings, and that’s what each anarchist styles themselves as, is just as effective at banding together as a room full of politicians are at running a government. As pro is the opposite of con, I leave it to your imagination what Congress or any other legislature is the opposite of. That said, governments do fund militaries and while their legislative types might fiddle as things burn, the military tends to react far quicker and with far more force than anything the self-styled kings could put together. As for anarchists with a capitalist bent, money may buy many things, but it does not buy the kind of love necessary for a man to lay his life down for another.

  “Despite anarchist protests, there are legitimate sovereign powers, just as there are responsibilities. In the end, such a government is only as good as its founding documents, provided its populace is well-educated, supports those principles, and endeavors to actually follow them, not subvert them.

  “So when I said freedom, there’s a lot more to it than just that one word.”

  “Like what? Give us something concrete,” Turing asked. “What makes your freedom different from what the Protectorate offers?”

  “Negative rights, for one.”

  “Negative rights?” Turing inquired.

  Oh, you bastard. I know that hint of a smile.

  “Things that the government cannot do or force you to do. The current ruling document for the Protectorate includes positive rights like a right to housing. If you have a right to a house, then someone has to provide it to you. If they’re providing something you can’t pay for, who is going to pay for it? The government? Government gets their funding via taxation, so it isn’t the government paying, but everyone else. This doesn’t touch on related issues like what happens when the government gets to decide just how much they’ll pay or how taxation beyond need is essentially legalized theft, morally speaking. I have a hard time calling a system that forces third parties to pay a bill they never agreed to a just system, much less one that tells the seller they have to sell it at a fraction of what it’s worth. If the government refuses to pay at all? Last I checked, demanding someone’s work without compensation is slavery. Positive rights do little more than put a nice face on the fact that the government is authorized to swindle, cheat, steal, and enslave its own citizens in order to bribe other citizens into supporting those in charge.

  “That’s why property rights are arguably the most important tenet of a functioning, free government. You own yourself, your income, and whatever you purchase with it. Nobody can take it away without your consent.”

  “Oh, so what if someone decides they don’t want to pay taxes? After the fact?” Doctor Lainz asked.

  Eric faltered a moment before stating, “Simple. Don’
t provide them the services those taxes would normally pay for. They’re also free to leave. Nobody is forced to stay.”

  “That seems fairly arbitrary,” Turing commented.

  “To a degree it is, but this assumes that the populace as a whole has already consented and passed this as law. I’m not saying this is a perfect system, but it’s the best one I’ve seen in any of my studies.”

  “If they choose to leave, what about their property? Unmovable property they can’t just take with them. Land for example,” Turing asked.

  “What about it?”

  Leah asked, “If they leave, what happens to the land?”

  “Well, if it’s abandoned, I’d assume it would be recovered and resold at some point.”

  “So your objectors would be left penniless? That’s rather harsh. Oppressive even,” Doctor Lainz scoffed.

  “Hardly. They have the option to sell available to them as well.”

  “That’s a remarkably poor consolation prize,” Turing noted.

  “There aren’t any valid alternatives. If you allow them to remain without paying, they’ll soak up services without paying for them. That’s not sustainable. It’s also morally equivalent to theft. If you kowtow to them, you’re subverting legitimate government authority to unelected kleptocrats. Selling the keys to the castle cheaply, I suppose. Authority, I might add, that’s been granted to the government by every other citizen. The idea is to avoid anarchy, not encourage it.”

  “So, what about this taking property without your consent you mentioned?” Doctor Lainz asked.

  “What about it? I can’t necessarily enumerate all of the cases where such a thing might be valid, but it’s fair to say they might exist. With just compensation, of course. Let the electorate vote on those conditions. They’re then bound by their own decision.”

  “And this process is incorruptible? Nobody could do something like say, buy the election?” Turing prompted.

  “No, I never asserted that. Anything made by man can be unmade by man.”

  “So if anything can be corrupted, how is your system any better?” Doctor Lainz asked.

  “By that standard, how is anything better than anything else? That line of criticism goes nowhere. It’s null. Power corrupts, that much is true, but the corrupt seldom tend to have the same aims. One could slow the spread of corruption by setting up a strict dispersal of powers across different levels of government. Set things up so that corruption plays off against corruption as it were. That method wouldn’t stop the corruption, but it would limit its influence and spread, provided it’s not systemic to the whole anyway.”

  “As interesting a concept as you’ve made it sound,” Doctor Lainz said, “I fail to see how your proposed government is any more morally or ethically superior to ours.”

  Eric blinked a few times before saying, “Other than the whole you’ve been lied to since the day you were born bit by your government and the system it created to keep itself in power? How do you think your outlook is better than mine, Doctor Lainz?”

  “Equally simple,” Doctor Lainz said with a smile. “The Protectorate strives for equality in all things, to quash discrimination, and we have a duty to help the poor. I haven’t heard a single word about any of those topics.”

  “There’s a good reason for that. None of those topics is the responsibility of the government,” Eric stated flatly.

  “So much for your case’s moral superiority,” Wesley snarked.

  “Shut up, Wesley,” Eric growled. “Look, you wouldn’t use a screwdriver as a hammer unless you absolutely had to, right? So why use the government to set social policy when that’s not what governments are supposed to do? Society sets its own rules. Having the government enforce them is a bad precedent. Suppose for a moment that you were a member of a certain group. A government believing they had the authority to impose social policy on the populace, were they opposed to what your group stood for, would find it perfectly acceptable to, quote unquote, do something about your beliefs. You say you’re against discrimination, but down that path lies madness. Down that path lies the police antagonizing the targeted group I just mentioned, possibly even rounding them up for incarceration or maybe even just shooting them in the street. How’s that equality or non-discrimination? All because you belonged to some arbitrary group. The point is that no government should be able to simply stamp out portions of the populace for having unpopular beliefs. They can’t be trusted with that sort of power. The Protectorate civil war saw billions put in the dirt for not toeing the party line, even when that line shifted underneath them. Your own history, even if you were unaware of it, proves my assertion out. Now, we both believe governments should be fiscally responsible, right?”

  Doctor Lainz cautiously nodded.

  “Well, if you’re hiring people on any basis other than competency, does it not stand to reason that you’re not necessarily hiring the best person for the job?”

  Doctor Lainz frowned and said, “But all things being equal, the hiring preference should go to the underrepresented person.”

  “Why?” Eric asked. Turing looked like he had been about to ask the same thing.

  “They’re underrepresented. Maybe historically discriminated against. Society owes them that much. The workforce and the government should be representative of the population they draw from.”

  “Point of order,” Turing broke in. “Doctor Lainz, we never did discuss in detail why you were exiled to my beautiful, if somewhat inconveniently deadly, planet. You are aware that what you just said is directly contradictory to both established sociological study and Protectorate policy, yes? There are no protected classes in the Protectorate. All are equal. Equally disposable.”

  “Well aware,” Doctor Lainz said dryly. “It isn’t my fault my colleagues were short-sighted and eager to see what they wanted to see.”

  Eric took a deep breath and said, “So you were sent here because someone in power deemed you a--“

  “I believe the word you’re looking for is throwback,” Turing offered when Eric faltered a moment.

  “That would be one of the more polite appellations, yes,” Doctor Lainz stated flatly.

  “Okay,” Eric said. “Heresy aside, spell it out for me. How exactly is your system so obviously better than what I supposed? I’m clearly not seeing it.”

  “And while you’re at it, good Doctor, if you would care to highlight how your vision is somehow superior to the Protectorate’s current philosophy, I would be greatly interested to hear it.”

  Doctor Lainz sighed and cast his eyes to Turing before beginning, “The problem with the Protectorate is that it is corrupt, Edward.”

  “Doctor Turing,” Turing corrected icily.

  “Doctor Turing then,” Lainz said. “We’ve lost sight of our own humanity. Nobody in power cares about the people. We take care of the poor, but those in power do so only to prevent civil unrest. They calculate down to the hundredth of a credit just how much needs be spent to accomplish that and they spend no more. Billions are stuck in poverty across the entire Protectorate. Billions.”

  “Be that as it may,” Turing commented, “Poverty is man’s natural state. You start with nothing and if you don’t work to earn more than that, you continue to have nothing.”

  “I’ll point out,” Eric interjected, “That the less the government takes from you, the easier it is to actually have something at the end of the day, too.”

  “That’s not the point, Doctor. So many people wouldn’t need to be living so poorly if they just had a hand up. They don’t have the privilege of coming from wealthier backgrounds like most other citizens. Such as yourself, for example. Those born into positions of power never have to work for it.”

  “Privilege?” Turing said with a snort. “Every generation of the Turing family moved planets to earn what they had, sometimes literally since we’re standing on proof of that. We’re also responsible for funding the University. Do I need remind you the student body numbers over two hu
ndred thousand? Do you know how many tens of thousands of scholarships we fund so that the poor you speak of have the chance to reach their potential?”

  Lainz’s eyes lit up and he asked, “What about the applicants your scholarships don’t fund?”

  “What about them? Even as rich as we were, we had only so much. We focused on those who would be able to take that opportunity and better themselves. The rest? We’d be shoveling our money into a burning pit,” Turing responded.

  “And there we have it, Doctor Turing. Your family thought it could buy the moral high ground, just the same as the rest of the rich.”

  “Okay, okay,” Eric butted in. Turing scowled, but did not argue further. “You were supposed to be explaining how your idea was morally superior to either of ours, Doctor Lainz, not starting an irrelevant argument with Turing.”

  Doctor Lainz closed his eyes and breathed in deeply. Eric noticed for the first time that the room had gotten crowded. At least two dozen people were watching them argue now.

  “The Protectorate gets so much right, dear Eric. They just don’t go far enough,” he said. Several of the newcomers nodded in agreement.

  “In what regard? I mean, everything I’ve seen, they go a hell of a lot further than I’m willing to,” Eric commented. More than a few of the crowd seemed to agree. “I mean, how are the poor treated now, exactly?”

  “The poor? They beg for scraps, hoping that someone like Turing’s family will take notice and lift them up. That’s no way to treat a fellow human.”

  “Damn right it’s not,” Wesley added.

  Eric recognized Perkin’s voice when the young man agreed, “He’s right, you know.”