Flandry and Miriam converse en route to Ramnu.
Flandry:
sips Scotch and smokes;
listens to recorded singing ornithoids;
has programmed a forest odour for the air;
has programmed a mild temperature;
has dimmed the lights.
Five senses, God save the mark!
Miriam points out that the Terran Empire:
keeps the Pax;
keeps trade lanes open;
resists external enemies;
guards the heritage.
In a galaxy with FTL, a Merseian Roidhunate and nuclear-armed barbarians, something like the Empire, although not necessarily with a hereditary Emperor, would be necessary - but that is a big lot of assumptions. Member planets of the Empire are able to organize their internal affairs any way they want, like the inhabitants of Sphinx in The Game Of Empire. I am not going to look this up now but I am sure that Julian May's Galactic Milieu insists that its member planets operate market economies - and maybe the Milieu has some (impossible in our universe) way to prevent those planetary economies from having boom and slump cycles? But the Terran Empire does not legislate about planetary economic systems.
5 comments:
kaor, paul!
i am not convinced slumps/recessions should always be prevented. in free enterprise economics, such things are among the means of correcting the mistakes people, acting in the real world, will inevitably make. and to motivate them to more efficiently reallocate resources of all kinds. bungling gov'ts incompetent efforts to prevent slumps simply prolongs and worsens the pain.
experimenting/practicing with writing comments.
sean
Good to receive comments again!
kaor, paul!
thanks! frequent exercising of my right hand helps. but many comments will need to be brief, for now.
sean
Good to see you here again, Sean!
Markets: they're a feedback mechanism, for distributing information. Like most feedback mechanisms, they "hunt" around an optimum position.
So a market economy will function better the more people are involved in it, and the more rapid and accurate the flow of information -- which is why, despite various disasters like the world wars, the 20th and 21st centuries have seen more economic growth than the 19th, and the 19th more than any pervious century.
The trajectory is irregular, but upward.
Other economic systems tend to stasis or decline.
Kaor, Mr. Stirling!
Many thanks!
Exactly, market economies WORK because of those feedback mechanisms. Other systems, like socialism, lacking them, will always trend to, at best, stagnation, stasis, decline. Or corrupt horrors like the former USSR.
And that upward trend characteristic of market economies might be even more spectacular if/when mankind gets off this rock into space!
Ad astra! Sean
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