Imagine an isolated island whose rulers, although they themselves are fully informed about current world affairs, keep their population in the dark. It would be difficult to isolate an island indefinitely but this might be done with a planet. Unan Besar is outside the Terran Empire. Its single spaceport, a hundred kilometres of jungle away from the capital city, is used only by occasional Betelgeusean traders who are not granted a bunkhouse and the longshoremen are forbidden to talk to them.
Human beings need a pill a month to survive the toxic atmosphere. Such pills could easily be distributed free and in abundance but instead are carefully doled out. Flandry understands and soon so does the reader. Merseians are not behind everything. Human beings are capable of vileness.
7 comments:
Kaor, Paul!
More exactly, the regime misruling Unan Besar, Biocontrol, used its monopoly control of the antitoxin pills humans need to live there as a single tax system. With the tax being relentlessly increased every generation. When Flandry came one antitoxin tablet cost an extortionate ten silvers, when it should have cost only a few coppers--even given the antiquated technology used by Biocontrol.
The closest real world analog I can think of for a hermit kingdom like Unan Besar is North Korea, misruled by the grotesque Kim dynasty.
I agree, humans don't need to be prompted by anybody to be vile!
Ad astra! Sean
Note that the tyranny of Unan Besar is unique in that it -literally- controls life and death for every individual, with a single point-failure source of the drug which can easily be destroyed.
Whereupon nearly everyone on the planet would die in agony.
Flandry points out that this means Biocontrol can rule -despite- being grossly inefficient. It has no armed forces, its police force (and secret police) are an inept joke, and that -doesn't matter-.
This would be fairly unique in history -- a regime both totally incompetent and irremoveable.
Kaor, Mr. Stirling!
I agree with your comments above. The thought I have is wondering how much HARDER Biocontrol could squeeze its victims? That is, would ten or eleven silvers per pill be the most the regime could extort before most Unan Besarians simply could NOT pay more?
Ad astra! Sean
The fee is the main factor driving Unan Besar in the direction of slavery or equivalents.
People will be ready to accept such status if they can't buy their own pills.
Kaor, Mr. Stirling!
I agree. Absent Biocotrol being overthrown the end result on Unan Besar would be everybody becoming slaves--except a thin crust at the top.
Ad astra! Sean
Kaor, Sean and Mr. Stirling!
I do have a slight problem with Anderson’s use of the term “single tax” in that novella. I read “The Plague of Masters” before I read Henry George, and learned about the single tax movement (for a single tax on the value of land), but, IIRC, after I had come across a reference to someone being a single taxer (in the autobiography of Lincoln Steffens), so for a couple of years I was vaguely aware that there had been advocates of a single tax, but didn’t know much, and thought that the main point was to have just one tax, probably something oppressive like the pill tax on Unan Besar. In my mid-teens I read Henry George’s PROGRESS AND POVERTY, did further reading, and learned what it was proposed to levy a single tax on, and why the proposal made sense.
Best Regards,
Nicholas D. Rosen, still behind on the weblog
Kaor, Nicholas!
Yes, but Anderson did not have Henry George's arguments and theories in mind when he wrote THE PLAGUE OF MASTERS. The extortionate fee/tax collected by Biocontrol for those antitoxin pills on Unan Besar was literally a single tax everybody on the planet had to pay to LIVE.
And I hope we see more comments from you!
Ad astra! Sean
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