See Learning History III.
An amulet informs Christian that, in an emulated Hellenic milieu:
"'Unwise social and fiscal policies led to breakdown, dictatorship, and repeated warfare.'
"Christian bared teeth. 'That sounds familiar.'" (p. 180)
It sounds familiar to readers of Poul Anderson's Technic History. Laurinda comments.
"'Alexander Tytler said it in our eighteenth century... No republic has long outlived the discovery by a majority of its people that they can vote themselves largesse from the public treasury.'" (ibid.)
She must know that Tytler's comment, although probably applicable to this emulated timeline, remains historically specific:
there were long periods before there was such a thing as a "public treasury;"
in her period, the public treasury was so vast that everyone received a basic credit issue without thereby causing breakdown, dictatorship or warfare;
technological production of abundant wealth can make competitive accumulation redundant, indeed counterproductive, thus transcending the antithesis between private and common wealth.
3 comments:
Kaor, Paul!
And I share Christian Brannock's "baring of teeth"! Those unwise and foolish policies exist in the US and many other Western nations. And they are indeed bringing us to ruin.
And we have not yet reached so high a level of technology that anyone can live comfortably off some of "citizen's credit." And if we are to have any chance of achieving it, we need to first get OFF this rock to develop the potentialities of space. E.g., see asteroid 16 Psyche and how SpaceX was given the contract by NASA to send a ship there to study it and its possible utility.
And citizen's credit or no citizen's credit, as long as human beings are human, there will be competition among many of them. E.g., competing for power and status.
Ad astra! Sean
There was certainly a public treasury in ancient Athens.
Incidentally, that was the reason that the extreme democratic party in Classical Athens was also the party of the most rabid imperialists.
The Athenian citizen body benefited a great deal from the Athenian Empire into which the League of Delos had turned; the local would-be oligarchs didn't need it nearly as much.
Kaor, Mr. Stirling!
I forgot about that, how "democratic" Athens most certainly did have a public treasury.
And I suspect the reluctance of some would be Athenian oligarchs to support Athenian expansionism was based on suspicion that the inevitable wars needed to bring that would lead to upheaval back home. Upheavals THEY too would suffer from.
Ad astra! Sean
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