And then he’d taken a pot-shot at one of the farmers, and then at Jackson when he had arrived in response to a complaint, treating him – all the while – to a torrent of racist abuse. Jackson probably deserved a commendation for not rising to the bait and hurting Anderson, but he was a clear and present danger to the remainder of the town. What had been tolerable, even funny, before the war could no longer be tolerated, not when lives were at stake.
The discussion had been brief and acrimonious. “John Anderson,” I said, “you are ordered to leave Ingalls and not return to the town.” It wasn't my sole decision, for once. It was the decision of the entire Cabinet. It still left a bad taste in people’s mouths for weeks afterwards. John Anderson hadn’t done anything beyond taking pot-shots at people, defending his property. Sure, we needed it, but where would it end if we established a precedent? There was little choice. “If you return, you will be shot on sight.”
And then we ended up trying to establish a unified government.
If anything, that was worse than upholding the law.
Chapter Nineteen
Any government will work if authority and responsibility are equal and coordinate. This does not insure “good” government; it simply insures that it will work. But such governments are rare — most people want to run things but want no part of the blame. This used to be called the “backseat-driver syndrome.”
-Robert A. Heinlein
And so we come to the government.
Ed’s Iron Law of Government runs like this;
“The more you want from your government, the less it will deliver.”
Why?
Think about it. The Government is basically a lot of people trying to run things, right? They have the power and the responsibility – or at least what we choose to give them – and they should be able to do whatever we think they should do, or so we think. It’s not true. A government is an organisation, just as a Marine Company or a business is an organisation, and the more you want it to do, the less it can do.
Take communism, for example. Perfect communism can really be summed up as the state controlling everything. The communists and their fellow travellers generally call it something along the lines of ‘everything belonging to the People’ – note the capital ‘P’ there – but the basic truth is that everything is owned and run by the government. It seems a good idea on paper – there will be no competition, no duplication of effort and no disputes – but in practice it simply doesn’t work. Why not? There’s just too much for the government to do. Even if they’re all upright honest Soviet Men – the Soviet Union used to claim that it had created a new species of human – they’re still going to be burdened with the task of doing everything. How can a single government handle it all?
A state can be described as a living creature. If you lower bread prices, for instance, you hurt farmers who want profits to encourage them to work harder. If you raise bread prices, you hurt the poor, who cannot afford to buy bread and therefore starve, a recipe for social unrest and revolution. It isn’t a coincidence that most Russian periods of civil unrest started when the shops ran short of bread, or that the Russian government was prepared to buy grain from filthy capitalists like us to feed their people; when the poor starve, they have nothing left to lose. Everything a communist state does has a knock-on effect somewhere else. They simply can’t make it efficient, even without accounting for human nature.
And humans are ornery creatures. The Russians have a joke that goes something like this. “The Government only pretends to pay us, so we only pretend to work.” I prefer a more practical story from my days in the Marines. A fellow rifleman once worked for this really good singer before signing up with the Corps. He was asked to name his price and promptly named the largest salary he dared, only to see it accepted at once. Overjoyed, he didn’t bother to question his good fortune until it was too late, when he discovered that everyone else in the band earned twice what he earned. He asked for a raise and was told no. Just how pleased do you think he was? It probably won’t surprise you to know that he didn’t serve the singer to the best of his ability and left in a huff when told to work harder, or be sacked.
Like I said before, everything depends on self-interest. If you make it easy for a person to be paid without doing any work, they won’t work. If you penalise your producers, you won’t have any producers. If, as I have claimed, a person is always governed by self-interest, it is important to note that a person’s personal self-interest may not accord with the government’s self-interest. Everyone who bought one of those Chinese cars, pre-war, was putting money in the hands of a bunch of fascists, but they were cheaper than American cars. People – and this is the fact that liberals and conservatives normally miss – vote with their wallets. They don’t vote for principles unless they’re rich or secure enough not to need to worry.
And what does all this have to do with Ingalls, you might ask? Five months after the Final War, we found ourselves hosting the first Constitutional Convention. You’d think that we’d all agree at once to form a new government and carry on from there. I know that I expected that the process of forming a government wouldn’t take that long, but I couldn’t have been more wrong. Farmers are political too – hell, almost every segment of American society is political in one way or another – and they were mad as hell at Washington. They wanted change they could believe in long before it became a political slogan and pretty much everyone else agreed with them. If they had all agreed on the kind of change they wanted, the whole issue might have been settled fairly quickly. They couldn’t agree at all.
Ingalls had received the dubious honour of hosting the Convention for a number of reasons. The first one was that we were roughly in the centre of explored territory. (The maps might have been accurate on some details, still, but politically large swathes of territory might as well have been filled with dragons.) We could host a meeting fairly easily and, with the radios, help the delegates to get back in touch with their constituencies. I hadn’t worried that much over security, at first, but between the ten Principle Towns and the smaller locations, we had over four hundred people coming to stay. At least most of them worked for their supper.
I had found a former Constitutional Scholar called Ben-David Singleton and placed him in charge of the Convention. The entire process was already chaotic when we started to organise it properly and I couldn’t cope. I – and everyone else in authority – was being bombarded with all kinds of suggestions and a whole series of threats from various interest groups. Some wanted a strict ban, for example, on all kinds of governmental interference in farming, others wanted the farmers alone to have the right to vote and so on. I spent more time than I wanted to spend simply skimming through thoroughly worthless suggestions and discarding them. You wouldn’t believe all the shit we had to wade through. One woman wrote in, quite seriously, and proposed that all alcoholic drinks be firmly prohibited, along with drugs, pre-marital sex, private gun ownership and pretty much everything else that makes life worth living. The religious establishment, such as we had in the absence of any links outside West Virginia, wanted some religious laws to be instituted; thankfully, that proposal got shot down swiftly.
And pretty much everyone wanted change and their chance to talk.
We held the first Convention in the open air, mainly because of the fact that the entire population of Ingalls – and hundreds of representatives from nearby towns and settlements – wanted to watch the delegates design the new constitution and hammer out a working plan for future government. Oh, there were a few people who thought that Ingalls – or insert another town name here – should go it alone, but the benefits of cooperation were too apparent for such proposals to get very far. Ingalls had changed considerably over the past few months – every patch of land that could be used as a garden, if only a small one, had been turned into a Victory Garden – but without cooperation, we might shrink away and die. Despite everything, there was enough trust in the ideal of American g
overnment to keep the flame alive. There are places in the world that weren't that lucky. They tended to cease to exist in the expansion following the reconstruction.
“The first Constitutional Convention will come to order,” Ben-David said, after the first speeches had been made. Every Mayor wanted a chance to address the crowd and, being Mayors, had had to have that chance. I won’t reproduce all of their speeches, but rest assured that they were starkly pragmatic, rather than boring and tedious hot air. Ben-David’s famous book holds a complete transcript of everything that happened at the Convention. “Gentlemen, we stand on the brink of making history.”
It was Ben-David’s pitch and he played it well. “Our forefathers built on this land a great nation,” he said. “They created rules that allowed us to live together in reasonable peace and harmony. They didn’t create a finished product, but one that evolved, without breaking. Even the stresses of civil war and racial conflict failed to destroy our nation. What we have to decide, now, is how much of the old we want to discard and how much more we will add to the laws that bind us together.
“It is easy to suggest, as so many have, that we should make this or that little change, secure in the knowledge that we’re doing the right thing. I must caution you against any such move. We might create, here, a precedent that allows some later tyrant to defeat us and strangle us in our own laws. We have seen the creation, in the last few years, of many constitutions, all vast wordy texts that inspire no loyalty from their alienated peoples. We can make the same mistake, but we must not do so. I urge you all to look to the past as a guide, but to the future as a goal. We will reach it as a united nation or a series of small entities, torn apart by civil war and strife. We must consider, when we look at the past and see what we would change, if we might be throwing the baby out with the bathwater.
“It seems a silly analogy, but it is one to remember,” he continued. “When the Founding Fathers created this nation, they did not design a finished product. There is much to regard with scorn and shame in the early years of the United States of America. They allowed slavery, an offence against God and man, an offence against human dignity and the equality of man before God, to exist. They treated women as second-class citizens and refused them the vote. We are appalled to think of them as our ancestors, but the system they designed evolved! They adapted and added women, and blacks, and Native Americans, the chance to vote. You may feel that we went too far when we evolved, but our society adapted. How many other political states can make that claim?
“And I do not feel that we should discard the Constitution, as some have suggested. I have heard from many – many – people over the last few weeks and most have spoken in favour of retaining the Constitution, with perhaps a few minor changes. I feel that yes, we should consider the Constitution to be a vital part of our new society. I feel that we should adapt it, based on the past, while looking to the future. We stand here, knowing that we will be judged, in the future, by the fruits of our labours. It behoves us to make them as secure as possible. We, too, must not design a finished product. A finished product will merely break at the first hurdle.”
He paused. “And now I throw open the floor for debate,” he said. “I ask people to make their opinions known. The Constitution, old or new, must enjoy the support of the people. I must warn everyone, however, that rowdy behaviour will see the person responsible evicted from the area. We should try to approach the future with a little dignity.”
He received a standing ovation before the first person rose to speak. It was, I freely admit, a very disorganised assembly. Ben-David had planned it that way. The people would make their opinions known, allowing the people who were actually going to do much of the legwork in adapting or rewriting the Constitution to hear what they had to say and incorporate their ideas. It was a chaotic system, but as he pointed out, the appearance of democracy was important.
The first issue raised, much to my surprise, was gun control. In hindsight, I shouldn’t have been surprised at all. Don’t get me wrong; Americans, particularly military veterans, are not gun-crazy freaks. We just have a tradition of an armed citizenry as the final bulwark against official tyranny and the occasional official fuck-up, such as the Jail Posse. If the Stonewall Prison had suffered an escape, we were not going to be hiding in our homes while the State Police – or whoever – searched for the escaped prisoners. Quite a few of the survivors of the Final War had even planned to fight the government, or the UN’s mythical fleet of black helicopters, or both.
(Which actually leads into a very important point regarding governments. The people running the governments have self-interests of their own. At best, this results in Empire-building on a small scale, at worst this results in official tyranny. You can’t give the vast powers of a People’s Commissioner to someone and not expect them to be tempted by the possibilities. Russia is – was – studded with the results of such people, from dachas that are effectively mansions to massive and completely useless factories. It only gets worse when non-governmental organisations, with even less accountability, are involved. They tend to think that just because they’re a charity, they know better than the people who have lived in the area for hundreds of years, even when they evidently do not. Your charitable donation, far from helping, might have done untold harm…but I digress.)
The argument raged backwards and forwards for nearly an hour before Ben-David finally managed to work out some kind of consensus. I didn’t take any part in the argument, although like all Americans, I do have a position on practically anything. (Heinlein was wrong; everyone has opinions on everything, even if they don’t know anything about the matter under discussion. It isn’t just sex and religion.) I suspect that the real issue wasn't gun ownership, or even gun control, but preventing gun misuse. A gun in the hands of a citizen who knew how to use it – and took care of it – isn’t particularly dangerous to the innocent. A gun in the hands of an armed robber – as the saying goes, once guns are banned, only outlaws will have guns – is incredibly dangerous. If I learned that someone was on the verge of doing something really unpleasant, like a college shooting, I would insist on disarming him for the safety of everyone else. You might feel that I was infringing on his rights, but no one has the right to take a pot-shot or three at the innocent. It’s easy to see why the entire issue becomes so muddy, with claims, counter-claims, and threats. No one is rational when it comes to guns.
I wasn’t entirely surprised at the outcome. The right to own guns would be inalienable for every citizen, although criminals would be banned from owning guns once convicted – stupid, I thought; criminals would have no problems obtaining guns illegally, even if it was remotely enforceable – and full training would be provided in schools in using guns. That was a better idea, I felt; proper training can lead to avoiding the handful of accidents that can occur when guns are involved. If the myth of gun-ownership leading to superpower status, or at least being treated as bestowing a dangerous glamour, could be discredited, we’d have fewer accidents. A gun is a tool, nothing more. Owning a gun doesn’t make someone a warrior.
(I doubted that they would follow Uncle Billy’s method. He’d told me, right from the start, that if I played silly buggers – his exact words – while he was teaching me, the first time I’d be spanked so hard I wouldn’t be sitting down for a week and the second time he’d just stop teaching me. I took that warning seriously. It might have kept a few dozen idiot kids paying attention.)
The discussion verged onto other themes. The women who wanted to ban everything got up and made a long speech, which was interrupted by someone throwing a tomato with dubious accuracy. It missed her – shame, really, or so I thought – and came down on some other poor bastard, who hadn’t been wearing a hat. I took a moment to evict the tomato-thrower and in the meantime the woman had been shouted down by most of the crowd. It always amuses me how many people seek to improve other people’s lives by means of the law, regardless of how their victims think about it, and…well
, it always struck me as short-sighted. If you want to end a particular kind of behaviour, it’s a good idea to pick on something that would give you the support of the vast majority of people.
The more serious issue took longer to resolve; governmental interference. The government had a habit of telling people what to do and that was, naturally, resented. The government had, before the war, been leaning towards the ‘green’ way of farming – long story there, look it up – and urging farmers to adopt it. They might have had the best motives - they always did, of course – but farmers resented being treated as idiots, particularly when they weren't. Sounds simple, right…?
But…the government was also needed to ensure minimum safety standards as well, and to act as umpire when Management and Labour clashed. (If, of course, it was a fair-minded umpire enforcing fair play.) How could anyone square this particular circle?
Perhaps I need a second Iron Law of Government:
“The trick to maintaining a government is to keep it balanced between doing too little and doing too much.”
Luckily, before I could go mad, I found myself with other responsibilities.
We didn’t know it yet, but we were on the verge of war.
Chapter Twenty
War is not a pathology that, with proper hygiene and treatment, can be wholly prevented. War is a natural condition of the State, which was organized in order to be an effective instrument of violence on behalf of society. Wars are like deaths, which, while they can be postponed, will come when they will come and cannot be finally avoided.
The Living Will Envy The Dead Page 18