You do not want to go there!
"Why not?"
For every day you earn working, they only allow you to keep a few seconds of it, their taxes will take EVERYTHING from you. You make clothing, and you will have it ripped from your hands and you will only be allowed to keep a few threads. They say it's for your own good, but the truth is, if you make a dollar, you will only keep a dime, and THAT is only if they even allow you to make anything at all. They WANT people poor, just so they can gloat. -- Anon Guest
The first planetary system known as Greater Deregulation was never called Greater Deregulation. They were named later, after their general philosophy. Once the rest of the Alliance caught on, they all gained the common nickname.
The first was called the Shining Fiscal Empire of Libertarian Freedom and Light. Quite a lot more of a mouthful than Greater Deregulation Upper West.
They were a Terran colony, so they were welcomed into the United Fellowship of Terran Planets. It was the following weeks that the trouble began. Or rather, the implacable demands. The howling about their inalienable rights, which they all knew. Well, which all the leaders claimed they knew.
They pushed. All the time. They pushed for their constitution to become the Alliance's constitution. They pushed for their laws to become universal. They pushed for freedom after freedom after freedom. What they claimed were freedoms. They had a peculiar knack for calling anything they wanted a freedom... when it was far closer to the opposite.
The freedom to work was the right to keep people in thinly-masked slavery. The right to choose medical assistance was the trap of no true choice at all. The freedom of air quality was the freedom to ruin air quality. As for buyer's rights? It was more... Caveat Emptor.
The Cogniscent Rights Committee actually read the proposed laws, rather than the deceptively attractive titles. They called the contents to the attention of the rest of the alliance, and how weaselly some of the phrasing was.
If you want to find snakes, look for them behind words with changeable meaning...
When war means peace, freedom means slavery, and speech becomes money... something is very, very rotten.
Then someone got out of there.
They were far smaller than their Executive Chief. In height as well as width. Their clothing was serviceable, new, and almost falling apart. That's what you get when the people making the work uniforms are paid a pittance for each hundred units they turn out.
The escapee was also skating the razor's edge at the precipice of terminal malnutrition.
Careful intervention had given them strength and health enough to testify. The culture shock might yet wipe them out, but they were a fighter. And that was where all the truth came to light.
Boss makes a dollar, I make a dime... But, no. It was worse than that.
Boss made a million. They made jack. And that was why the rebellion attacked.
[Photo by Collab Media on Unsplash]
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