[Space] Economics of a space empire

[cmdicely]

Originally Posted by Tyneras

To take Fish's example, my original plan was to have Britain, instead of forcing Hong Kong to buy anything, would just start putting larger and larger taxes and/or tithes on Hong Kong

Taxes are the price at which government services are sold, and which the taxed entity generally can't (legally) opt-out of. So, in a sense, raising the taxes imposed on an entity is just a special case of increasing the quantity of goods that the entity is compelled to buy from the taxing/selling entity.

[Infornific]

I'm not sure the "Bread & Circuses" concept works, at least as presented. If you've got an interstellar empire you have a very high energy, civilization - by definition much wealthier than our own. I can see an automated future where there's a large population of unemployed proles, but I don't see how it will chew up a huge percentage of gdp to provide them with basic food and shelter. We're not talking about labor intensive services here - we're talking about things likely to get cheaper as technology advances. If you have huge amounts of power and material resources (implied by the interstellar society) you probably won't have to spend a high percentage to provide proles with basic food, shelter plus cable tv and internet access. Food's a lot cheaper in relative and absolute terms than in ancient times, and you can broadcast your circuses an unlimited number of times. On top of that, assuming advances in social sciences and bio-technology it shouldn't be too hard to nudge prole birth rates downward and solve the problem over a few generations.

This doesn't mean you can't have core worlds exploiting the frontier - I just don't see why they'd need to do it to keep the proles happy. There could be other cases - old school mercantilism has been mentioned. Pournelle's CoDominion took the opposite tack - Earth dumped proles on the colonies to deal with. Another possibility is that the exploitation is to maintain elites. Say the technology has development to replace a lot of educated labor at the top of society. So the core worlds create a huge and unneeded military and civil service to give employment to the upper and upper middle classes (obviously an officer heavy military) made surplus by technology. So the frontiers, which lack superfluous elites get to pay taxes to keep things going. That would justify a much higher expenditure than keeping proles quiet. For a historical analogy, I'd say a major unofficial function of the British Empire was to provide employment and status for British aristocrats.

[Michael Cule]

I find the 'bread and circuses' idea is banging a current political drum rather than using the possibilities of SF to imagine a future that isn't just the contemporary world written on a large scale.

I think if I were you I'd make the oppression on the frontier derive from the technological restraints of the setting. For instance if the 'empire' controls the means of interstellar travel or can easily police them they have the means to impose their desires on the fringe. Stargates or fixed and therefore policeable jump points mean they can tax and oppress to their hearts content. And they don't have to have a unquenchable maw of a welfare state to motivate them. People will rob other people when they can get away with it, even if it's against their long term interests. Look at the magnificent and ultimately stupid con-job of the Delian League, where Athens took an agreement for mutual defence and turned it into their own petty empire.

And then, when some hardworking by-his-bootstraps genius on the fringe comes up with a way of travelling between the stars that by-passes the means that the Empire controlls, you've got the basis for a Story!