DarkShip Thieves by Sarah A. Hoyt Page A

Earth was well ruled. Strangely it wasn't so. Rarely referred to, and when at all, it had the tone of an embarrassing time. It was called the time of Earth Authority or the Time of Servitude.
    Other things too had a different weight in those books. Take the Usian experiment. All the analyses I read back from primary program on talked of it as a failed experiment and everyone agreed it had been doomed from the very beginning, where it had put the emphasis on private rights and individual decisions about government. Eden's books . . . well, it wasn't that they had never heard about Marx, or Pseudo-Gurion, and they seemed to have a startlingly low level of respect for Moore, though his work was referenced in passing once or twice, mostly as an example of what not to do—it was more that they looked at everything I'd learned from the other side.
    In their view the Usian state had collapsed not because it had reposited too much confidence and too great a power in the individual; not because it had allowed private citizens to own dangerous weapons; not even because it had enforced the right of the individual to associate and trade with whomever he pleased, but because it had, by degrees slid into the same sort of oligarchy that governed most of the world at the time. It was—the darkship's people's treatises said—because the Usians had surrendered, intellectually, to the older ways of doing things that they had lost their place as the most advanced and powerful state of the early twenty first century. And it was because of that that it had eventually become just the North American protectorate of Earth's government.
    If only the Usians had restricted their government, if they'd kept it small and powerless, the world might still eventually have united under the Bio-Lords and led to the debacle and disorder and the current government of the Good Men, but probably not.
    I'd learned soon to keep my mouth shut about how strange these ideas were. I'd tried arguing once, after a week in the ship, when I'd read only a few gems. "It's not true, you know," I'd told my captor over lunch.
    We rarely ate lunch together. In fact, he seemed to avoid me as much as he could, almost as much as Father did, only with less reason. Or perhaps not. I had never tried to strangle Father. But this one time, I'd come in, with the small gem reader he'd loaned me in one hand, reading my fourth history book of the week—more than I had read in my entire educational career.
    He looked up from what he was eating—something that smelled and looked like fish over rice—and gathered his eyebrows over his eyes. "What is not true?" he asked.
    "That the government of the Mules collapsed not because of the Mules but because too much power was concentrated in the hands of too few individuals. The Mules were different—They weren't human. They didn't think—"
    "Perhaps," he said, and lowered his eyelids a little, whether to think better or to hide his eyes from me, I did not know. "And perhaps because they were different the system survived longer than it would have with normal humans."
    "Uh?"
    "Well, think about it. What is the rationale for having all the power concentrated in the hands of a few individuals?" he asked.
    "That . . ." I thought about it and fished from my imperfectly remembered lessons the answers I'd learned. "That governing can then be done by experts. It is too much to hope for, too much to believe that regular individuals, concerned with their families and their work and . . . daily life, will have any interest in the government of the Commonweal beyond the marginal interest in enacting what they will benefit them, but which might be disastrous for the country, region or world."
    "And why shouldn't they enact what's in their best interest?"
    "Because they don't always know what's in their best interest."
    Kit Klaavil waved the whole thing away, as if it didn't matter. "I must remember to give you Gilbert's The Election of the Few .