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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Ruin Explorer" data-source="post: 8809097" data-attributes="member: 18">Perhaps, but definitely not for the reasons you appear to suggest.The LoP's government of Sigil is far more laissez-faire than the government of Singapore, to the point where it's laughable to make the comparison, let alone to suggest Singapore is more free from a government perspective. The idea that the LoP's minions are going to be knocking on your door because you said the wrong thing, or caning you in public (both of which can happen in Singapore) is obviously laughable. It takes serious effort to piss of the LoP if we go by canon, rather than fanon. The LoP is definitely a totally undemocratic, unrepresentative, inflexible, and inhumane/uncaring leader, but she's not forcing people into an army, brain-washing people, pushing alleged drug dealers out of helicopters, systematically murdering protestors, enforcing apartheid, engaging in genocide, destroying the intellectual class, or really doing anything that an "oppressive" government normally does.But that cuts both ways. And that's BAD.The LoP also doesn't intefere when people are taking it upon themselves to be thugs and fascists within her city. The Mercykillers, for example, are allowed to operate in Sigil, and act as de facto police force, when they're in fact extremely violent, have very odd ideas about what constitutes justice, don't really respect any kind of rights or freedoms, and so on.They're the sort of people who would mean 21st-century people wouldn't want to live there, not the LoP. The LoP is effectively enabling by not intefering. But she's not sending them to round up dissidents or the like. They're doing that by themselves, and even have been at odds with the LoP at times (I believe they were ultimately one of the factions banned from Sigil in Faction War).It's exactly the kind of consequence most people ignore, very demonstrably through world history.People don't voluntarily pay taxes unless they're getting a far more direct benefit that than. However, it's a balance - so long as you're getting something from the taxes - usually some kind of protection, whether that's against, violence, ill-health, theft, or whatever, then people are going to complain but will pay. The idea however that people will just pony up when they're effectively getting nothing, personally, is a laughable fantasy.I agree re: post-apocalyptic writers being idiots, though. It's just the reasoning is equally weak on "people will voluntarily/happily pay taxes for largely abstract benefits". They won't. They'll pay them because they're effectively forced to (even if very little force is actually involved). They'll be happier if there's a non-abstract benefit.This is an sadly low-quality argument.The better kind of SF/speculative fiction/fantasy goes to great lengths to understand why and how alternative societies, ones that don't operate like our own, would work. That requires some actual thought, effort and maybe even research on the part of the author though, not mindless hand-waving.Ursula K. LeGuin is the gold standard here. She's written many books about societies that don't work the way ours does, and whilst not everyone is going to like those societies, she does at least give them a real depth and makes sure they actually work in a logical way, and withstand some kind of analysis.So implying it can't be done and is is dumb to try is both insulting and silly, frankly. It's easily disproven.The issue with Citadel is indeed like the issue with early TNG - the society hasn't been thought through. The utopian vision is there, but there's little idea as to how it would work, particularly when people test the limits, which being humans, they will. Later TNG and DS9 did a vastly better job, and interestingly Strange New Worlds has done a good job here too (I would argue that Discovery has not, despite attempting it).Moving on from that, though, what I think people are being really silly about though is one incredibly simple thing that I've never seen not be true:Adventurers (and their players) absolutely loathe, detest and are enraged by being taxed. Especially if they're taxed in some sort of flat way that doesn't reflect any benefits gained. It doesn't matter if the taxing entity is Cormyr, or the Radiant Citadel or wherever, it doesn't matter how nice the people are, adventurers loathe it. Further, the taxes and requirements levied tend to be extremely ill-conceived and not at all thought through, which exacerbates the issue.Partly this is because adventurers tend to be nomads, or to put more cruelly, hobos, and further, adventurers don't typically get protected by the authorities, it's usually the authorities protecting people from them ("Are we the baddies?"). If you show adventurers what benefit the tax is giving them, and make it so the tax is proportional to that, and to their residence somewhere, then things improve, often drastically.</blockquote>

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