The Last Emperox (The Interdependency, #3)

by John Scalzi

Either she was going to have to become less fundamentally selfish, or she was going to have to find a way to make others less so.

The second reason was that the ruling class of the Interdependency, favoring financial and social stability over having the lumpenproletariat trying to rip their heads from their necks at every opportunity, opted to have the Interdependency’s baseline standard of living one where no one starved, or was without shelter, or died of easily preventable diseases or went bankrupt if they had a heart attack or lost a job, or both.

It was less of a problem when the goal was to tie all known human systems into a web of mutual reliance, ostensibly to lessen the threat of interstellar war and trade conflict but mostly so that a small number of mercantile families could rent-seek from the rest of humanity in perpetuity. But now that all those systems were about to be on their own, possibly forever, it became a very large, very looming issue.

They both came away from the meeting feeling like they had manipulated the other precisely, which meant it was a good meeting.

“Sophistry can be heuristically generated.” “So millennia of college sophomores have taught us, yes.”