Mack Reynolds - Equality - In the Year 2000

“Some notes 1 was going to ask your father about, but it occurs to me that as a student of anthropology, you might be more up on it than he is. It has to do with crime.”

“Crime? Oh, of course. Fascinating. I spent over a year studying it. It must have been fabulous, living back when they had crime.”

He let the breath out of his lungs. “Yeah,” he said. “Never a dull moment. No more crime these days, hey?”

“No. Of course not.”

He didn’t bother to disguise his skepticism as he fumbled through his notes. “All right. Now let me state my case. When I went into hibernation, we had one hell of a lot of crime. It was growing so fast it was hard to keep statistics.”

He looked down at his papers. “For instance, we had petty crime, such as shoplifting, avoiding paying your fare when getting on a subway or bus, children sneaking into movies, walking out on a bill in a restaurant, figuring out methods of making long distance calls on the telephone without paying.” He paused. “Then there were servants pilfering about the household, servants getting a kickback from the butchershop and other stores where they purchased supplies for their employers. Trivia such as that.”

“Fascinating,” she repeated.

“Yeah,” he muttered. “I once had a houseman who drank up three cases of vintage champagne on me.” He went back to his notes. “Then we had crimes of violence. Mugging, kidnapping, piracy even, in some parts of the world, murder, rape, robbery of homes, stores, warehouses, and banks.

“And along in here we have a whole variety of odds and ends: confidence games, prostitution, gambling, blackmail, pickpocketing, smuggling, cattle rustling, extortion. Actually, the list is endless. At the very top, even more lucrative than bank robbery, and certainly more often committed, there’s embezzlement.”

“Yes,” she said brightly. “I studied all about it. Men like Dillinger, Pretty Boy Floyd, Baby Face Nelson, Al Capone.”

He looked at her sarcastically. “So no more, eh?”

She shook her head.

“No more police, no more jails. Don’t need ’em any more, right?”

“That’s right,” she said reasonably.

He threw down the sheaf of notes on the coffee table.

“Why not? All through history we’ve had crime, since first some caveman slugged his neighbor over the head with a club and swiped his wife. So now, all of a sudden, why has it ended?”

“Because the reasons ended.”

He took her in silently.

She said, “Now see here. All those different types of crimes you mentioned fit roughly into one of two categories; those committed for the sake of money, and those due to mental illness. Obviously, now that we’ve eliminated money, crimes that dealt with stealing, as such, were abolished out of hand. What would you steal, these days? Those that dealt with mental illness are now in the hands of the Medical Guild, not police, courts, and jails.”

She thought about it. “Why, even in your day how did they deal with a shoplifter who was found to be a kleptomaniac?”

“Okay. But look, take a present-day embezzler. Suppose you had someone working in the part of the data banks dealing with what we would have called banking—the credit records. Someone in a position to so alter the records that he deposited to his own account, say, twice as much credit as the other citizens are granted from their Guaranteed Annual Income. What would you do with him?”

Edith sighed. “Jule, in the first place he would have no motive for doing such a thing since he already receives all that he needs. You can’t eat more than three or four meals a day, you can’t wear more than one outfit of clothes at a time, and you can’t sleep in more than one bed. As things are now, most people don’t use up their yearly quota of credit. What in the world would you do with twice as much? But if such a thing did happen, then obviously the person involved would be mentally deranged and the Medical Guild would treat him.”

“And during the time he was being treated, he would still continue to receive his Guaranteed Annual Income?”

“But of course.”

Julian sighed. “Okay. All right. But how about rape? Don’t tell me there are no longer crimes of passion.”

“Yes, there are; seldom, but sometimes. As to rape, sex is so free, so easily available to all, that only a terribly upset person would resort to rape for sexual satisfaction. In which case, once again, it is a matter for the Medical Guild to treat the poor harassed individual.”

“But suppose in committing the rape, the rapist kills the girl. Suppose the rapist is a sadist.”

She looked at him in puzzlement. “But surely even in your time a sadist was given psychiatric care rather than punishment.”

“Sometimes,” he muttered. “Sometimes they were executed, or given life imprisonment.”

“How terrible!”

“Suppose it’s a crime against the State?”

“What State? There is no State. The State was an institution for the purpose of maintaining a class-divided society. It was organized with laws, police and military, courts and prisons to maintain the status quo under slavery, feudalism, capitalism, or state-capitalism, which was what the Soviet-type communism was really all about. Today, we have no State, since we have no class or classes to be kept subjugated.”

“What I mean is, suppose someone comes along who wants to overthrow this so-called Golden Rule society of yours. What do you do with him?”

“Nothing. Any citizen is free to advocate any change.”

“But suppose he wants to overthrow the system?”

“If he could convince the majority of our citizens that his plan was appropriate, then it would be done.”

Julian was becoming impatient with her. “But suppose he knew that he couldn’t convince a majority and resorted to force and violence. In the old days, in the United States, it was theoretically legal to advocate a basic change. The country was full of minority parties and groups who wanted to establish everything from socialism to anarchy. But you had to advocate that it be accomplished by peaceful means—the ballot. When somebody came along such as the IWW, the Wobblies, or the early Communist Party, who favored armed revolt, the police, the F.B.I., and everyone else landed on them like a ton of bricks.”

The idea was so foreign to Edith that she had to think it over. She said finally, “He’d have his work cut out trying to accomplish it. For one thing, in your day half the citizens in the country seemed to possess guns. If not, they were easily obtained, even after various laws were passed to control them. But today I would estimate that not one person in fifty owns a firearm. Hunting is no longer a popular sport; we tend to protect our wildlife. Those who do have guns usually have small-caliber ones for use in marksmanship clubs. They would hardly be suitable for armed revolt.”

“But suppose a few thousand people did arm themselves,” he argued, “even with these small-caliber guns, and seized the government?”

“Jule, Jule, you know enough about the manner in which the country is run now to realize how silly that sounds. We have no government in the sense that applied in the middle of the twentieth century. The government that we do have, if that is what you want to call it, is not in control of the country. Let us suppose that you did seize all the members of the Production Congress. What would have been accomplished? They are not in control of the nation. The production of the industries and the other necessary work would go on. We would simply elect new members to a new Production Congress. But it is all so ridiculous. What would motivate such people? What would they gain that they do not have now?”

Julian grabbed up his notes and fumbled through them. “Oh, yeah,” he said. “Somebody—it was you, I think—told me that narcotics were legal now. Anybody can try them.”