FOR US THE LIVING BY ROBERT A. HEINLEIN

“How awful! How in the world could they stay clean and healthy in such houses?”

“They couldn’t. I don’t suppose that I can make you realize just what the conditions were in which a lot of people lived. A classmate of mine at the Naval Academy joined the navy because he got tired of walking behind a mule and plowing. So he walked fifteen miles to town barefooted and slept on the doorstep of the post office. When the postmaster arrived in the morning he enlisted. He was selected for the Naval Academy and became one of the most brilliant young officers in the fleet and expert in the use and design of equipment that makes your automatic door seem simple. But his father and mother and brothers and sisters were still living in a one room dirt-floored cabin, dirty and sick from hookworm, anemia, and malnutrition.”

“Why in the world would the government spend all that effort on machinery for an aircraft carrier when its citizens were living in such abominable squalor?”

“Well, I guess we had something like your private and public spheres of actions, Dian’. The lives of these people were in the private sphere of action, but national defense is public.”

“But it’s obviously the same thing. Any government official would know that it is dangerous to everybody to let people be hungry and sick. Why, from the most selfish standpoint possible, if people are sick, they can be the center of epidemic, and anybody knows that a hungry man is not responsible for his actions and may do something dangerous.”

“I don’t know how to answer you, Diana. We knew it in the navy of course, and we kept them clean and healthy and well fed, but to say that any government official would naturally know that—well, either men have grown very much wiser in a hundred and fifty years or something has happened to change the point of view.”

“I don’t believe that we are any smarter than people were in your day. I don’t think such a thing is possible in four or five generations. But I don’t see how anyone could be so short-sighted.”

“Even if an official did have your viewpoint and wanted to do something, he would be bound to ask ‘where is the money to come from?’. And no one could answer him. Cost of government was already too high.”

“Where is the money to come from, Perry? Why, I never heard such silly talk. Where does any money come from? When the government sees a need for exchange, it creates it, of course. Why you had that in your day, Perry. It says right there in the original constitution, ‘Congress shall have the sole right to coin money and regulate the value thereof.'”

“Yes, I remember that phrase. But that isn’t the way it worked out in my day. Money was created by the banks, most of it at least—the important part anyhow. If the government needed money and couldn’t raise it via taxes in time, it borrowed from the banks.”

“But I don’t understand—the banks are a part of the government.”

“Not in my day. They were private institutions. It might be proper to say that the banks were the government. In some ways they were stronger than the government.”

“But that would be sheer blind anarchy!”

“It was—pretty much.”

“But see here, Perry. All this doesn’t check. You came from 1939 when Franklin Roosevelt was president. I don’t know a whole lot about history, but I do know that he is regarded as the first man in the new economic era. Why, there is a statue of him in Washington, showing him feeding the hungry.”

“Yes, Mr. Roosevelt knew that all right. But he got very little cooperation, even from those he was trying to help. But it’s my turn to ask questions: Tell me, is there no longer anyone hungry?”

“Of course not. Not in the United States at least.”

“I meant the United States. Are there any sick?”

“Oh yes. Not many of course.”

“What happens to them?”

“They are treated and taken care of to make them well. What else could you do?”

“Never mind. Is anyone out of work?”