...Reminder that Johnson revealed the 4,000 murders thing offscreen to the international news outlets of the Free City of New York, per poptart post.
So Victoria has that to deal with on top of literally everything else.
To be fair, the international media may not take what is to you the obvious perspective of "the Victorians murdered all those poor people" and may instead go for something more like:
"Clashes between Commonwealth forces and Victorian militia, reported to have been made up almost entirely of aged veterans of Victoria's old Apostolic Army, shattered the city of Buffalo, claiming the lives of four thousand civilians and wounding thousands more."
Because all 'look what you made me do' reasoning aside, that's the neutral, just-the-facts way to report that story. The Victorians did not, so far as I know, round up four thousand civilians and shoot them personally, but their use of human shields ensured that said casualties would happen.
What would be good for refugees and the food crisis would be a New Deal policy.
Gets people employed and fed, and makes the case for citizenship harder to dismiss.
I am not a history buff, though.
I mean, we don't actually have an employment crisis. What we have is something much older and darker; we have
famines to worry about.
See, in a developed or semi-developed industrial economy, when the economy sputters, it's usually a complicated issue of supply and demand and whatnot, and you get situations where the factories cannot profitably employ people and the economy contracts and so on. It's very abstract and complicated and the main reason people bother to pay economists in hopes that they can sort it all out.
We have a much simpler problem.
Not enough food is being grown to feed everyone. This is almost unheard of in a modern developed nation, but was very common in pre-industrial societies. The agricultural sector, due to bad weather, poor farming techniques, or disruption of the economy that stopped the labor force from gathering the harvest, could simply fail to gather enough food to keep everyone alive for the next year or so until another harvest came in. This is disastrous, because it means
someone, somewhere, is going to starve, and the only question is 'who.'
To make matters worse, anyone who produces food or controls the means by which food is distributed will start hoarding in this situation, if only to ensure that they have what it takes to feed their own families. Since food hoarding means storing more than you anticipate needing (the famine might last longer than you expect, or you might lose some to theft or disaster), this further exacerbates the food inequality.
...
With our population growing very rapidly due to refugee influx (two million or so in the first two years, and more since, on a base population of about fifteen million), this is a serious issue for us.
Fortunately, the reason we have this problem is simple and fixable. Our people have been forced to use much more primitive methods of agriculture than were normal in the early 21st century, with a lot of people reduced to outright subsistence farming to survive. This means that there is a
huge amount of room for us to increase farm productivity with better machinery and techniques, which means that unlike most historical societies suffering from famines, we can realistically hope to increase output fast enough to keep ahead of the problem.
...
But for purposes of government policy, the thing to understand is that a famine is very different from a recession in which unemployed poor people starve. In a famine, the problem isn't some abstract economic thing, it's that
even with everyone working hard, there just is not enough food to eat. This means that under famine conditions you will usually NOT see a major unemployment problem, except perhaps in urban areas if the entire economy collapses due to the famine.
People will all be working as hard as they can until they collapse from exhaustion- the problem isn't that people are out of work, it's that the work doesn't ensure that there will be enough
food.
To be frank, I kind of think having a legitimacy stat at all was a mistake, since this discussion happens literally every time it's been brought up.
I dunno. I feel like it's kind of nice to have a mechanic that reflects "so, are you seen as being in any meaningful sense a successor state to the old US" and incentivizes us to care at least a little bit about old American cultural legacy rather than just shrugging and going "so what mechanical consequences are there for letting the Vicks melt the Liberty Bell down for scrap metal?"
