Trope-a-Day: The Government

The Government: Even though there is one, sort of averted in the (remarkably ungoverned) Empire.  There, it mostly means the Imperial Service, which is about as thin as air – apart from keeping their Universal with them, spending the Citizen’s Dividend, and mailing in their three-four percent on Empire Services Fee Day, the majority of Imperial citizen-shareholders barely notice that it exists in any given year, never mind have occasion to interact with it.

(Although some services it provides are fairly ubiquitous – infrastructure, copyrights, externality management, currency – they’re not really the sort of active, impositional, or obvious things that make people yell “government!”, the runér spend more time acting in their private capacity than via their strictly circumscribed governing authority, and most of the generalized-benevolence functions that get attached to Earth-style governments are devolved to the Citizen Oversight Groups of the Plurality, which lack the sovereign powers of government and aren’t tax-funded and so can be cheerfully ignored by everyone who doesn’t care about what they do.)