Roslin, the economy is not her thing.

Television, Movies Games and Books BSG-2003
#1

In continuing with my bashing of the Roslin/Adama dictatorship, I wanted to post what I have thought for years now. This is something that Roslin as President should have been doing with the lives of the people on the rag tag fleet right after the events of Episode “33”.

What I feel was Roslin’s greatest failure was the fact she failed at getting any kind of real economy set up. Now before I get slammed for saying that this is impossible I would like to point out something. Money here in the United States has no backing. It is what they call fiat money. In other words its market value is like any other commodity, and it has been that way since we took it off the gold standard.

Now what I am saying would have been very hard to do, but not impossible…

Now we know that the fleet still has paper, algae coffee grounds, ammo, tooth paste, ect ect. My point being that someone, somewhere is manufacturing goods. So it wouldn’t be out of line to say that they could be manufacturing new forms of currency.

Now personally I would start with the Military and anyone with a government job. You can use the old pay scales that already existed before the attack as a starting point for salary amounts, and go from there. The long and the short of this, if you take the refining ship; now they say no one wants to work and live there. But because the job being harder, you pay these people there more. Maybe you don’t charge them “rent” to live on the shift as a perk. Which brings me to another point, if there were a cost to have to live on the ship or any ship; is there not now is a reason to get up and go to work? I really don’t recall seeing people have to “pay their way.” For food, drink, shelter, ect.

Basically I am talking about creating a “above ground” economy that would do much of what the “underground” economy is doing for the fleet now.

Now I know that working for money doesn’t give a group of people reason for living, but it might give them reasons for not revolting. If the men and woman on the refining ship were there because the pay was better and had time off and had other people out in the fleet wanting to fill in full or part time; the people there might not want to say revolt and run away with all the fleet’s fuel.

I guess what I am trying to say is that I get the feeling that the standard of living on the fleet is just horrid, and many out there are being used as slave, and this didn’t have to happen.

Anyone else have any other views?

#2

Wow, this is exactly what I was musing on just earlier this week, especially as regards the tilium ship. I never understood why Adama or Roslin couldn’t give them benefits instead of just going “suck it up, we need tilium”. Clearly this is a point where Roslin needed experience in that part of government.

Right now, the Fleet is essentially running by the seat of its pants because there’s no one there who understands and wants organization. The Quorum is stuck on the basics—food, water, shelter, rights—and Adama and Roslin are all about survival and sticking together. What they needed, as soon as the 33 minute time period was up, was to start assigning people who knew what they were doing to take care of these things.

If society is running smoothly, no matter how unfair or stupid some of it is, people will not be likely to revolt. Because revolution means chaos, and the loss of the comfortable status quo. But if things are already a mess, it just begs for someone like Gaeta or Zarek to use that to their advantage. Frankly, if Zarek said he had a plan for organizing the Fleet better, instead of just killing the Cylons, I’d be all for his mutiny.

#3

Way cool that you were thinking about that… I had been pondering about that forever now. To me this is just one of her great many failures as President.