“Throughout history,” Robert Heinlein wrote in 1973, “poverty is the normal condition of man.”
“Advances which permit this norm to be exceeded—here and there, now and then—are the work of an extremely small minority, frequently despised, often condemned, and almost always opposed by all right-thinking people.”
“Whenever this tiny minority is kept from creating, or (as sometimes happens) is driven out of a society, the people then slip back into abject poverty.”
“This,” Heinlein added, “is known as ‘bad luck.’”
All those “right-thinking people”—the people with the socially certified ideas, the kinder, gentler, mask-wearing, anti-fossil-fuel types—are on the ramparts, proudly toppling the atavistic instruments of their prosperity.
"All societies are based on rules to protect pregnant women and young children.
All else is surplusage, excrescence, adornment, luxury, or folly which can - and must - be dumped in emergency to preserve this prime function.
As racial (human race) survival is the only universal morality, no other basic is possible.
Attempts to formulate a “perfect society" on any foundation other than "Women and children first!" is not only witless, it is automatically genocidal.
Nevertheless, starry-eyed idealists (all of them male) have tried endlessly - and no doubt will keep trying."
~ Robert Anson Heinlein ~ Engineer Lieutenant USN - Novelist ~ Born July 7, 1907 Butler, Missouri, U.S. ~ Died May 8, 1988 Carmel-by-the-Sea, California, U.S.