The Rangers Are Coming (35 page)

              “There also have to be changes to the electoral process as far as voting is concerned.  We need more informed and involved citizens.  As each state organizes its school systems, we need to make sure that several things that are crippling education in the 20
^th
century don’t happen.  First, we must insure teachers are paid a very good wage, and enjoy a high social standing in society, so they don’t start organizing into a self-serving union.  School needs to be a year round activity with breaks for planting in the spring, harvesting in the fall, and a relatively short break at Christmas.

                “Thanksgiving has been a commonly celebrated blessing for a good harvest.  In my day, it’s nothing more than the kickoff to the Christmas buying season.  We need to make sure it’s kept as a religious observance and held the first Sunday in November.  Another important change to the schools will be a major concentration on civics and the concept of government ruling by the consent of the governed.  It will be an easy sell to tell students that in order to give their consent, then the people have a responsibility to be educated in how administrations and Congress govern.  All students will be required to pass a test on that very subject in their final year of high school.  The religious connection to owning their rights should never be far from the discussion on government.  This firmly places God in the schools, and the subject of separation of church and state will never come up, as it relates to schools.”

              “A final improvement to the schools is to insure gifted students are treated differently.  When the student is identified as gifted, it will be a great honor to a family to have their children given special education at centers that will eventually spread around the country.  Essentially, these will be facilities, where children live, and are provided everything they need to be happy and to immerse themselves in the subjects in which they excel.  One of these schools will be just for promising government leaders.  I’m hoping most of our future presidents come from this school.”

              “We have another problem on the domestic agenda that threatens stability,” said Arcadia.  “When you take your census of the county in two years, you are going to find out you have about 20 million people living within our borders.  Technically, all of them are American citizens.  But that’s really only in name and not practice.  Basically, we need to redistribute the population, especially from Mexico and Central America and some of the Caribbean islands to some of the empty spaces in North America.  We also need to break up the concentrations of blacks in the south, and the poor neighborhoods of the northeast.”

              “What do farmers want?  Free land of their own.  What do poor families want?  They want better jobs that improve their standard of living.  We can do both. 

              “70 years from now, an American President will get Congress to pass something called the Homestead Act.  This provides 160 acres of free land for any person with a $10 filing fee, and the promise to live on the land and improve it for at least five years.  Offer that to the poor tenant farmers in Mexico and Central America, and they will come by the tens of thousands.  However, we aren’t going to wait 70 years, the Homestead Act is a fact already.”

              “We need to rapidly improve the nations’ infrastructure.  That means more electricity to run factories.  We get that by building strategic dams on some of the big rivers that are flooding every year.  In order to do that, we have to have more railroads, highways, and heavy equipment.  We have done a good job of building railroads in the last 20 years.  We now have a rail system that runs north and south along the east coast, with several spurs that lead to our Mills.  We also now have two transcontinental railroads that run from New York to San Francisco Bay, and another that runs from Charleston to Southern California.”

              “In purely agricultural areas, we will produce food to feed the world.  In areas that are marginal for farming, and there are places like that in every state, we build steel mills, and assembly plants for the many new products we are “Inventing.”  This will give us the diversity we need for the voting population and will homogenize our people so that living next to a black person, who lives next to a Mexican, who lives next to a white man, is the natural order of things.”

              “One last thing, gentlemen,” said Arcadia, “America has the biggest collection of natural resources in the world.  We will exploit these to our mutual advantage, but not at the expense of fouling the land, the water, and the air.  We will all be conservationists, or in our world, environmentalists.  It simply means we respect our country.  We also have some of the most beautiful places in the world.  These will be administered by the Federal Government, and belong to all the people, as National Parks and forests.  I  have a list and a map of them all for you Mr. President.”

              “You certainly know how to take charge,” said Jefferson.

              “Just the judicious use of the authority you have given me, Mr. President.”

              “Can we now turn to finances and trade,” asked Hamilton

              “Certainly,” said Arcadia, “Let’s take a look at the business of making the United States rich.”

              “I admit we did most of the startup financing for a lot of our big projects, but the systems are operating correctly now.  We have a flat tax of 10 percent on all income, individually and commercially.  We are currently taking in about $6 million a year on individuals and $20 million on industrial and commercial business.  It works very well, the employers hold back tax on income of their employees and send it in on one simple form along with their own business income.  It’s not an onerous tax, kind of like tithing to church.  And we don’t have a lot of other taxes to pay.  The states have some taxes on sales, and on real property, but, so far not much.”

              “The government of the United States, is spending nothing on national defense, but still is collecting the taxes on income from the soldiers.  The Federal government is currently sending $5 million to the states to pay for education.  Other government costs last year were $11 million dollars.  That means we have a $9 million surplus.  However, the real money is about to coming flooding in from foreign trade.” 

       “All we had to do was wait.  It’s been six months since the intact and depleted fleets of the European powers have returned to their homeports.  The ambassadors in London, Paris, and Madrid reported there was unbelievable upheaval in each of the capitals.  The response was predictable.  At first, there was complete denial of the events that had occurred in the United States.  Nobody in Parliament could believe that General Sims had lost an entire army in a single, two-hour engagement, despite the fact his staff all said the same thing, and all 2,000 survivors of the battle said they thought they were lucky to be alive and the Americans treated them very well.”

              “Then came anger.  The British talked about going back, but nobody wants to take on the Rangers.  The French government has started to unravel, after the Constitution of the new United States is available to the people.  Riots against the monarchy are growing.  The Spanish were happy to get their troops and the troop ships back, but were angry they lost so many capital ships.  All the countries lost many ships, over 400 capital ships, which cost a lot to build.  A continent-wide recession has begun because the treasuries are so depleted.

              Poor General Sims was so abused there was talk of trying him for treason.  When the talk got serious, the American Ambassador to England took the general and his family into the embassy and found a way to sneak them all out of England and back to the United States, where General Compton welcomed him with open arms and put him to work getting caught up on modern warfare.  He fits right in and is enjoying a pleasant and productive life.”

              “Finally, came acceptance and the resulting crisis.  In England, the situation is dire.  The British has imported food for years because they can’t produce enough to feed all their people.  Now people are on the verge of starvation.”

              ‘When I heard that, I went to President Jefferson to tell him our big trading enterprise could begin.  He ordered from the storehouses all over the country, an avalanche of flour, corn, barley, potatoes, and cattle.  The cattle went on one of the new steel steamships.”  

              “The rest of the food went on the original troop ships the British had sent for the invasion.  President Washington held back a hundred of these ships as government property and the President filled them all with the stored supplies.  The satellites steered the fleet around the big storms in the North Atlantic and our losses were minimal.”

              “On a sunny day in Bristol harbor, the sails of a hundred ships were spotted.  At the same time, the U.S. ambassador visited the Prime Minister and said that the food and the ships were gifts from the American people.  He also left a copy of a catalog with the P.M. that went into general circulation between the merchant and banking community.  The publications are just a high quality catalog that offers hundreds and hundreds of products from America at bargain prices.  We produce them so cheaply because of the benefits of assembly production.  The same catalogs were distributed throughout Europe and within two months, the orders began pouring in.”

              “For the last 10 years, assisted by my cadre of specialists who came from 2025, we’ve been cherry-picking the best minds in America and driving them at top speed toward “discovering” some very advanced technology.  Some remarkable results have been achieved,  the independent discovery of the vulcanization process for rubber, for example.  Then the super students went farther and began producing improvements for the process, like rubber boots and waterproof garments.

              “All of this created new industries.  Mass production techniques have created enormous surpluses of dozens of new products.  The wheat and corn harvester was another outcome of the Special Education department.  We have thousands of silos filled with grains.” 

              “I’m still financing many projects, including the front money for producing the big inventory of products and just putting them in storage.  The workers and companies are happy, since they’re being paid for the products.  But, government warehouses are filling up with an astonishing range of products of all sorts.  These were the products that were in the catalogs circulating through the business community of Europe.  These companies and merchants could not believe they could buy these products for such low prices.  In fact, we make twice the money as the price for which they are for sale.”

              “Now the trade enterprise is paying off.  We have the foreign merchants pay their money to companies that are actually owned by the Federal Government.  We will have a trade surplus of over $30 million this year.”

              “The gift of food and some very expensive ships retuned with no strings attached went a long way toward healing the wounds between the British and America.  In ways, the food was the difference between living and starving in England.  Parliament passed a resolution abandoning all their claims to the Americas, and the merchants are getting loans from the banks to buy a lot of things, including more food.

              In Spain, there was enough food, but Spanish desperately needed all the tools and farm implements the catalogs offered.  The problem for the Spanish was the banks had no money to lend to the merchants who wished to buy American products.  We solved that problem by buying  Spanish Reals and then lending them back to the government in the form of promissory notes payable in dollars at very low interest rates.  In a very short period of time, all the governments in Europe will be making similar deals.  It’s kind of hard to cause problems with a country that is selling you everything you need very inexpensively, and to whom you also owe a great deal of money.  In the case of Russia, America purchased Alaska for 10 million dollars in cash.”

              “Currently a long a stream of American merchant ships are crossing the Atlantic with an astonishing list of products.  As we anticipated, one of the biggest sellers are the high quality wagons and carriages with vastly improved suspensions and rubber wheels.  The leader in this industry was none other than the Pierce family that had gotten a big head start from Robby Pierce, years before.  The village of Concord has exploded into a medium-sized city to handle the demand for wagons.”

              “The entire system is not built solely on profits from trade.  The United States needs things too.  As the merchant ships return to American ports, wonderful products are emerging.  There is exquisite hand-made furniture, crystal, clocks and watches, fine wines, and lots more rubber, the list is endless.  These products are purchased with much the same rate of exchange for what we are selling our goods, and are, therefore, much less expensive.  The growing middle class of citizens in America are enjoying products they could never have acquired before.”

              “We now have and will continue to have the capital to build our infrastructure of railroads, roads, dams, more steel mills, a bigger fleet of steel steam ships and manufacturing plants.”

              “You want to know the best part of all this,” said Arcadia?  “We are doing all of this without giving up any of the secrets of how we are producing the products.  The secrets of Bessemer Steel, electrical generators, assembly lines, railroads, concrete for building buildings, roads and so forth, are all isolated in the United States.  We are about a hundred years ahead in technology for the whole world.  Sure, they are going to develop a lot of this on their own, but by that time, we will be another hundred years ahead of them.  So it will go.”

              “This is all very wonderful and makes me feel very secure,” said Ben Franklin, “what I want to know is when the next global crisis is coming and what we are going to do about it.”