Even without that, however, Zachary knew, she wouldn’t have cared for the Sollies. When the Solarian League was created, the local governments of Old Earth’s older daughter worlds had already been over a thousand T-years old. Few of those planets had been prepared to surrender their sovereignty to a potentially tyrannical central government, so the League Constitution had been carefully designed to prevent that from happening. Like the founders of the Star Kingdom, the men and women who’d drafted that Constitution had limited the funding sources for the government they were creating as the best means of ensuring that it could never grow into the monster they feared. Unfortunately, they hadn’t stopped there. Instead they’d gone on to give every member system of the League effective veto power in the League legislature.

That combination had created a situation in which the League effectively had no official foreign policy. Or, rather, what it had was a consensus so mushy that it was hopelessly amorphous. About the only clear and unambiguous foreign policy principle the League maintained was the Eridani Edict’s prohibition against the unrestricted use of what were still called “weapons of mass destruction” against inhabited planets. And even that was only because the edict’s proponents had used the Solarian Constitution’s referendum provisions to do an end run around the Assembly and amend it to incorporate the edict into the League’s fundamental law after the horrific casualties of the Eridani Incident.

But if the League had no official foreign policy, that didn’t mean it lacked a de facto one. The problem was that the League Assembly as such had virtually nothing to do with that policy’s formulation.

While the restrictions on the central government’s ability to tax had indeed limited that government’s power, the limitation was purely relative. Even a very tiny percentage of the total economic product of something the size of the Solarian League was an inconceivable amount of money. Despite that, however, the League was perpetually strapped for revenue, because the relative ineffectuality of the veto-riddled Assembly had resulted in the transfer of more and more of the practical day-to-day authority for managing the League from the legislature to bureaucratic regulatory agencies. Unlike laws and statutes, bureaucratic regulations didn’t require the item-by-item approval of the entire Assembly, which, over the centuries, had led to the gradual evolution of deeply entrenched, monolithic, enormously powerful (and expensive) bureaucratic empires.

For the most part, the Sollies appeared to have no particular problems with that. Those regulatory and service agencies seldom intruded directly into the lives of the citizens as a whole. And however distasteful Zachary might have found their existence, they did perform many useful functions which the veto-hobbled Assembly would never have been able to discharge efficiently. But there was an undeniable downside to their existence, even for League citizens.

For one thing, the ever-growing sprawl of regulatory overreach required larger and larger bureaucracies, which, in turn, absorbed an ever growing percentage of the central government’s total income. That, Zachary suspected, was one reason the Solarian League Navy, for all of its numerical strength and its perception of itself as the most powerful and modern fleet in existence, was probably at least fifty T-years out of date compared to the RMN. The Navy’s budgets were no more immune to the hemorrhaging effect of such uncontrolled bureaucratic growth than any other aspect of the League government, which left too little funding for aggressive research and development and meant that far too many of the SLN’s ships of the wall were growing steadily more obsolete as they moldered away in mothballs.