DETROIT (Rooters agency) – Security police yesterday used tear gas and taser-firing drones to beat back a terrorist attack on crucial infrastructure that is helping the city to work its way out of bankruptcy.
The terrorist mob, made up of outside agitators and city residents, assembled in the early morning outside the control center of Sunshine Corporation (SC), chanting, “Without sun, there’s no fun!”
As the crowd grew in size and pressed up against the chain link fence, threatening to push it over, Sunshine Security (SS) forces responded with a broadcast message from the overhead drones: “If you don’t run, we’re going to stun.”
When the terrorists ignored this warning for more than a minute, SS drones released tear gas, followed by random tasering. This was done at “medium pain” level, said an SS spokesman, rebutting a terrorist claim that the tasers had been set to maximum. “If we’d had them on maximum,” he said, “they’d all be dead.”
But while SC easily survived this terrorist threat, some observers believe the incident will redound to the benefit of the company’s opponents in the national debate over the country’s first large-scale experiment with sunshine privatization.
The teething problems that occurred when SC first installed its floating Fluoropane™ Sunshine Window™ over Detroit have now been largely overcome. Even critics admit that there are now very few instances of the Window being opened mistakenly for a non-subscriber instead of for the subscriber next door or on the next block. And, after messy and embarrassing legal disputes, SC gained credit with the public by abandoning its claim that subscribers should not be allowed to reflect its sunlight to their neighbors. It also, after the initial two-year grace period, began paying royalties that have helped the city to keep its budget in the black.
More difficult to deal with has been the “in principle” opposition, which claims that privatized sunlight discriminates against the poor. The company denies this. Sunshine CEO Van Darker points out that the sunlight fee paid by residents is not much more than the price paid to people who put excess electricity from solar panels into the city grid. “Our less affluent subscribers could therefore obtain all the sunshine they want for little cost simply by installing solar panels and connecting to the grid.”
Mr. Darker, who majored in economics at the University of Nonox, worries about a more fundamental problem with the oppositionists. Known for his blunt speech, he calls the opposition “cave men.” He says that they are trying to popularize “an outmoded idea that there is something called ‛the commons’ that can be jointly owned by an entire community.
“This absurd superstition was widely believed in the Middle Ages, which is probably the chief reason that medieval productivity was so low.”
If we give in to the opponents of Sunshine, says Mr. Darker, we will only encourage anti-economic behavior in regard to other commodities.
“Next they’ll be claiming free water as a right,” he says, “and then health care, maybe even secondary education. They don’t realize that nothing in this world is free. Somebody has to pay for everything, and I’m damned if it’s going to be me for anything.”
In an unrelated development, Sunshine Corporation appears close to launching a product to meet rising public concern about air quality. Insiders say that SC has abandoned plans for the Universal Airmask, which proved too expensive for the mass market. The new, bottled, product has been tentatively named BestAir.
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