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// Royal Reform 
// Story: Myou've Gotta be Kidding Me 
// by DataPacRat 
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Luna raised an eyebrow. "I see thou hast brought some visual aids."

"They say that a picture is worth a thousand words - and both of us have all too little time to spare for these private chats."

She lifted a cup to her lips, and sipped some tea. "Then by all means, proceed."

"There's an old saying - 'If you would be a real seeker after truth, you must at least once in your life doubt, as far as possible, all things.'"

"I believe I remember that one - wasn't it by the fellow who put de cartes before de horse?"

I shuddered. "That one has to be old, even for you."

"Mm, perhaps so. Pray, continue."

"To try to focus on what I have in mind today... why bother with law?"

"That seemeth simple enough - so that all may know what they should not do."

"Are you sure? It seems fairly obvious to me - don't hurt other ponies, or take their stuff from them. There - two laws to replace all the rest."

"It hath been some time since I hath played the game of So-cart's Questioning, but I do not mind it. More detail is needed as a guide for questionable circumstances, such as when it is unclear which ponies own a thing."

"Alright; then once that guide is set... why do we still need a body of lawmakers?"

"I know all too well that words change in meaning over the years - perhaps they exist to keep the language of the laws concordant with the current language."

"And here's my first visual aid. Here is a copy of the law on murder from two hundred years ago; and here is the current version of the same law. Some of the words have changed - but mostly, it is the same. Just how many lawmakers do we need to employ, to change a half-dozen words over two centuries? Couldn't the Diarchy simply hire a linguist every decade or so to report on any potentially troublesome words?"

"Perhaps - but a number of new ideas arose during my absence, such as the various forms of companies and corporations, and the law had to be extended to take into account things that had never been thought of when it was first written down. The tax laws alone are, if thou will forgive the phrasing, a nightmare to consider."

"And thank you for taking this conversation to where I was hoping to eventually steer it. Tax laws seem to be a kind of different beast than criminal laws - the latter are about how ponies interact with each other, while the former are about how they interact with the government."

"I could poke many holes in that - but, as thou did say, we only have so much time."

"So why have taxes at all?"

"To pay for those services which benefit Equestrians as a whole, which individuals cannot pay for themselves. The Guard, hospitals, schools."

"How do you tell how much Guard is enough? Or when you've hired not enough, or too many, hospitals or schools? I know some people who suggest that the whole set should be paid for privately, instead of through government."

"A combination of advice from long experience on the part of myself and my sister, and discussions to build consensus amongst those with the power to pass the tax laws."

"In other words - the point of the Barn of Lords isn't really to determine criminal laws, but to balance the competing interests of the nobility about money?"

"That seemst a fair, if blunt, description."

"Let's try a scenario. Let's say all the companies start out being taxed at the same rate on their profits. But one noble has a business in, oh, tree-farming. So she points out that her business takes years and years to grow the trees, which means that it's harder to get bank-loans to fund her operations - so it's not really fair that she's taxed at the same rate. So she proposes that in order to encourage the obvious benefits of tree-farming, she should be taxed at a lower rate."

"I have seen many such proposals over the years - and many of them have been accepted."

"Then you'll also have seen proposals where such a tax break increases the profit of one small group by, say, a hundred thousand bits; while some complementary measure increases the general taxation to cover that amount, so that every taxpayer has to pay a small amount extra."

"That is how such taxes tend to be paid for."

"And the Barn of Lords is supposed to, in general, talk with each other to find ways for competing interests to agree. Say, the tree-farmer promises to vote for a similar tax break for the fishermen, if a noble of the seacoast supports her own exemption."

"That is so."

"And this is supposed to find the best overall set of compromises for Equestria's people as a whole."

"Again, that is so."

"So who argues for tax breaks for cows?"

"Pardon?"

"Or donkeys, or sheep, or buffalo, or any non-ponies who live peacefully in Equestria's borders, and are subject to its laws. Who proposes tax breaks that benefit them, or argues against measures that increase taxes on them without any commensurate benefit?" Luna was looking at me like I'd grown a second head - I double-checked to make sure I hadn't, since in this world, it wasn't completely out of the realm of possibility. I carried on, "Or even going back to criminal law - if the buffalo have been using a piece of land for centuries, and a bunch of ponies move into the place and start building things that keep the buffalo from using the land... when ponies, and ponies alone, are writing the law, who do you think the law will say the land belongs to?"

"But surely-"

"Last year. Appleloosa. Peaceful discussions failed. The buffalo tried to stampede the town flat. It was only after the stampede was already in progress that a deal was struck." She winced. I continued, "If you truly believe that Equestria's laws provide equality of opportunity to all, regardless of species, then you surely expect that checking the data will reveal that, statistically, cows and ponies will have roughly equal distributions, relative to their populations, at any given income level."

"From thy tone, I am guessing that thy visual aids demonstrate otherwise."

"I'll put it this way - if barns are so great to live in, why don't ponies prefer them to houses?"

"Thou maketh a point - and I will be sure to take a close look at thy data, when Abacus and I have the time."

"That's fair. I have other items I could bring up, such as the fact that since the law-makers tend to be nobles, then they will naturally pass laws which favor nobles over non-nobles, such as in permissible responses when one pony believes another has defamed their name, or stained their honor, even if the statement was the complete and literal objective truth. But I believe my overall point is clear."

"Perhaps thou should say it aloud, so that thy clarity may be doubled."

"The Barn of Lords is in need of some serious reform."

"I believe I overheard my sister proposing to ennoble thou - or another cow of thy choosing, when thou refused."

"That... would solve a few of the problems - but it's more of a short-term patch than a true solution."

"What wouldst thou consider to be a 'true' solution?"

"I've come up with a few possibilities. For one, I've been doing some reading on some of the changes that have been made to Equestrian government over the years - how the Withergamot developed into the Curia regis, the royal council; which then split into the Day Court, Night Court, and the Barn of Lords. But that was only one of the four royal councils to the Diarchy. The ordinary courts are still in existence - but the other two, the Magnum Concilium and the Commune Concilium, while not having been summoned or met in centuries, were never formally disbanded - and, at least in theory, can be reconvened at any time without significant upset to the foundations of Equestria's government. And given your recent return after your millennium of absence - it would be entirely reasonable for you to summon one of them, as you might find them more familiar than the modern arrangements."

"So you would replace the Barn of Lords with mere vote-grubbing politicians?"

"Not replace - supplement. Right now, many folk have no voice to speak for them in government - and at least getting a vote-grubbing politician is the start of having some say. And as the current Barn of Lords doesn't necessarily use the same procedures as the original Curia regis, a revived Commune Concilium doesn't have to use the same procedures as the original - and there are some options which can be chosen to make such a body a truer representation of the voice of the people, such as proportional representation rather than first-past-the-post districts, or approval voting rather than a plurality system. I've written down some of the math showing the pluses and minuses of the variations I've been able to remember."

"That is still a... significant undertaking."

"It's really more of a warm-up. Another possibility is to create a set of High Laws which other laws must follow, and which are harder to change than ordinary laws. For example, one High Law might say that all Equestrians have the right to say what they believe to be the truth - and that any ordinary law which tries to make saying the truth is illegal, transgresses against the High Law, and the High Law takes precedence over that ordinary law, rendering it null and void. Again, I've got a list of sample laws - one being that all Equestrians are equal under the law, regardless of species."

Dryly, Luna asked, "Is that all?"

"I do have another set of proposals, for more ordinary laws. For example, that because of the trust placed in the lawmakers, they have to be held to a higher standard than ordinary Equestrians - and so anybody who finds evidence of wrongdoing by a lawmaker should receive as much protection as possible from the lawmakers, to avoid reprisals from the people in power. That one might have to be implemented more as a Royal Decree, since I don't really see the current crop of nobles voluntarily voting to place additional limits on their own power."

Luna held up a hoof. "Enough. For now. Until today, I thought that simply reforming the tax code and the procedures of the Equestrian Revenue Service was the most complicated task facing me in the decade following my return. I need to think on the issues thou hast raised, before even considering thy proposed solutions."

"That's an entirely fair and reasonable response, given your position."

"'My position?'"

"Would you care to sleep in the royal dairy barn, rather than your royal bedchamber, come the dawn?"

She eyed me oddly, and I wondered if I'd pressed my luck a step too far. "Perhaps," she said, and that was more of an acceptance than I'd expected - maybe I really was getting through to her. "In the meanwhile, hast thou any lighter topics of conversation to while away the eve?"

"Perhaps," I echoed with a smile. "There is something I've been wondering, and perhaps you know the answer better than anypony..."

"Yes?"

"Do you have any idea how far away the stars of the night sky are?"





Turned out that Luna really was willing to give the barn a try - after all, she'd slept under far worse conditions during the fight against Discord. It also turned out that the hardest part of the whole procedure was getting the household staff to not revamp the whole place to royal sleeping-quarters conditions for her.

The second-hardest part was suppressing the rumors that she was doing so because of some sort of illicit affair between her and me. Which would have been a lot easier if Luna herself hadn't started hinting at those rumors herself. And wasn't helped by the fact that, out of all the sapient creatures I'd met since being transformed from male human to female cow, if there were any I was going to have some sort of affair with, Luna was either at or near the top of the list. I mean, sure, she was a hooved quadruped with magical powers who'd lived for millennia; but she was also intelligent, had a sense of humor, was the right gender for my semi-confused mind, didn't live too far away, and actually did understand discretion when it suited her. Maybe her doing some trolling by spreading the rumors was a way to make me confront the fact that I actually could let myself get attracted to her... or maybe she was just trolling.

One thing I was fairly sure of was that I wasn't interested in joining in a 'traditional' cattle family: polygyny, a herd with a single bull and several cows and their calves. But taking that option off the table didn't leave much left - there weren't very many ponies interested in close relationships with cattle, and even among cows, I didn't really know enough to join an all-female herd, romantically. Now that I was thinking of it, I didn't really know any cows, ponies, or the like well enough to call them my friends. Sure, I had acquaintances, but they were pretty much all through my job - either employees, or ponies I had to deal with professionally. In a world where friendship could be turned into an actual physical force, such as the Elements, or even just the Hearth's Warming Eve magical floating hearts, that... might be a worrying sign. And the lack of any real social support might have explained a good portion of my still-increasing stress levels.

Back on Earth, I'd been something of an urban hermit - a happy loner, an introvert who'd made that work for him. But now, I had to make advance arrangements just to get any time to myself - and the time I wasn't by myself, I was among people I couldn't completely trust, couldn't completely rely on the way the Mane Six could rely on each other in the cartoons.

It was a pretty pickle, and I didn't know where to even start looking for a solution. Even Twilight's friendship reports started with the assumption that she had some friends to report on - and I didn't fancy teaming up with an assortment of strangers to face a world-endangering evil, purely as a trust-building exercise.

And so that was why I figured that maybe it would be a good idea to try to discreetly find out the answer, as to whether Luna really was interested in pursuing matters the way she was spreading rumors about the two of us.

And so that was how I found out that the answer was a very firm, if polite, 'no'. And that was a significant reason for my deciding to leave Canterlot for at least a few days, for both of our embarrassment - alright, almost entirely mine - to have a chance to cool down to the point where I could at least look at Luna without blushing.