Editing Logic of Empire (section)

==Themes==
Ostensibly a tale about a man in the wrong place at the wrong time and his struggle to free himself from the oppressive circumstances in which he is plunged, the story also attempts to explain how slavery develops in a new colony. Even in the future, the technology available to a new colony is always initially low.{{citation needed|date=November 2018}} If a machine to do a necessary job is too expensive to import (say a [[combine harvester|wheat harvester]], a [[Submersible pump|water pump]], or even a [[washing machine]]), a human must do it instead. If too many jobs must be done by hand, and there is a shortage of labor compared with independent resources that free labor could take up (exploit - "[[Slavery#Economics|land]]" although that condition is not clear in the story), a market for slavery develops. Decades later, while there is still an abundance of land, this market remains because the colony itself has quotas to meet and debts to repay and cannot spare the resources to develop local industries to make the machines itself, yet free labor still then does not have to bid its price down enough to out-compete slave labor.

Throughout the story, Heinlein takes the view of the objective narrator in describing Venusian society. "Logic of Empire" places different rationales on the people who participate in slavery, only teasing a sort of socio-scientific inevitability of a slavery system.  There are no real villains; everybody is just doing their job of trying to maximize income in a mercantilist system. Even the plantation owner who owns the hero is portrayed as a struggling and failing small businessman, whose main motivation is to secure a livelihood for his daughter.