According to the beliefs of the Church of Scientology, the Marcab Confederacy is said to be one of the most powerful galactic civilizations still active. Church founder L. Ron Hubbard describes it as: <blockquote>Various planets united into a very vast civilization which has come forward up through the last 200,000 years, formed out of the fragments of earlier civilizations. In the last 10,000 years they have gone on with a sort of decadent kicked-in-the-head civilization that contains automobiles, business suits, fedora hats, telephones, spaceships — a civilization which looks almost an exact duplicate but is worse off than the current US civilization.<ref>Hubbard, Dianetics and Scientology Technical Dictionary, 1st edition, pg. 243.</ref> </blockquote> The capital of the Confederacy is said to be "one of the tail stars of the Big Dipper", probably Alkaid, a star 108 light years distant from Earth. The Marcabians used to rule Earth at some point in the past but lost control of it due to "losses in war and other things". Marcabians The Marcabians had an oppressive political system: "if [a person] was considered to be in contempt of court or anything like that, [he was] simply fried since there was a curtain of radioactive material which went clear across the front of the bench anywhere that a witness or anybody would stand, and so on."Hubbard said that the Marcab Confederacy invented income tax as a means of punishment, with the death penalty imposed for making even the slightest mistake in returns — "one comma wrong and it's 'dead forever'." The Marcabians also appear to have been distinctly socialistic, having "had plan balanced economies" (presumably some form of planned economy). They were also keen on motor racing and every once in a while Scientologists undergoing auditing "will run into [memories of] race tracks and race-track drivers". Hubbard described this in some detail in a 1960 lecture: They had turbine-generated cars that went about 275 miles an hour (443 km/h). They ran with a high whine. I notice they've just now invented the motor again. And they had tracks that were booby-trapped with atom bombs, and they had side bypasses. The tracks were mined, and the grandstands were leaded-paned. The tracks were deliberately designed to be as dangerous as possible, with "a mountain that you went up to the top of and fell off", and death was commonplace; but participants in the races, and any other citizen,