Shibboleths.
Kevin Drum has a good, if snarky, policy:
Personally, I would refuse to be baited by the kind of person who refers to paper notes as “fiat currency,” but hey—it’s Eugene’s blog and he can do what he likes.
“Fiat currency” is one of those buzz words—buzz terms, I suppose—that does, indeed, signal a certain je ne sais quois. The person using it is being persnicketily specific, to the point of spoiling for a fight: usually, about the gold standard. (Which would you rather have in your bank account: gold, or green cheese?) —Which reminds me of “valuta” (which seems much less buzzy these days), a term I recall from that portion of my youth spent poring over the pages of Robert Heinlein’s Expanded Universe, trying to glean The Truth. It’s sort of the obverse of fiat currency—rather than value imposed by government fiat, it’s value demanded by citizen fiat, usually that of cranky old men convinced the gummint’s stealing ’em blind. (They bite down on the gold coins you give them—they know the taste of gold, you see.) They also tend to refer to “the franchise”—at least, the cranky old men in my mind’s eye do, the ones so heavily influenced by Heinlein, and I really should stop making fun: while they might have quaint ideas about valuation, and a curious semantic failure when it comes to how government works, and for whom, they would be raising holy hell about crap like this, and holy hell is precisely what we need, right now. Of course, they’d turn right around and try to limit the franchise to those who can solve quadratic equations, or who own real property in fee simple, or give you a number of votes in proportion to the amount you’ve paid in taxes, but that’s a fight we can pick once we’re done putting a stop to this black-box nonsense.
There’s another phrase set rattling by this late-night influx of cranky old men with gold under their mattresses: “blood and treasure.” At first glance, it feels and smells like another one of those cranky old men shibboleths: blood and treasure, what we have paid and spilt, a measure of what’s owed to us. It’s got a nice Founding Fathers ring to it—the Monroe Doctrine, of course:
The political system of the allied powers is essentially different, in this respect, from that of America. This difference proceeds from that which exists in their respective governments. And to the defence of our own, which has been achieved by the loss of so much blood and treasure, and matured by the wisdom of their most enlightened citizens, and under which we have enjoyed unexampled felicity, this whole nation is devoted.
Which most likely cribbed it from John Adams:
July 1776 will be the most memorable Epoch in the History of America. I am apt to believe that it will be celebrated by succeeding generations, as the great anniversary Festival. It ought to be commemorated as the Day of Deliverance by acts of Devotion to God Almighty. It ought to be solemnized with Pomp and Parade, with shews, games, sports, guns, bells, bonfires, and illuminations from one end of this continent to the other, this time forward, forever more.
You will think me transported with enthusiasm but I am not. I am well aware of the toil and blood and treasure that it will cost US to maintain this Declaration, and support and defend these states. Yet through all the Gloom, I can see the Rays of ravishing Light and Glory. I can see the End is more than worth all the means. And that Posterity will triumph in those days of transaction, even though we should rue it…which I trust in G-d we shall not.
Or maybe George Washington:
Shall a few designing men, for their own aggrandizement, and to gratify their own avarice, overset the goodly fabric we have been rearing at the expense of so much time, blood, and treasure? And shall we at last become victims of our own lust of gain?
What’s weird, and a little spooky, to me is that of all the references to “blood and treasure” that Google can find—7,930, as of 10.30 pm or so, Pacific Daylight Savings Time, August 6, 2003—3,250 of them also include the word “Iraq.” Almost half. —And while it’s not that surprising that almost half the references to blood and treasure found on the internet would refer to by far the largest and most active theatre of war in the internet age, and more than a few of those references are the sort of true-blue conservative, libertarian, isolationist, anti-imperialist, anti-preëmptive war stuff you’d expect from these cranky old men, still: there’s Colin Powell, referring to the price in blood and the price in treasure paid by the members of the Coalition of the Willing; there’s Richard Armitage, talking about the expenditure of blood and treasure; there’s the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, talking about how it was us that put blood and treasure on the line for the people of Afghanistan and Iraq.
Perhaps there’s something in the water?
Of course, all of this blood and treasure makes me think of pirates. Which is maybe not the image this meme ought to conjure for maximum effectiveness in this particular case, but I’m a lost cause. (Blood? Treasure? Isn’t it more honest to make your purchases as you go, with sweat and valuta?) Thinking of pirates, of course, makes me think of Johnny Depp, and would you look how far afield I’ve strayed?
I should maybe just point you to this book on the art of money me and the Spouse picked up the other night. It’s true: American currency is ugly; the other currencies of the world are far more beautiful. More beautiful, even, than buttery, auric gold. —If we paid them with pretty fiat currency, that comes in rainbow colors and has those shiny anti-counterfeit strips, maybe then those cranky old men would stop writing letters to the editor?
Nah. The 7-11 would still refuse to take anything higher than a twenty. Where’s the justice, I ask? Where?
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You're silly. Great post.
Labor. Base everything on labor.
It's nice to know I'm not the only one who was enculturated by unlearning Heinlein.
"Unlearning" is such a--harsh word. And Heinlein-the-person was by many accounts so much more generous than Heinlein-the-polemicist that it helps to explain why Heinlein-the-novelist manages to hold onto his crown--despite the best efforts of Heinlein-the-pedantic-dullard. (The efforts of Heinlien-the-prolific-sonofabitch didn't hurt, either.)
Much as any adolescent must reject a parental authority figure, I blew off Heinlein in college (I was already starting to in high school. His solipsistic period is rough going, even for rabid fans); much as any young adult, I'm discovering a new-found respect for the now-former parental authority figure. --Though it's only a modicum, and may merely be due to the softening forces of nostalgia. (It doesn't approach the fondness shown for him by Delany, say: "The door dilated," yes, very well, but why on earth did it dilate? Demmed inefficient means of opening and closing doors, say wot? Give me Delany's riff any day: "The door deliquesced." --Of course, that wouldn't be nearly as funny as it is if it weren't for Poppa Heinlein having paved the way...
(Yes, it is funny. It's a dry sort of humor. Deal.)
I've got Moon is a Harsh Mistress in the house--for my money, the best novel he ever wrote, mostly for the narrative voice he played with--the vague flavor of Russian-tinged Spanglish he got, without going overboard or getting in your way. And I've got Have Spacesuit, Will Travel, because I liked his earlier, juvie work (yes, Rocketship Galileo was the first SF novel I ever read), and one of the protagonists is named "Kip." And I've got to find a collection with "The Menace From Earth," and that will then be that.
"Unlearned"? Not so much. Assimilated and moved on, more like. But it does leave the oddest echoes ringing in the back of your brain, late at night...
Re ugly money: And the US has the gall to keep genocidal Andrew Jackson on the $20 bill.
But the EU gives us a different kind of bland ugliness; correct me if I've fallen under the spell of an urban legend, but I'm told that folding Euros have bridges on them because the EU wasn't up to the task of mediating among a thousand different nationalistic and ideological forces to come up with some admirable humans or cultural monuments to put on the bills instead. Sigh. It's enough to make one think that the opposite pole of blind jingoism isn't so bad after all.
Re "Base everything on labor": I'd love to see a basic exploration of how that kind of an economic order would work. Places like India which are near the bottom of the exchange rate food chain would be economic superpowers if an hour's worth of an Indian's time were suddenly worth an hour of an American's.
But how would differing skills or productivity be taken into account? I'm not so unimaginative as to believe that the current outrageous gaps in exchange rates are "natural", but neither do I believe that they're solely the product of a plot by the industrialized world.
Darn. Taking my flippancy seriously, are you? :)
I have no idea how you would base currency solely on labor. In fact, it seems simplistic. My instinct tells me that to a certain extent we already use labor as a basis, in that the supply and demand of labor plus the supply and demand of the commodity to be produced have complicated relationships to one another and determine the value of each. Keeping in mind, of course, that employers and consumers strive to pay as little as they can get away with. I couldn't get more specific if I tried. Yet somehow it seems less arbitrary than say gold or cottage cheese.
Donald Ernsberger, a libertarian economist, disputes the marxian labor value theory here. Of special interest to our discussion (hey, am I hijacking your blog, Kip? Let me know) is his breakdown of intrinsic versus market exchange values:
This seems to me an oversimplified dichotomy. Not necessarily false, but too, I dunno, diametrically opposed. As I noted before, there is certainly competition among what employers are willing to pay, what consumers are willing to spend, and what workers are willing to accept in payment. Notice how the worker tends to be a bit outnumbered. But the worker is a consumer, too. I have no grand theory of unifying these factors, and in my view they are constantly negotiating with each other, sometimes competing, sometimes cooperating. And they are always political.
Interesting. I'm reminded of a couple of pop econ sources I've run across lately. Not that they're especially trustworthy, just somewhat relevant.
One was a piece a few days ago by Robert Reich that aired on NPR's Morning Edition. In it he pointed out that most of us are now investors, workers and consumers, and the differing priorities of these three roles are not easy to reconcile, if they can be reconciled at all. (My hunch is that they drive us a little crazy and make our political system and public policy waaay crazy.)
The other appeared in the July 7 '03 New Yorker, p. 27, in their series of boxed economics lessons by James Surowiecki. He describes something known to economists as "Baumol's cost disease", in which there's a tension between jobs which increases in productivity (say, assembling a car) and jobs which don't (playing a string quartet, grading English papers, repairing a car). The result is a bit counterintuitive:
I'd guess he leaves something out: it also generates tremendous pressure to increase producitvity in fields where that does not come easily and as a result quality or customer experience suffers greatly -- education, medicine, and anything involving customer service. (His example of music has me confused; the number of people necessary to play a string quartet may be unchanged over centuries, but the number of tickets or units sold is free to vary. Maybe he means that ticket prices have to go up for musical experiences where economies of scale can't enter, such as concert halls or night clubs with a fixed number of seats. And the economies of scale required to keep unit costs low in mass-market music force out the little guys and leave only the stars showing a profit.)
Ah, ain't speculative amateur economics grand?
I read that Suroweicki piece (as I read all of his pieces; they are always well-argued, even if I don't always agree...although I usually do.) His music example was simply that productivity, strictly speaking—i.e., making the product, which in this case is a piece of music—cannot be rushed, streamlined, Taylorized or in any other way made more efficient. A 7-minute piece requiring 4 musicians cannot be performed in 6 minutes by adding another musician.
But you make a good point about the pressure to increase productivity in fields where productivity is nebulous at best. In common political parlance, they call for "running it like a business." In my view, always a bad idea, because when education, for example, is treated like a business, you get huge class sizes, unreliable blanket testing methods, and watered/dumbed down text books. Those artsy-fartsy things like drama and music get booted, and because taxpayers are getting more and more ornery, sports programs are on their way out, too.
As for Reich, he's right that some of us and more of us are becoming investors. But I have doubts about how seriously that additional role is taken. When Enron shafted its employees' pension plans and 401Ks, the reaction was loud and angry. But I think it was also a minority view; important, but not, so far, pervasive. Most folks with IRAs and 401Ks whom I know rarely look at their statements or really know where that money is invested. Maybe that's just habit and will change over time; that Enron employee reaction may harbinger more widespread phenomena in the future.
My personal ideological problem here is that adding "investors" to our other roles as "workers" and "consumers" still keeps us within the parameters of, well, "coal-shovelers" to the (cue 1950s cheesey narrator voice) The Engine of Capitalism. And in all, one is defined solely by one's self-interest, individualized, but not self-interest, socialized. That is, social responsibility remains off-topic. Individuals aggregate to magnify their self-interests with a potential cry of "We're getting screwed here!" This seems only half the picture. Individuals also cooperate to serve each other's mutual interests and even the interests of others not like themselves: "They're getting screwed here!"
The problem Suroweicki indicates relates here: education, art, medicine, science, etc. are social goods, means of, yes, individual advancement, but also of advancing the interests of (1950s narrator guy again) Society At Large. And Democracy At Large, while we're at it. What role do we play here? "Consumers" does not seem adequate enough to properly describe it. "Tax-payer" is way too narrow. Anyone with a clue? Kip?
Citizens, Kevin. (To cue up another shibboleth.) There's that French quote, from someone or other: "The economy is here to serve us." We just need to open up that "us" to "all of us" from "those of us who sit on the boards of large corporations and can vote ourselves constant raises that far outstrip every other benchmark of economic growth." (Talk about a Job For Life.) --I also took the liberty of fixing your blockquote tags (wrap each paragraph with tags to make it work, silly boy) and deleting the comments where you tried to fix them. So.
I like that "The economy is here to serve us" slogan. It beats the shrill and unrealistic tone of the lefty slogan "People before profits" and it also resonates with an aphorism I think a lot of people like even if they don't follow it, about working to live rather than living to work.
Ah, wrap each paragraph with tags, and not the entire blockquote. Interesting. Why is that necessary? I ask out of technical interest.
And citizens is a good suggestion. And yes, quite the shibboleth. My one minor concern is that seems to make one term do a lot of work. And that maybe something a tad more specific might be in order. Come! Let's coin a new jargon!
Work sucks. I just wanna live, maa-a-aan.
Because wrapping each paragraph division of text with the proper tags is just good clean HTML coding, you nit. Rather than wrapping large chunks with one set of tags and trusting every browser out there to just "know" what you meant and render it accordingly.
The linkage between this brand of persnickety specificity and the one posited above is left as an exercise for the reader.
Because wrapping each paragraph division of text with the proper tags is just good clean HTML coding, you nit
Ah. Very good. Thank you. You are most kind, Mr. Corn Cobs Up Ass. My humblest gratitude.