The Probability Broach, chapter 1
Among the possessions of murder victim Vaughn Meiss, Win Bear spots something unusual:
The ambulance was ready to take our client to the taxidermists downtown. One of the techs passed by with a collection of plastic baggies containing personal effects. “Hold on. Let me see that.” He handed over a bright golden disk, larger than the silver dollars I remembered from childhood, in deep relief a picture of a bald-headed old coot with ruffles at his throat:
ALBERT GALLATIN
1761 C.E.-A.L. 76
REVOLUTIONIST, PRESIDENT, SCHOLAR OF LIBERTYOn the other side, an old-fashioned hillbilly whiskey jug, and forest-covered hills behind:
ONE METRIC OUNCE
GOLD 999 FINE
THE LAPORTE INDUSTRIAL BANK, L.T.D.
Win is puzzling over the strange coin and the unfamiliar dating system it bears when he’s interrupted by Oscar Burgess, the state security thug mentioned last week. Burgess doesn’t hesitate to pull rank, announcing that he’s taking over the investigation, which Win finds suspicious:
“What brings SecPol into a simple street killing, Burgess?”
… “You ought to know better than to ask foolish questions. We’re thinking about preempting this case – National Security. When the papers come through, you’ll have to turn everything over to us and go back to busting jaywalkers.” He grinned and watched his men confronting mine, knuckles white on holstered pistol grips all around.
“Didn’t realize there was a full moon last night, Oscar,” I said. He turned back, puzzled. I pointed to a tiny cut on his pockmarked forehead, dried blood at the edges. “Cut yourself shaving?”
He whitened. “Mind your own stinking business, Bear, or I’ll have you back working curfew violations!”
This, of course, is the injury that Win infers Meiss’ killer must have suffered. The book all but shouts it, so it’s not a spoiler to say that Burgess is the killer.
The reason he murdered Meiss, rather than arresting him, won’t be revealed until later. However, it has no meaningful impact on the plot, so I’ll spoil it here: Burgess has gone rogue. He’s running his own scheme on the side that he doesn’t want his superiors to know about yet.
After delivering the stock “you’re off the case” message, Burgess storms out. Win holds onto the coin, spitefully resolving to pursue the investigation on his own:
I signed six different forms and took the coin, to be surrendered at Properties tomorrow, on pain of pain. Eventually it would wind up in some bureaucrat’s pocket, or melted down to feed a multi-quadrillion neobuck federal deficit. Probably the former.
This is another detail that’s only vaguely sketched in, but it seems that in this dystopia, individual possession of gold has been outlawed. Win narrates: “Gold, legally kosher a few brief years ago, was presently hotter than vitamin C”.
This is reminiscent of when FDR made it illegal to own gold in 1933. It was a first step toward getting the U.S. off the gold standard, which was strangling economic recovery and prolonging the Great Depression. As long as the government was constrained by the requirement to be able to redeem dollars for gold, it was hobbled in what actions it could take. It was an arbitrary and artificial limit on the money supply that led to a deflationary spiral.
When the dollar was no longer tied to a finite gold reserve, the government could issue debt to pay for New Deal social programs, kickstarting the economy and ending the depression. The plan worked as intended, but despite its success – or more likely because of its success – libertarians and other goldbugs are still mad about it. They believe that the confiscation of gold inaugurated an era of government tyranny. There’s an echo of that reaction in this book.
The unusual thing is that unlike Ayn Rand, who declared that gold was “the objective value”, Smith doesn’t believe gold has any exalted metaphysical status. In his utopia, there are competing private currencies backed by commodities like wheat, iron, even whiskey. This is a consistent application of his anarchist politics.
But in spite of this, he persists in treating gold as specially significant. It’s no coincidence that the first big clue is a gold coin from another world (rather than, say, a paper banknote). It’s also not by chance that Smith’s tyrannical government hoards gold as part of its program of social control.
Libertarians have always assigned a talismanic, almost religious status to gold. They believe it’s “real” money in a way that fiat currency isn’t. Gold fever is so common among Smith’s ideological confreres, it seems he’s unconsciously adopted the same attitude, even though his philosophy doesn’t require him to. It’s almost like a vestigial trait.
There have been so many ads to get the rubes to buy gold to hedge against total apocalypse. This never made sense to me; in a complete and utter apocalypse, gold would be worthless. You can’t eat it, you can’t heal wounds with it, you can’t plow a field with it. You couldn’t even trade it for goods or services because you can’t eat it, heal wounds with it, or plow a field with it.
But gold does seem to be (quoting you) “talismatic, almost religious” to them/
abstractly i am reminded of that space shooters episode where commodore kick fights lizard lorn, and he’s like, “this planet has a wealth of minerals but i’d trade it all for a laser sword, or a good solid club!”
Wait, what about that “hotter than vitamin C” throwaway line? Does this novel also worship overhyped supplements?
I’m pretty sure LN Smith was getting health information from less-than-entirely-reliable sources.
The comic is not exactly the same as the book, but after the protagonist is severely injured and is being healed by magical Libertopian healing tech, his doctor tells him: “You were dying of malnutrition, deficient in the nitrilosides, lecithin, ascorbic acid, the tocopherols, degenerative diseases I’ve only read about.”
Ya-huh.
Why would vitamin C ever be banned? I suspect that Smith is ascribing actual malevolence to the Federalist government. If it’s good for you, you’re not allowed to have it. [*evil laughter from petty bureaucrats who delight in petty malice *]
Just what I was wondering. I guess Linus Pauling is a libertarian hero?
Why do we trust the 999s printed on those bars (and the fictional coin)? Or that a purported bushel of wheat is actually the right amount, to say nothing of isn’t adulterated in some way?
We’ve got a system that penalizes anyone who tries to defraud buyers with fakes and misleading claims, backed up by a Bureau of Weights and Measures, that’s why. Every civilized place does, and did, all the way back to Ur and Uruk. Keeping track of that stuff is a big part of why we invented writing in the first place. The Incas even invented all the same stuff independently (though not also the wheel) but did it rather differently, recording (at the very least) ledgers in knotted quipu tassels and the like.
Any ancap Galt’s Gulch is going to either lack a Bureau of Weights and Measures, or have multiple competing ones, and anyone buying a bushel of any damn thing is going to have to pull out a scale or a ruler and measure it. Without standardized units, anti-fraud norms backed by audits and policing of some sort, and all of that, transaction costs are going to be through the frigging roof compared to here and now. Heck, standardizing weights and measures is so beneficial (with everyone a winner and no losers) that in a world rife with climate denial, giant national disparities in income and things like public health, and wars, we’ve had no problem agreeing to let one little institute in France set a worldwide standard for what distance one meter is.
The most basic prerequisites for a fair game, or even one where at least everyone can agree on the outcome, is impartial referees and a level playing field. The minarchists on the libertarian right, at least, recognize this; the swivel-eyed ancaps who’d call even the minarchists “statists” imagine they can somehow have a functioning economy without these. Good frigging luck.
The Incas paid a price for not inventing the wheel, though. The people who did eventually also invented clockwork, made of lots of little toothed wheels, and then invented timepieces accurate and portable enough to bring on ships and use to do precise east-west navigation, not just following coastlines and north-south crossings†. I doubt I need to remind everyone what happened next.
† Latitude is easy: just find the pole star, or any other star with a known declination, and whip out a sextant. If the earth didn’t rotate, longitude would be equally easy, given a star with known right ascension. (Unless you were on the permanently daylit hemisphere, then you’d want to replace the clear lens in that sextant with No. 14 welder’s glass.) But it does rotate, so you need a clock that’s at least accurate to the minute. The Polynesians managed to colonize a lot of the Pacific islands without that, but I don’t think their methods scaled to continent-conquering volumes of travel, or they would have beat that Columbus dude by about 500 years and been there to greet him at Haiti.