A CAN IN THE CAN
Tuesday. Your family or friends can wire money to the prison and it goes on your “books”... but you can never have more than $360 on your books at any given time. And you can also never spend more than $360 a month. So it doesn’t matter whether you’re poor or a billionaire on the outside. It’s communism on the inside. Everyone is the same. And if you don’t have anyone on the outside to send you money, you can work. I actually had a really good job. I drove a snowplow and a streetsweeper every day, and I got paid $50 a month... which was a good wage in prison. One day – it might have been a Friday – I was sitting in my cell on my bunk, and it wasn’t a commissary day. And it was kind of well-known that if you wanted to transact with someone, you had these stores. You had inmates who ran these little Walmarts out of their cells where you could buy stuff not on commissary day for a premium. And of course, in the absence of sound money and a fair market, a black market will emerge... Just look at Argentina, North Korea, and even China. Even during World War II all over Europe, black markets emerged in the absence
I didn’t understand this. You had an alternative currency system that had no utility. No actual real use. But it was still considered money because everyone agreed that it had value. And this was insane... Money was single-use packets of mackerel in soybean oil that cost $1.50 in the commissary. Do you ever go to the supermarket, and buy the single-use packets of tuna fish? It’s just like that, but with more of a well-bodied fish instead of the mushiness of tuna. So if I wanted to get a haircut, it would cost These mackerel packets are about the size of your cellphone, and they were stackable. So they’re easy to store. People had their life savings in these mackerel packets. And everyone in prison works out. These mackerel packets were the best source of protein in prison. So it was sound money because everyone agreed that it had value. three “macks” – three mackerels. Now why was mackerel valuable?
of a sound economy. So what was money?
There were no physical bills. If you were caught with even a nickel, you’d get sent to the “hole.” And trust me, you don’t want to go to the hole because you never come back. So what did people transact with?
58
November 2019
Made with FlippingBook HTML5