and so on to control that old lady clubbing me with a kielbasa. Gives you sympathy for Kim Jong-un. I decided to go home. (This is the part of a polemical narrative where I need to make a speech, like the speech of copper baron Francisco d’Anconia in Ayn Rand’s Atlas Shrugged about money being the root of all virtue. Ideally the writer works such speeches in as part of a dialogue. But the other person in the dialogue – in my case, my wife – doesn’t get to say much. In Atlas Shrugged , Francisco goes on for five pages in response to a snide remark by hateful anti-capitalism journalist Bertram Scudder. I shall try to contain myself.) “Oh my gosh, what happened to you?!” asked my wife. “Money is the root of all virtue,” I replied. “Goods and services shouldn’t be completely free. For years now we have been treating goods and services as if they were de facto free. It was only a matter of time before we made them free de jure . “It started in the 1920s,” I said, “with easy access to consumer credit on the installment plan – ‘Buy Now, Pay Later.’ This didn’t make goods and service free of course, but it made goods and service seem free. “Customers no longer had to save up money to pay for what they wanted with cold, hard cash. (Which even paper money was in those days, being backed with gold and silver.) “My Dear,” I went on to say, “that was just
the beginning of a long-term trend – I would even call it a plot – to separate the desire to purchase from the duty to pay . “By the 1930s, individual stores were issuing charge plates so that wives could buy finery one month and not let husbands find out until the following month...” “Ahem,” my wife interrupted, “I’m the one who balances the checkbook around here...” “In 1950,” I continued without pausing, “Diners Club introduced a general use ‘credit card’ that allowed cash-free purchases at restaurants and a wide variety of other commercial establishments. In 1958 the American Express Card promoted this ‘un- pay’ concept worldwide. “Our own children have no idea what things cost or how the cost is met. Our children will say, ‘Sorry I sat down on the glass-top coffee table and my butt busted it to pieces. But you can just go on Amazon and get another one.’ “Now people can simply tap their iPhones to go into debt. Debt, incidentally, that the events of this very day have shown will never be paid. What is the world coming to ?” “Well,” said my wife, “If you’d ‘come to’ a little earlier this morning we could have gotten a free washer and dryer.” Free Goods and Services was the lead story on all the television news channels. The whole country was going crazy just like my little town... except in the big cities, where everybody is crazy anyway and things were much worse.
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