Angina Monologue 22

His Majesty is somewhat particular.

For example, his weekend breakfast must be just so. He starts with a tall glass of kefir; this I must prepare for him, the day before, by placing the kefir clots in fresh lowfat milk in a glass (and it must be the right glass), covering this with a paper towel, and placing it on top of the refrigerator to ferment for precisely 24 hours. His Majesty is a teetotaler (surprisingly) and he frets that kefir left too long or otherwise prepared incorrectly will build up a significant alcohol content.

The kefir must be served with a tablespoon of xylitol (for sweetness) along with His Majesty’s morning pills. The balance of  his breakfast is a bowl of steel-cut oats, simmered for precisely 15 minutes, served with blueberries and freshly ground flax seed and sweetened further with sucralose; a single large blueberry pancake with inositol added to the batter for fiber; sorbitol syrup, precisely one quarter cup; a single fried egg and thick slice of lean breakfast ham; and a small serving of mixed nuts. His Majesty snarks that he much prefers these to the mixed nuts writing letters to the editor that are published in his morning newspaper.

The flax seed must be freshly ground; His Majesty does not want its highly unsaturated fat content to go rancid, for fear this will corrode the imperial coronaries. I recall getting a very strange look from my grocer, who was also serving in my ward’s bishopric at the time, when I dropped by his store and asked if he had any coffee grinders for sale. I had to explain about the flax seed. I have to special order some of the ingredients for His Majesty’s breakfast, since my grocer confesses he would not know how to persuade the chain to supply them even if there was more of a local market for them than just His Majesty. I am sympathetic, but grateful for Amazon, who delivers by clone here.

I believe that few voters properly appreciate the importance of order. This is particularly true of libertarian and conservative voters, who frequently speak of a free market as if it was an unregulated market. Liberal voters make the opposite mistake. Neither could be further from the truth. You cannot have a market without regulation.

Consider our ancient ancestors. All was shared within a tribe; socialism in all its forms is a throwback to a cave man society. But barter between tribes was a solemn and perilous occasion. The moment of the actual exchange of goods was fraught, as one or both sides might suddenly attack to take possession of the whole of them.

The only thing that permitted barter to take place at all was a kind of primitive code of honor symbolized by such things as the handshake. We are far enough from such times that most of us fail to recognize the deep ritual significance of a handshake, though this awareness lingers among Hasidic Jews, Freemasons, and perhaps other groups. At the other moral extreme, the first action of a used car salesman who is preparing to fleece you is to insist on shaking your hand. (He also insists on knowing and using your given name, which likewise had great ritual significance in traditional societies.)

Barter has severe limitations. It is possible only when the goods being exchanged are chattels and are physically present at the place of bartering. There can be no ownership or purchase of real property under a pure barter system, since there is no way to bring your land to a place of bartering. Indeed, the only way to assert ownership of real property in a pure bartering society was to camp around it with spears.

Even chattels lack liquidity. If you have a side of mammoth today, but the Gronks across the river have not yet made their annual pilgrimage to the secret/sacred obsidian fields (the two were one in ancient cultures), you’re stuck trying to make a half ton of tasteless jerky this afternoon, while your neighbors are going to end up sitting on a bunch of worthless shiny rocks.

It is hard to say which of these restrictions prompted the organization of the first markets, but my guess would be illiquidity. Media of exchange likely predate the written records that are the practical basis for real property. The love of money may be the root of all evil, but money itself was a wonderful invention. Now you could sell the Gronks your excess mastodon flank steak for a bunch of obsidian beads, which you would later trade back to purchase your spear heads for the next year’s hunt. And I suspect they were obsidian beads; money was a kind of sympathetic magic, with the beads being tokens of the actual arrowheads to be purchased later.

But contract law probably followed the invention of money relatively quickly. The development of written records allowed title to real property to be defined, and once it could be defined, it could be traded like chattel. Of course, this inevitably led to disputes, and thus the court of law was invented — which, in its earliest form, was a gathering of tribal elders. The word senator originally derived from senex, meaning old man. (For my part, I have no trouble regarding Barbara Boxer or Hillary Clinton as honorary old men.)

His Majesty makes a great many double-edged comments like that.

And from there to the modern market, which is regulated through and through. The market could not exist otherwise.

What most conservatives and libertarians mean when they sing the praises of a free market is not that the market is not regulated, but that it is not centrally planned. They are, of course, quite right. A planned market is an oxymoron.

From the point of view of the individual, the virtue of the market is that it lets him trade what he has for something he values more. The law of comparative advantage tells us that it is possible for both sides in a free trade of goods to exchange what they have for something they value more; it denies the existence of any absolute value for a good. So does common sense: If both sides did not benefit from most trades, trade would cease.

The real magic comes from the social point of view. The countless individual interactions that make up a large marketplace are a kind of massively parallel computer network that rapidly collates and propagates information about the economy. Thomas Sowell has said quite a bit about this in Knowledge and Decisions, which I consider perhaps his finest work for the lay Sith. When you see that this is so, you also see the folly of a planned market. It is a market in which the government decrees lies. When a genuinely free (not unregulated, just free) and competitive market says that gasoline costs $3 a gallon, it is an accurate statement of the worth of a gallon of gasoline compared with other goods to whose production we might devote our resources. Don’t like that answer? Vote for a politician who promises gasoline at $2 a gallon. Never mind that he is promising to lie to you and is guaranteeing that you will be in a long line for artificially cheap gasoline a week after he gains the power to fix the price. It’s a case of putting the Carter before the horse.

Remember that: A politician who promises to “regulate” the market so that things cost what you want them to cost is a politician who is promising to make the market lie to you. It’s morally and practically equivalent to decreeing that, henceforth, water shall freeze at 5 degrees below zero Centigrade, as a “solution” to global warming. And remember that wages, for example, are just another cost.

Voters crave order, Lord Vader. We shall make order one of the planks of our platform. We shall call it a free market in front of conservatives, and a fair market in front of liberals, and we shall be telling the truth to both, just in the way each wants to hear.

My master, none of this is particularly a new thought. It is a rehearsing of things we know very well already.

So? We are at the start of a long political campaign. It is appropriate to remind ourselves of what we know, to get solidly settled on our platform, before going out to sell it to the voters.

I recognize the appeal of first selling our platform to the voters and then deciding what it is. This seems to be working well for Mr. Trump, for example, as it has for many politicians before him. But we are not the Red Queen, calling for sentence first and verdict after.

His Majesty positively salivates at the thought of bringing order to the body politic. It has been a theme of his throughout his career.

I wonder, though, if he is really up to another campaign. I took him to the doctor just his last week; his sugar is up and his testosterone is down. Not that there are any signs this has sweetened his disposition.

I’d still rather be his minion than Hillary’s.