This is now the sixth post on a series about economics of the free markets and society. If you read the previous post you will remember my alter-ego in the Banana Republic of Chitita (the BRC) has been reporting on how his country has evolved from a government controlled economy to a free market economy. So you'll now find me 10 years down the road from the last post, when a number of reforms were put in place to adapt the country to the new free market economy and how everything was wonderful in this new system.
But can it get any better? Well, just when you think it can't get any better, well that's probably when it can't. Not only it can't, but in this case, things actually began to deteriorate. That's the whole point of life, things are either getting better or getting worse, but they are always getting somewhere. What things? I'll get to that in a minute.
First let me tell you a bit more of how good we had it. Although we'd been working like dogs, 16 hours a day for little wages, our economy was growing stronger and stronger. Our government, in spite of our ever increasing production and exporting capability, kept our currency deliberately under-valued in the international market, such as to make our exports grow. And boy did we grow! Everybody was buying our cheap fruit. We basically took everybody else out of the orange and tomato business. Other countries were even growing suspicious of our dumping and wanted to impose new tariffs on our products, but luckily we had signed a World Free Trade alliance that prevented them from doing just that, suckers!
We also had elected Cor Uptible as our first president. He had promised to fight for higher wages, paid vacation and pension. So he actually went to my wife, who was then the CEO of the Chitita Corp., and asked for all these things. She said that the actual owners of the corporation would not be very pleased with it and it was better not to ask for those things just now, because, they were still consolidating business and if we asked too much they might leave the country, and that was not nice. So Cor decided it was better to wait for a more appropriate moment. In the mean time he went about privatizing all the things that were still the government's responsibility, schools, hospitals, even old Waldy, the dog became privatized and joined the Chitita private security force. The rest of us could not have it that Cor had failed to negotiate our demands, we lived in a free country and we'd certainly do something about it. We got unionized. Yes, this was actually suggested by our friend Com Unist. All the workers should unite to fight the oppressing bosses. So we started a big protest, we threatened to go on strike, and eventually they broke in. We got our pay raise of 1% and paid vacation of one week. I had never been on vacation before, and I had never left our country, except to go to the neighbour. So I decided to travel to see the outside world with my own eyes, I'd never been so excited like this in my whole life. So I travelled for a whole week and visited other countries, and saw how they had it nice as well. People in general were a bit colder and distant and didn't talk to each other, but they looked beautiful. I've been in a country where everybody dressed corporate brand clothes and got facial surgery, I wanted so much to have one myself, but I couldn't afford it. I realized that our country still had a long way to go until everybody could afford so many luxury goods, but I was glad we were on the right track.
When I got back to Chitita, something terrible had happened, I was told. Just the day before a van with loud speakers had driven by and a guy called Merdia, who was claiming to be a fantastic scientist had been shouting for all to hear, that he had made an important discovery, and that was that eating oranges caused men to get bald. I was shocked. I had never realized that relation although I'd been eating oranges all my life and had in fact by now gotten to be considerably bald. It was so obvious, how could I have not realized it? He said also that on the other hand eating bananas would make hair grow twice as fast. And then he moved on to shout that in other countries.
This was terrible indeed, this meant our currency had just lost roughly half of its value because nobody would be buying oranges anymore, and we were basically poor. The union called on all the workers and we rushed to the farm to cut down all those orange trees. But when we got there, and to our astonishment, by some miraculous coincidence, all the orange trees were already gone, and in their place, surprise, surprise, banana trees. I didn't even know bananas could grow so far up North, but as I was later explained this were a sort of Genetically modified banana (don't ask me to explain that), we were rich again, bananas would be selling like crazy as they make hair grow back! I couldn't wait to have some of those bananas myself. Now what was more concerning to me was, of course, who had done this. The answer was a fleet of bulldozers. And next to it another fleet of agriculture machines was ready to take over the ploughing, the picking, and the watering of the fields. Just 10% of us men were required from now onwards to manoeuvre the machines, those would receive appropriate education, and the rest would be laid off, and would be free to pursue another more fulfilling career in another area. I was glad to be free, but was very worried what I would do if I did not got chosen to work with the machines, I only knew how to plough and water and pick fruit. What career did they mean?
I got laid off. This was the worst day of my life up until then. I got some money as severance, but it would only last me for a couple of months. What was I to do? I went to my wife to see what she could do for me, and she said she was sorry, but I was getting kind of on the old side, did not have the same stamina of some of the young folk, and investing in my education would be a bad managerial decision. But that I should look on the bright side of things. The guys who did stay would be producing much more with the help of the machines and the whole economy would go much better, which meant things would be better for all, and that was the best thing that could happen to us all. That's one way of seeing it, but I couldn't help feeling bad.
A bad thing never comes alone. When i got home, that is the barn to where I'd been relocated some time before, there was an eviction note on the door. I was to be relocated again to a new social building with a hundred floors and 4 square meter apartments, I got a flat on the 80th floor with a fantastic view, but a bit cramped. At least I didn't end up in the street, like some other foreign colleagues, I guess my wife must have had some pity on me. The reason I got evicted however was this. Rumours had it that the barn was needed for chickens. I was very surprised to know that we were going to produce chickens, since the neighbour produced so many already, and wondered who'd had such a stupid idea. It turned out, I later discovered, that we were not going to produce them after all. Chitita Corp. bought an incredible amount of chickens from the neighbour and stored them in the barn, they told the neighbour they wanted to feed a lot of hungry people, who had lost their jobs. I was so happy they'd thought about us and waited to receive my portion of chicken, but somehow it never came. The reason it seems was because, all of a sudden a strange disease attacked the remaining chickens of the neighbour killing most of his productions, since there was then so little chickens in the market, their price went sky high, and a lot of people in the World suddenly became extremely hungry for chicken.
Our Chitita did the human thing, and provided them from the stored chickens at a high price, because those chickens had been intended for the poor of our country.
The neighbour who had not put in place all the reforms we did, and had his economy relying solely on chickens and beer, was shaken by this event, and was in a bad situation. He went a bit cuckoo and one day came barging through our country with a bulldozer trying to destroy our plantation. Why would he do that? We'd even offered to sell back to him some of our chicken... Chitita Corp. issued a note saying he'd become a terrorist and put back the barb-wire around the plantation to protect it from other possible crazy terrorists. People with envy of our wealth and progress. And can you believe that even that wasn't enough. Another guy, an ex-colleague of mine, who had been fired from Chitita, infiltrated into the plantation and attempted to sabotage the irrigation system and a couple of plough machines. They caught him too. It turned out that he was some how related to the neighbour, a cousin or something, which I found totally strange, because he had never mentioned anything about it, and certainly they didn't look a bit alike, since the neighbour was white and this guy was black. You never know. Well, the end result was, the whole plantation security was scaled up, and now big X-ray machines were installed at every road entering in our country. Trade continued as usual, but people had to be a bit restrained as some, we realized, were potentially dangerous.
The union people got together to protest again against the corporation, but all the guys who remained working there had actually quit the union, so all we could do was shout for work at the doorsteps of the government. They let the new dogs (angry Dobermans) on us, and we had to run for our lives. We went to the pub and got drunk. I run out of money. Man, how I started to miss the old days. Even people who had not been here in the old days were missing the old days. Someone said quite wisely: "Oh things were much better, back in the days when things were much worse". And all these stupid foreigners who kept coming in thinking this was some sort of El Dorado, where you find work in a blink and make lots of money, just made things worse. Some of us started hating the foreigners; even people who not long ago had been themselves foreigners hated the new foreigners.
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