In the fifth post of this series, I have to admit I somehow grew attached to the characters of my wife's and mine alter-egos, in Sousolandia and I think I could use them to further explore the effects of such a radical economical change. Forgive me if you just find the whole thing dumb.
So this post will find me a couple of years down the road from that incredible time when we changed our country from a Government controlled economy to a free market economy. And things could not have turned out better. This is it. We love it. We have reached the Nirvana of the economic paradigm, prosperity for all has arrived and the end of hardship. Ok, maybe, I should admit that we still work hard, but at least now we can get a lot of good stuff for it, stuff I never even dreamed I'd be needing, but without which I cannot live anymore (Whisky is among them).
How did we get here? So you'll remember that Cap, Cap Italist, the great foreign agriculture expert, came luckily our way, and out of his immense generosity offered to help us with the production. My wife, of course told him, she'd gladly accept it, but that he should always keep in mind that she was dictating the rules, and that of course she counted on my advice, because she didn't want things to somehow turn bad for me or the baby (the one we found on a basket), she loved us immensely of course. Oh yes, the baby has been growing fine, beautiful boy, he needs even more stuff than I do. My wife adores him. The funny thing is that some years before, when things had been going relatively OK, I had even proposed we'd get some of our own, which she then found that it wasn't such a good idea because we wouldn't be able to feed them on such low crops. Funny how things turn out.
Cap was fine with it, in fact he said he loved our rules, and even propose to suggest some of his own which could help improve things even more. He called them Reforms. First of all, he said Sousolandia sounded very old fashioned and that the outside people would not associate it with a modern fruit exporting country. So he came up with a beautiful alternative, Chitita, the Banana Republic. I raised my arm and told him, that in fact, we were neither a Republic, nor did we produce bananas. To which he smartly retorted that "one has to look into the future, my boy". I liked Sousolandia, but Chitita was just as fine.
With a name like that many more people came and we all got work down at the plantation. We even had to expand it. So we started to cut down parts of that useless forest that was surrounding our farm, sure it was beautiful, with all those birds, and flowers, and lake, but it was completely useless, nothing really worth anything was being produced there. I thought I'd miss the times when I was a child playing in those woods, but then again I'm not a child anymore, and we need to increase production. By then we were producing so many tomatoes and oranges, which we were using to trade for everything else that we realized that it was such a burden to carry them around to do business, so Cap suggested the Monetary Reform. That is for each tomato and orange we produced, which for us were worth more or less the same, my wife, the government, would issue a little paper saying "I'm worth an Orato" (that's what we called our currency), and then we just needed to use those papers to trade instead of fruit. Because we started carrying lot's of paper, she then made some which said "I'm worth 5, 10 or 100 Oratos".
The neighbour did the same and created the Chikollar, which was worth a chicken. So in order to trade with him we had to maintain a table to convert Oratos to Chikollars, depending on the level of production and exporting of either country and how appreciated those products were in the market, which oscillated with the fashion. Then we figured out that everybody else was doing the same and we had to expand our table to foresee all possible conversions from all currencies to all currencies. This also turned out to be complicated then one country said that they produced something that was worth more than anything else in the planet, diamonds, and that we should all just calculate the worth of our currency with respect to that (he was right, I'd seen one of these diamonds in the neck of my wife, a little present from Cap, to celebrate their everlasting friendship, it seems it had cost him a few thousand tomatoes and oranges). That made life easier; we all indexed our currency as a fraction of a diamond. Now doing business was really smooth. I hardly ever really saw a tomato or orange again, but some one must have been buying them because our papers were always worth something. Sometime we could tell that the selling was not going well because all of a sudden the paper value would drop, and you'd need more of it to buy something, and they called that inflation. Oh yes, Cap was giving us paper money for our work at the plantation, a fixed amount, which he adjusted every year so that we didn't feel so much this inflation (my wife had to push him to do so, but never mind).
The other thing Cap proposed was to buy the right to plant the land. He said that the land would still belong to the country, but he wanted to own the right to plant it how he saw fit, because if others would be coming to interfere this could make things very inefficient, and after all if he was going to invest most of his possessions in it, he wanted to be sure he wasn't going to get ripped off, dispossessed of his most valuable belongings and expelled once the plantation was yielding lots of fruit. My wife agreed to it, they signed a contract which she swore to honour and we received a few diamonds in return. So we had the Privatization Reform. But he didn't stop there. He asked my wife: "Why is it that you only take loans from the neighbour? You know he's always ripped you people off, he asks too much interest.” we had never really thought about that one. He was after all the only other person we knew until then, and even if he was not entirely fair, we at least trusted him. But Cap said that now we were trading with all kinds of other people and if we trusted them to trade and balances our currency; why not trust them with loans? In fact there'd be so many others offering nice loans that we would find much better interest rates, and use the money to invest in the plantation. How can you argue against that? My wife immediately started the Liberalization of the Capital Market Reform. Cap was very pleased with us, and told us how smart he thought we were to come up with all these nice reforms. It was very nice of him to say so, especially since most of these ideas were actually his.
My wife in the meantime got very busy attending to the needs of everybody in the country, we had grown now to a considerable size in population, most of them Foreigners, but now some were having their own children here, which I guess makes them nationals. She had to make sure everybody stayed more or less healthy, but unfortunately there was no more hot water bottle in bed and herbal tea as before, everybody was just getting an Aspirin, and had to pay money for his or hers. She had to make plenty of rules for how people should behave, because everybody was accustomed to something else from the places they come from. She also had to teach them all to speak our language. To sponsor all these things, health, justice, education and others she needed funding. Before in the old days when it'd been just her and me and Waldy, she would take all of our production and basically decided how much each would get in oranges and tomatoes and use the rest as she needed and that was it. Now she wasn't in control of the plantation anymore but she had to make sure to get some funding out of it somehow. So she came up with her own reform, the Tax Reform. She decided that since Cap was making so much money out of our production she would tax a percentage of the profit he was making. He thought that was again a very smart idea and agreed, but he convinced her that most of that money could be better used if re-invested on the plantation to make it even bigger, and that he could think of a number of other ways to get tax. Namely he said "Look at all those people in your country, they're earning such big wages, that's basically all profit, because they don't have to invest any money in tools and fertilizers, I do that for them, so why don't you also tax their enormous profits? And since you have all this trouble in issuing money to match the production why don't you also tax all the sales to cover your expenses. This way you can lower my taxes, I produce more, and everybody gets a salary raise and then you can tax them more. All so logical and simple. And that's how she introduced wage tax and sales tax, and lowered the tax on the food corporation profits.
All these reforms were not easy to introduce, there was always so much protest all the time about everything that she started to get really fed up. People were just used to the old ways and would not accept easily change, even if for the better. And so she started dreaming of her old job, when she was planning the production. Now the whole enterprise was so big and interesting that surely the job must be fantastic. She kind of mentioned her anxieties to Cap (who she now considered to be a kind of spiritual Guru) and he told her that in fact, he'd been thinking of making her his own personal assistant, to oversee the production locally while he had to be away so often to do international business. She asked "But what about the government? Who takes care of the people?". He said, in his infinite wisdom, that the people would take care of themselves, that in fact this would be a fantastic opportunity for them. After all, weren't they always complaining of how you did things? So they probably think they can do it better. Some of them were even calling my wife a despotic tyrant. Could she believe it? She did. She would not be talked of, in the outside world, as a tyrant. She loved her people more than anything in the world, me, the baby, and all the people who came afterwards, and their children as well. So she decided to do what was best for all, and for her as well (she was earning more as an assistant to Cap, then as the head of the Government) and let the people decide for themselves. And she created the greatest of all of the reforms, the Democratic Reform. This was a beautiful day, and everybody congratulated our country for joining the train of the progressive countries of the free world, and we pledged to every year commemorate this day with big parades. We called it Freedom day. We were now all free to decide for ourselves who'd represent us. A marvellous thing.
So the next day a big bunch of us decided to stand for election and become the new President of the Republic. We knew not much of what the job entailed, but it seemed like the smart thing to do. Maybe we could follow on the footsteps of my wife who'd been offered such a great job after she left the government in the corporation top management. After a while it seemed unlikely that all of us would get elected so we started debating to see if we could find the guy with the best ideas to represent us. So a guy stepped up and proposed that if we all voted for him, he would trash the contract where we sold the planting property rights to Cap, and we could kick him out of the country and take over from him the control of the food plant, and make money for ourselves. His name was Com, Com Unist. Nobody took him serious, because we all knew we had neither the international connections nor the money or the skills to manage this thing as Cap did. So another guy stepped up and said he would rather convince Cap to share a bit more of his profits with all of us, since we were doing most of the hard work, and demand some benefits like vacation and a pension scheme. We all thought that was more reasonable, and we chose him. And that's how Cor, Cor Uptible, became the first president of our free Republic. Long live the Republic.
Everything was just grand, Cor is much less strict than my wife used to be, and we basically can do what we please. The only one who wasn't much happy these days was Waldy, our old Münsterländer. His services had not been needed much lately, since we did not have to repel anybody anymore. In fact the barb wire around the whole farm had been removed and roads appeared from all directions. Waldy kept barking, mostly at foreigners, but he wouldn't scare anybody. We gave him the task to patrol the streets and bark at drunken people, but even that was starting to be too much for old Waldy. He never really did like Cap either, strange dog.
Now, can this get any better? That I hope will be the topic of the next post.
So this post will find me a couple of years down the road from that incredible time when we changed our country from a Government controlled economy to a free market economy. And things could not have turned out better. This is it. We love it. We have reached the Nirvana of the economic paradigm, prosperity for all has arrived and the end of hardship. Ok, maybe, I should admit that we still work hard, but at least now we can get a lot of good stuff for it, stuff I never even dreamed I'd be needing, but without which I cannot live anymore (Whisky is among them).
How did we get here? So you'll remember that Cap, Cap Italist, the great foreign agriculture expert, came luckily our way, and out of his immense generosity offered to help us with the production. My wife, of course told him, she'd gladly accept it, but that he should always keep in mind that she was dictating the rules, and that of course she counted on my advice, because she didn't want things to somehow turn bad for me or the baby (the one we found on a basket), she loved us immensely of course. Oh yes, the baby has been growing fine, beautiful boy, he needs even more stuff than I do. My wife adores him. The funny thing is that some years before, when things had been going relatively OK, I had even proposed we'd get some of our own, which she then found that it wasn't such a good idea because we wouldn't be able to feed them on such low crops. Funny how things turn out.
Cap was fine with it, in fact he said he loved our rules, and even propose to suggest some of his own which could help improve things even more. He called them Reforms. First of all, he said Sousolandia sounded very old fashioned and that the outside people would not associate it with a modern fruit exporting country. So he came up with a beautiful alternative, Chitita, the Banana Republic. I raised my arm and told him, that in fact, we were neither a Republic, nor did we produce bananas. To which he smartly retorted that "one has to look into the future, my boy". I liked Sousolandia, but Chitita was just as fine.
With a name like that many more people came and we all got work down at the plantation. We even had to expand it. So we started to cut down parts of that useless forest that was surrounding our farm, sure it was beautiful, with all those birds, and flowers, and lake, but it was completely useless, nothing really worth anything was being produced there. I thought I'd miss the times when I was a child playing in those woods, but then again I'm not a child anymore, and we need to increase production. By then we were producing so many tomatoes and oranges, which we were using to trade for everything else that we realized that it was such a burden to carry them around to do business, so Cap suggested the Monetary Reform. That is for each tomato and orange we produced, which for us were worth more or less the same, my wife, the government, would issue a little paper saying "I'm worth an Orato" (that's what we called our currency), and then we just needed to use those papers to trade instead of fruit. Because we started carrying lot's of paper, she then made some which said "I'm worth 5, 10 or 100 Oratos".
The neighbour did the same and created the Chikollar, which was worth a chicken. So in order to trade with him we had to maintain a table to convert Oratos to Chikollars, depending on the level of production and exporting of either country and how appreciated those products were in the market, which oscillated with the fashion. Then we figured out that everybody else was doing the same and we had to expand our table to foresee all possible conversions from all currencies to all currencies. This also turned out to be complicated then one country said that they produced something that was worth more than anything else in the planet, diamonds, and that we should all just calculate the worth of our currency with respect to that (he was right, I'd seen one of these diamonds in the neck of my wife, a little present from Cap, to celebrate their everlasting friendship, it seems it had cost him a few thousand tomatoes and oranges). That made life easier; we all indexed our currency as a fraction of a diamond. Now doing business was really smooth. I hardly ever really saw a tomato or orange again, but some one must have been buying them because our papers were always worth something. Sometime we could tell that the selling was not going well because all of a sudden the paper value would drop, and you'd need more of it to buy something, and they called that inflation. Oh yes, Cap was giving us paper money for our work at the plantation, a fixed amount, which he adjusted every year so that we didn't feel so much this inflation (my wife had to push him to do so, but never mind).
The other thing Cap proposed was to buy the right to plant the land. He said that the land would still belong to the country, but he wanted to own the right to plant it how he saw fit, because if others would be coming to interfere this could make things very inefficient, and after all if he was going to invest most of his possessions in it, he wanted to be sure he wasn't going to get ripped off, dispossessed of his most valuable belongings and expelled once the plantation was yielding lots of fruit. My wife agreed to it, they signed a contract which she swore to honour and we received a few diamonds in return. So we had the Privatization Reform. But he didn't stop there. He asked my wife: "Why is it that you only take loans from the neighbour? You know he's always ripped you people off, he asks too much interest.” we had never really thought about that one. He was after all the only other person we knew until then, and even if he was not entirely fair, we at least trusted him. But Cap said that now we were trading with all kinds of other people and if we trusted them to trade and balances our currency; why not trust them with loans? In fact there'd be so many others offering nice loans that we would find much better interest rates, and use the money to invest in the plantation. How can you argue against that? My wife immediately started the Liberalization of the Capital Market Reform. Cap was very pleased with us, and told us how smart he thought we were to come up with all these nice reforms. It was very nice of him to say so, especially since most of these ideas were actually his.
My wife in the meantime got very busy attending to the needs of everybody in the country, we had grown now to a considerable size in population, most of them Foreigners, but now some were having their own children here, which I guess makes them nationals. She had to make sure everybody stayed more or less healthy, but unfortunately there was no more hot water bottle in bed and herbal tea as before, everybody was just getting an Aspirin, and had to pay money for his or hers. She had to make plenty of rules for how people should behave, because everybody was accustomed to something else from the places they come from. She also had to teach them all to speak our language. To sponsor all these things, health, justice, education and others she needed funding. Before in the old days when it'd been just her and me and Waldy, she would take all of our production and basically decided how much each would get in oranges and tomatoes and use the rest as she needed and that was it. Now she wasn't in control of the plantation anymore but she had to make sure to get some funding out of it somehow. So she came up with her own reform, the Tax Reform. She decided that since Cap was making so much money out of our production she would tax a percentage of the profit he was making. He thought that was again a very smart idea and agreed, but he convinced her that most of that money could be better used if re-invested on the plantation to make it even bigger, and that he could think of a number of other ways to get tax. Namely he said "Look at all those people in your country, they're earning such big wages, that's basically all profit, because they don't have to invest any money in tools and fertilizers, I do that for them, so why don't you also tax their enormous profits? And since you have all this trouble in issuing money to match the production why don't you also tax all the sales to cover your expenses. This way you can lower my taxes, I produce more, and everybody gets a salary raise and then you can tax them more. All so logical and simple. And that's how she introduced wage tax and sales tax, and lowered the tax on the food corporation profits.
All these reforms were not easy to introduce, there was always so much protest all the time about everything that she started to get really fed up. People were just used to the old ways and would not accept easily change, even if for the better. And so she started dreaming of her old job, when she was planning the production. Now the whole enterprise was so big and interesting that surely the job must be fantastic. She kind of mentioned her anxieties to Cap (who she now considered to be a kind of spiritual Guru) and he told her that in fact, he'd been thinking of making her his own personal assistant, to oversee the production locally while he had to be away so often to do international business. She asked "But what about the government? Who takes care of the people?". He said, in his infinite wisdom, that the people would take care of themselves, that in fact this would be a fantastic opportunity for them. After all, weren't they always complaining of how you did things? So they probably think they can do it better. Some of them were even calling my wife a despotic tyrant. Could she believe it? She did. She would not be talked of, in the outside world, as a tyrant. She loved her people more than anything in the world, me, the baby, and all the people who came afterwards, and their children as well. So she decided to do what was best for all, and for her as well (she was earning more as an assistant to Cap, then as the head of the Government) and let the people decide for themselves. And she created the greatest of all of the reforms, the Democratic Reform. This was a beautiful day, and everybody congratulated our country for joining the train of the progressive countries of the free world, and we pledged to every year commemorate this day with big parades. We called it Freedom day. We were now all free to decide for ourselves who'd represent us. A marvellous thing.
So the next day a big bunch of us decided to stand for election and become the new President of the Republic. We knew not much of what the job entailed, but it seemed like the smart thing to do. Maybe we could follow on the footsteps of my wife who'd been offered such a great job after she left the government in the corporation top management. After a while it seemed unlikely that all of us would get elected so we started debating to see if we could find the guy with the best ideas to represent us. So a guy stepped up and proposed that if we all voted for him, he would trash the contract where we sold the planting property rights to Cap, and we could kick him out of the country and take over from him the control of the food plant, and make money for ourselves. His name was Com, Com Unist. Nobody took him serious, because we all knew we had neither the international connections nor the money or the skills to manage this thing as Cap did. So another guy stepped up and said he would rather convince Cap to share a bit more of his profits with all of us, since we were doing most of the hard work, and demand some benefits like vacation and a pension scheme. We all thought that was more reasonable, and we chose him. And that's how Cor, Cor Uptible, became the first president of our free Republic. Long live the Republic.
Everything was just grand, Cor is much less strict than my wife used to be, and we basically can do what we please. The only one who wasn't much happy these days was Waldy, our old Münsterländer. His services had not been needed much lately, since we did not have to repel anybody anymore. In fact the barb wire around the whole farm had been removed and roads appeared from all directions. Waldy kept barking, mostly at foreigners, but he wouldn't scare anybody. We gave him the task to patrol the streets and bark at drunken people, but even that was starting to be too much for old Waldy. He never really did like Cap either, strange dog.
Now, can this get any better? That I hope will be the topic of the next post.
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