I had a dream that dollars were replaced with actual horses.
A professor wearing a burlap blazer pointed to a large screen with a laser pointer. When value is placed upon the ability to make an abstracted value-exchange, then surplus, abstracted wealth becomes a necessity in order to maintain continuity in the system. When a value cannot be derived from a surplus of exchanges, then negative monetization holds the system in check. Fiat money doesn’t work. If people traded horses instead of dollars, then the Koch brothers would have 10 billion horses. The staggering costs of caring for and distributing the horses (for very limited use, riding or eating) would outweigh their value.
When horses are spread out, there is less of a stress on resources needed to support horses.
Likewise, if the debt-generating capacity of banks was eradicated, then decentralized systems of wealth would always remain distributed among the commons. Imagine investor groups driving giant herds of horses into mergers. Lightweight, pocket-sized horses would become status symbols.
I operated a Metashet Mart. We no longer specialized in uber-small, workplace horses, horses that could carry your purse or laptop. A viral outbreak had wiped out stock, and my centralized distribution/husbandry company had been broken up and spread to franchises in different states. Although still attractive, metashets no longer commanded the trading power they once possessed. Tiny saddles, tiny little brushes, tiny shoes the size of thumbnails applied with curved staplers, those had likewise faded into the general landscape.
I stayed in business by marinating onions in vodka. Drunken metashets could be goaded into combative situations. Bets could be wagered upon drunken metashet horse wrestling matches. The funny thing was, the smaller the horse, the bigger the draw. One single horse in Vermont last year fetched a trade of six million acres somewhere in Nova Scotia by an anchovy baron, a rumored Freesaddler. The horse was three inches tall and blind, but it could walk.
I heated the onions with large mirrors out in a field. I slathered the onions with vegetable oil, stirred in suet and herbs, caramelizing them in giant troughs half-filled with vodka. Days were long. I often got headaches. But the spiced vodka kept me in saddles, which I could trade for medicine and books, seed and nice leather products from Arizona where the old drives still filled the canyons.
Tomorrow I would harvest another large haul of onions, replanting as I went. Gonna be a long, wet autumn according to the leaves in my old chicory cup. No one knew about my apple orchard, nor why my onions tasted so sweet, and why the horses drank my booze. I cut the vodka reduction with apple cider I kept hidden in clay jugs in the fields, buried below the maceration tables. I ran a tube into their stoppers and pumped the liquid up into the troughs. Not even my kids knew why the horses drank my onion liquor.
Apples were illegal.
The sweet brown schnapps flowed day and night. At night, my kids in bed with their diapered Pokehorses, I sat on the porch and listened to the wind. Sometimes I could almost hear the thunder of hooves, and I would close my eyes and remember the hay days of my metashet youth.
Fifty State Banana 