None of My Business E-Book

P. J. O'Rourke

• Herausgeber: Grove Press UK
• Kategorie: Fachliteratur
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 278

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2018

Beschreibung

After decades covering war and disaster, bestselling author and acclaimed satirist P. J. O'Rourke takes on his scariest subjects yet? business, investment, finance and the political chicanery behind them. Want to get rich overnight for free in 3 easy steps with no risk? Then don't buy this book. (Actually, if you believe there's a book that can do that, you shouldn't buy any books because you probably can't read.) P.J.'s approach to business, investment and finance is different. He takes the risks for you in his chapter 'How I Learned Economics by Watching People Try to Kill Each Other.' He proposes 'A Way to Raise Taxes That We'll All Love'?a 200% tax on celebrities. He offers a brief history of economic transitions before exploring the world of high-tech innovation with a chapter on 'Unnovations,' which asks, 'The Internet?whose idea was it to put all the idiots on earth in touch with each other?' He pokes fun at bitcoin, and closes with a fanciful short story about the morning that he wakes up and finds that all the world's goods and services are free! This is P.J. at his finest, a book not to be missed.

Leseprobe

ALSO BY P. J. O’ROURKE

Modern Manners

An Etiquette Book for Rude People

The Bachelor Home Companion

A Practical Guide to Keeping House Like a Pig

Republican Party Reptile

Confessions, Adventures, Essays, and (Other) Outrages

Holidays in Hell

In Which Our Intrepid Reporter Travels to the World’s Worst Places and Asks, “What’s Funny About This?”

Parliament of Whores

A Lone Humorist Attempts to Explain the Entire U.S. Government

Give War a Chance

Eyewitness Accounts of Mankind’s Struggle Against Tyranny,

Injustice, and Alcohol-Free Beer

All the Trouble in the World

The Lighter Side of Overpopulation, Famine, Ecological

Disaster, Ethnic Hatred, Plague, and Poverty

Age and Guile Beat Youth, Innocence, and a Bad Haircut

“I Was Tragically Hip and I Recovered! You Can Too!”

Eat the Rich

A Treatise on Economics

The CEO of the Sofa

One Year in the Life of a Man Who Said, “Mind If I Put My Feet Up?

I Think I Will Take This Lying Down.”

Peace Kills

America’s Fun New Imperialism

On The Wealth of Nations

A Minor Mister Opines upon a Master’s Magnum Opus

Driving Like Crazy

Thirty Years of Vehicular Hell-Bending Celebrating America the Way It’s Supposed to Be—with an Oil Well in Every Backyard, a Cadillac Escalade in Every Carport, and the Chairman of the Federal Reserve Mowing Our Lawn

Don’t Vote—It Just Encourages the Bastards

A Treatise on Politics

Holidays in Heck

A Former War Correspondent Experiences Frightening Vacation Fun

The Baby Boom

How It Got That Way . . . And It Wasn’t My Fault . . .

And I’ll Never Do It Again

Thrown Under the Omnibus

A Reader

How the Hell Did This Happen?

The Election of 2016

First published in the United States of America in 2018

by Grove Atlantic

First published in Great Britain in 2018 by Grove Press UK, an imprint of Grove Atlantic

This paperback edition published in Great Britain in 2019

by Grove Press UK

Copyright © P.J. O’Rourke, 2018

The moral right of P.J. O’Rourke to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act of 1988.

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the prior permission of both the copyright owner and the above publisher of the book.

Every effort has been made to trace or contact all copyright-holders. The publishers will be pleased to make good any omissions or rectify any mistakes brought to their attention at the earliest opportunity.

Chapters have appeared in a previous version in

American Consequences and the Stansberry Digest

Emoji art design by Erica Leah Wood

1 3 5 7 9 8 6 4 2

A CIP record for this book is available from the British Library.

Paperback ISBN 978 1 61185 500 5

E-book ISBN 978 1 61185 935 5

Printed in Great Britain

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www.groveatlantic.com

To Ed Mallon

Combat veteran, career FBI Agent, business executive, investor, and—best of all—father of my bride

If work was a good thing the rich would have it all and not let you do it.

—Elmore Leonard, Split Images

CONTENTS

Foreword: Why I’m Not Rich and You Aren’t Either

Section I: How I Learned Economics by Watching People Try to Kill Each Other

Introduction

Lesson 1: The Power of the Economic Impulse

Lesson 2: The Real Secret Behind All Investment Scams

Lesson 3: (Topic for Discussion) If You Want Hard Money, How Hard Do You Have to Be to Get It?

Section II: Money and Banking

Introduction

The Strange, Shape-Shifting Symbol of Value

My Own Personal Central Bank

Negative Interest Rates—Not Only Wrong but Evil

Debt Jubilee

Section III: Mutant Capitalism

Introduction: The Mutants

One Good Thing About Mutant Capitalists: They Aren’t Playing Monopoly

What Are Corporations For?

Section IV: The Transition

Introduction: The Digital Age and Which Digit It’s Giving Us

A Brief History of Economic Transitions

A Blockhead Confronts the Blockchain

What’s the Connection?

What Has the Digital Revolution Done to Print Media?

Five Lessons About the Digital Economy from a Member of the Digital Generation

Innovation—It’s All in Your Head

Innovations That Get No Respect

Unnovations

Six Geniuses (Plus Some Cartoon Animators) Try to See into the Future

A Ray of Hope in the Contest Between Man and Machine

Section V: Consumption

Introduction: Some Thoughts on the History of Trade

The Price of Being Middle Class

Armchair Predictions About Consumer Trends

Consumer Trends Among the “Grumpies”

Consumer Trends Among the “Grumpies,” Part 2

Summing Up American Consumer Trends . . .

All the Money in the World

Section VI: Random Walk

Introduction

Five Things I Know About China

Doubts About Asia

Thoughts While Cleaning the Chicken Coop

Six Lessons from a Man on Horseback

Sympathy for the Devil

Reform or Deform?

Free-for-All!

Acknowledgments

Foreword

Why I’m Not Rich and You Aren’t Either

To a flock of sheep the sheep who is every evening driven by the shepherd into a special pen to feed, and becomes twice as fat as the rest, must seem to be a genius.

—Leo Tolstoy, War and Peace

If you’re looking to claw your way up the corporate ladder, succeed beyond your wildest dreams, and amass an enormous fortune, you’ve got the right book in your hands. Now hit yourself over the head with it.

That stuff doesn’t come from books. I write books. If wealth came from books I’d be too rich to be writing. I have no idea where power, success, and a big pile of money come from. Probably from someplace awful, such as hard work, or impossible, such as being much smarter than I am.

But it’s a lot of fun watching people frantically trying to make—or keep from losing—money. I love economics the way I love the NFL. A great thing about professional football is seeing the guys who stuffed me into my locker in high school break each other’s legs. A great thing about economics is how it’s like live crabs in a pot of boiling water. If one of them almost makes it out of the pot, the others will pull him back down.

And I say this not as some kind of anticapitalist commie nut, but as a firm believer in the free market and a great fan of economic liberty. I mean, I root for the Patriots. And I root for the Dow Jones too. But, if the guys who hoovered my investment portfolio in the 2008 financial crisis go to bankruptcy court or jail, that’s a lot of fun.

Economics is a blood sport that I greatly enjoy—as a spectator. Of course, like everyone else, I am, at some level, a participant in the economy. But I got myself off the field and into a luxury skybox by marrying a woman who was a business major and is much smarter than I am. I leave everything to her. I have no idea what’s in my investment portfolio now. I haven’t called a play since 2008. It might be a thousand shares of Berkshire Hathaway. It might be a crypto-currency that Jim Cramer pulled out of his ass on Mad Money—“Buttcoin.” I don’t know. I don’t want to know. I just want to have fun.

Or I did until the kids got older and I became the father of three adolescents and began to feel that it was incumbent upon me to give them some fatherly advice about how to claw their way up corporate ladders, succeed beyond their wildest dreams, and amass enormous fortunes (with which to take care of me in a luxurious fashion in my old age).

So I told them, “Ask your mother.”

Their mother said, “Work hard and be much smarter than your father.”

My kids were discouraged by the first part of this advice.

So I tried again. I told them that the best way to do well in life is to find a job that combines what you love to do with what you’re good at doing with what people will pay you for. “Take me, for example,” I said.

My kids said, “You?”

I said, “Well, children, you’re not starved to death and naked. Although you . . .” (I said to my eldest daughter) “. . . should wear a sweater over that Forever 21 top. Anyway, I have made a living.”

And I explained how. I told them. “Think of What You Love to Do and What You’re Good at Doing and What People Will Pay You for as three circles. Technically, a Venn diagram. Try to find a place where those three circles intersect, then go there.”

And I drew the “Me” diagram on my cocktail napkin.

“But, Dad,” said my kids, “the National Lampoon was, like. forty years ago.”

“Right!” I said. “And I’m still riding on its coattails. But I can give you more up-to-date examples.”

I mixed another cocktail and got a new napkin.

My wife looked over my shoulder at my doodles and said, “Don’t forget, dear, you’re supposed to address the NAP-WTF Conference in New York on Monday.”

“The ‘National Association of People Who Think they’re Funny,’” I explained to the kids.

“You’ll have to leave by nine o’clock,” said my wife. “I’ve called an Uber.”

“Uber?” I said. “Some twerp with a nose ring who plays in a K-pop cover band on weekends driving his mother’s Honda Civic. Can’t you get me a Yellow Cab?”

“They’re out of business,” said my wife.

Then she turned to our children. “If you really want to get rich,” she said, “listen to your father. Listen especially carefully when he says, ‘That’ll never catch on.’ For example, your father said, ‘A phone that connects to the Internet? What for? I’ve got a computer at home. That’ll never catch on.’ He said, ‘A face-book? Why would anyone want a book full of faces? That’ll never catch on.’ And he said, ‘What the heck is this bird noise, this peeping or cheeping or chirping or twittering I keep hearing about? That’ll never catch on.’”

My wife said, “Just listen to your father. And whenever he says, ‘That’ll never catch on.’ Invest every penny you’ve got.”

SECTION I

How I Learned Economicsby Watching PeopleTry to Kill Each Other

All thy trees and fruit of thy land shall the locusts consume.

—Deuteronomy 28:42

Introduction

Devoted readers of my books (and I thank you both) will note that there are, in None of My Business, certain “Twice-Told Tales.” Especially in this section of the work. I have reached the age where I repeat myself. In excuse, I quote that most brahmanic of the Boston Brahmins, Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.: “He must be a poor creature who does not often repeat himself. Imagine the author of the excellent piece of advice, ‘Know Thyself,’ never alluding to that sentiment again.”

Not that I have any such excellent piece of advice. My advice is more prosaic: “Know Economics.” In pursuit of that knowledge I retell certain adventures that I had over the past thirty-five years as a reporter covering the civil war in Lebanon, the collapse of Albania into anarchy, the perennial anarchy of Somalia, the Iraq War, and a car journey along the Grand Trunk Road from Rawalpindi, Pakistan, to Calcutta on the Bay of Bengal. Then, later in the book, I return to my experiences in Mainland China a dozen years ago and to my other travels through Asia, shifting my reportorial emphasis from war, chaos, and exotic sightseeing to Econ. 101.

I’m trying to explain something, partially to the reader but also to myself. How did a roving hack with—as my friend Jimmy Buffett once described it—“a phony-baloney job making fun of everything” get interested in economics? Not for nothing did the historian Thomas Carlyle deem economics “the dismal science.” It’s not the best source of jokes.

This raises another question. How did a phony-baloney wisenheimer get interested in being a foreign correspondent?

I started out, at the beginning of the 1970s, as a cub wisenheimer at the National Lampoon, making fun of everything. When I became a freelancer in the early 1980s, I started to look around for something specific to make fun of, to establish my “professional niche.” I settled on foreigners as my topic. Everybody loves making fun of foreigners. But no one had set out to do it for a living since the heyday of the British Empire.

Alas! What various tastes in food

Divide the human brotherhood!

Birds in their little nests agree

With Chinamen, but not with me.

Colonials like their oysters hot,

Their omelets heavy—I do not.

The French are fond of slugs and frogs,

The Siamese eat puppy-dogs . . .

In Italy the traveler notes

With great disgust the flesh of goats

Appearing on the table d’hôtes;

And even this the natives spoil

By frying it in rancid oil.

—Hilaire Belloc

Making fun of international shenanigans (and silly foreign cuisine) soon led to making fun of the politics that underlay the shenanigans. And one cannot inspect politics at close range for long without overturning the rock of economics and making fun of the squirmy, slimy things that live there.

No matter what armed imbroglio, conflict, crisis, or catastrophe I was writing about, everybody was in it for something. Me, of course: I wanted good copy. But everybody else wanted to profit from the situation too. Perhaps the profit would be in money. Perhaps the profit would be in power. Perhaps the profit would be in pride or renown. The most virtuous people involved were piling up treasure in heaven. The most helpless people hoped to profit merely by staying alive.

Some read about economics on their own. Some take economics in college. Others are students at a tougher school, the Academy of Feeding a Family. I followed a different path.

I filed stories for Rolling Stone, The Atlantic Monthly, and The Weekly Standard from forty-some countries, none of them the nice ones. I reported on wars, revolutions, coups, riots, civil disturbances, persecutions, oppressions, and other human unpleasantness. My job, phony-baloney as it may have been, was, basically to watch people try to kill each other.

Watching people try to kill each other teaches important economic lessons.

Lesson 1:The Power of theEconomic Impulse

The first time I went to a war zone was in 1984 during the Lebanese Civil War. I flew to Beirut on Middle East Airlines. MEA, the Lebanese national flag-carrier, had a flight schedule that, somehow, was never interrupted by the war. Looking back, I should have realized that all sides in that multifarious conflict were making payoffs to MEA. Everybody needed a way to get money, combatants, warlords, spies, and other personnel into (and out of) the country they were tearing apart.

Just stepping off the airplane showed me what a good job of it they were doing.

The airport windows were shattered. The fronds were blown off the palm trees in the parking lot. The surrounding streets were pitch dark; all the lampposts had been run over by tanks. The taxi I got into looked like it had been used by Steve McQueen for a POW breakout attempt in The Great Escape.

Getting into the city from the airport meant negotiating a dozen checkpoints controlled by different militias from Lebanon’s various warring factions. At each checkpoint militiamen would brandish their weapons and shout at me: “Bassboat!” “Passboot!” “Pisspot!”

What they wanted was my passport, the one English word that every militiaman knew and none of them could pronounce.

I finally got to the Commodore Hotel, the unofficial HQ of the foreign press in Lebanon. The smiling bell clerk asked, “Would you like a room on the car-bomb side of the hotel or on the mortar-shell side?” I had to empty the minibar to get to sleep.

The Lebanese Civil War lasted from 1975 until 1990. It started as a conflict between the Christian Lebanese, who were the majority of the politicians, and the Muslim Lebanese, who were the majority of the population.

In 1975 and 1976 the center of Beirut—“The Paris of the Middle East,” with its cafés, nightclubs, luxury hotels, and beachfront Corniche—was reduced to rubble. Thousands of people died. The country’s government collapsed. And—the Mideast being the Mideast—things got worse after that.

The Sunni Muslim Lebanese began fighting the Shia Muslim Lebanese. The Islamic fundamentalist Lebanese began fighting the Islamic secularist Lebanese. The Palestinian refugees living in Lebanon began fighting the Druze, a Lebanese sect that’s an offshoot of Islam. Then Syria invaded one end of Lebanon and Israel invaded the other.

There’s not room here to explain it all. There’s not room anywhere to explain it all.

Anyway, by the time I got to Lebanon the place was a complete mess. Economics was not on my mind. I was reporting on war and the political, religious, and ethnic issues behind the fighting. At the time, it didn’t occur to me that Lebanon had an economy.

Of course, Lebanon did have an economy—otherwise all the Lebanese who weren’t dead from the civil war would have been dead from starvation.

Actually, Lebanon had a remarkable economy. In the midst of murderous chaos, the Lebanese economy continued to function. Considering the circumstances, you could even say it thrived.

True, the war led to runaway inflation, as wars do. A U.S. dollar was worth three Lebanese pounds in 1975; by 1992, $1 U.S. bought 2,500 pounds. But this didn’t bother the Lebanese. They conducted business in British pounds, French francs, U.S. dollars, or whatever hard currency came to hand. Children selling cigarettes in the street would give you that day’s international exchange rate.

Beirut was loud, but not with the din of battle. The city’s electrical grid had been destroyed, so every business and home had a portable gasoline generator on the sidewalk with extension cords snaking every which way. The generators were noisy enough to drown out all but the loudest gunfire.

Fuel seemed as plentiful as ammunition. Traffic was heavy and the driving was erratic. It always is in the Mideast, but more so when the stoplights don’t work, the traffic cops are in hiding, and drivers are dodging sniper fire.

Shops were open, including shops selling things you wouldn’t think would have a wartime market. Few journalists returned from Beirut without an acre of Persian carpets: “Special war price.”

The Commodore Hotel did a brisk business, especially its bar, where the press corps sought treatment for post- (and pre-post-) traumatic stress disorder.

Lebanon produces good wine. Chateau Musar, vintage 1975, was in great demand. It was in such great demand that an amazing number of bottles of Musar ’75 were for sale—so many that the Chateau Musar vineyard must occupy most of Lebanon’s landmass, and 1975 must have lasted ten years.

The Muslim militia controlling the neighborhood around the Commodore opposed alcohol and invaded bars and sprayed the wine racks and liquor shelves with machine-gun fire. But some kind of deal had been arranged at the Commodore. The Commodore’s bar was invaded once, for form’s sake, I guess. But a timely forewarning meant that no bottles of Musar ’75 were machine-gunned, just Coke and Fanta.

Where the money for all this economic activity came from, I don’t know. Well, I do know. When I visited Lebanon’s fertile agricultural area, the Bekaa Valley, the fields were full as far as the eye could see with lush, tall green marijuana plants.

The Lebanese Civil War caused terrible losses. More than 250,000 people were killed or wounded—10 percent of the prewar population. Nearly a million people were displaced. Property damage was incalculable. But one thing the Lebanese did not lose was their economic impulse.

While I was working on my article about the civil war, I went to the southern suburbs of Beirut to interview people about the political, religious, and ethnic issues that led to the fighting. I was stopped at a Hezbollah checkpoint (the same Hezbollah that’s fighting in Syria now).

Hezbollah’s checkpoints were manned (I should say “boyed”) by fourteen- and fifteen-year-olds with AK-47s. They twirled their weapons around, poked them in the dirt, and scratched their ears with the muzzle sights. Gun safety merit badges must go begging in the Lebanese Boy Scouts.

“Bassboat!” shouted the adolescent at this checkpoint. When he saw my American passport, he was furious. He stuck the AK-47’s barrel inches from my nose.

The teenager spoke some English. He subjected me to a twenty-minute tirade about “Great American Satan Devil.” I was berated at gunpoint for how America had caused war, famine, injustice, poverty, and Zionism all over the world.

At last the boy finished his rant. He lowered his gun and gave me back my passport. Then he said, in a normal tone of voice, “As soon as I am getting my green card I am going to Dearborn, Michigan, to study dentist school.”

Bless the power of the economic impulse. Today that kid’s probably a wealthy orthodontist living in Bloomfield Hills. And I’ll bet he votes Republican.

Lesson 2:The Real Secret BehindAll Investment Scams

In 1997 I went to Albania to cover the complete collapse of the Albanian economy and, hence, of Albania.

The collapse was caused by investment scams. The scams were simple pyramid, or “Ponzi,” schemes. Scammers promised foolishly high investment returns. Foolish investors were paid off with money from more foolish investors. The more foolish were paid off with money from the more foolish yet.

The “greater fool theory” indicates this can go on forever. No matter how idiotic you are there are bigger idiots out there.

Mathematics, however, indicates this cannot go on forever. If a pyramid scheme grows in an exponential manner—101, 102, 103, etc.—it takes just ten layers of a pyramid to include nearly twice the population of earth.

The population of Albania was 3.2 million. And, as far as I was able to tell, all of them had invested in pyramid schemes.

We know what happens with pyramid schemes. Charles Ponzi’s hoax about arbitrage of international postal coupons fizzled in 1920. Bernie Madoff’s hoax about sailing above market fluctuations flopped in 2008. Ponzi’s and Madoff’s investors were outraged.

But not as outraged as Albanians. There were violent protests. The government banned public meetings. The protests became more violent. The army was ordered to shoot. All the soldiers deserted.

The soldiers had money in the pyramid schemes too. They were as angry as anyone else. The violent protests turned into armed rebellions. Albania’s military arsenal was looted. There was a lot to loot.

Until 1992 Albania was controlled by fanatical Stalinists. Albania was as isolated and bellicose as the only other country it had diplomatic relations with, North Korea. The Albanian military was armed with 1.5 million rifles, pistols, and machine guns—all stolen along with 10.5 billion rounds of ammunition.

Heavy weapons were also pilfered. The National Commercial Bank in the city of Gjirokaster was robbed with a tank.

Theft slipped into pillage. The railroad to Montenegro was stolen—the track torn up and sold for scrap. Pillage degenerated into vandalism. Schools, museums, and hospitals were wrecked. And vandalism reached heroic scale. Bridges were demolished, water-supply pumping stations were blown up, power lines and telephone wires were pulled down. Albania came to bits.

I got through on one of the few remaining phones to the only remaining hotel in Albania’s capital, Tirana, and took the one remaining weekly flight from Italy.

The hotel sent a driver and translator, Elmaz, in an old Mercedes belonging to who-knows-whom. There were no customs formalities or security checks at the Tirana airport. How could anything or anybody be more dangerous than what was in Albania already?

Albania came to bits, but not to a standstill. The crumbling two-lane road into town was full of cars, trucks, and horse carts loaded with all sorts of things belonging to who-knows-whom.

More cars and trucks, crashed or abandoned, lined the road. Albania had so many wrecked and stolen cars that the horse carts were all fitted with automobile seats, some with center consoles and luxurious upholstery.

Elmaz was studying to be a veterinarian. Everything had been stolen from his school—books, drugs, lab equipment, even parts of the buildings themselves. “We are without windows, without doors,” said Elmaz. “We study with only desks and walls.”

The desks had been stolen too, but the faculty found them in a local flea market and bought them back. “All the horses we had were shot, “said Elmaz.

An American wire-service reporter at the hotel bar said of the locals, “They’ll rob you.” The moment he said that a neophyte British television producer limped in and told us he’d just lost a car, a TV camera, and $5,000.

The first Albanian pyramid scheme was Sijdia Holdings, offering 5 or 6 percent interest a month. Sijdia Holdings had some real assets. Its founder, Hadjim Sijdia, was jailed in Switzerland for fraud but got out and somehow managed to repay his debts. This lent credence to nine other large pyramid schemes. That, in turn, led to a plethora of mini-pyramids, some offering interest as high as 50 percent a month.

“My family had two thousand dollars in the pyramid schemes,” said Elmaz. It was their entire savings.

I interviewed an Albanian newspaper editor, Ilir Nishku. He said, “The pyramid schemes created the idea that this is the free market and just four years after communism we could get rich. They created the wrong idea that this is capitalism”

Albania’s economic statistics looked great: 9.6 percent growth in 1993, 8.3 in 1994, 13.3 in 1995, 9.1 in 1996. And that should tell us something about the gullibility—or the stupidity or, maybe, the corruption—of the people who compile economic statistics.

The United Nations 1996 Human Development Report declared that Albania’s “progress in wide-spread economic well-being . . . has continued, forming a social basis for human development.”

“Everyone was sitting in cafés,” said Elmaz.

Then, in February 1997, five of the nine large pyramid schemes and all of the small ones failed. The remaining four quit paying interest and froze account withdrawals. An estimated $1.5 billion disappeared—half the Albanian GDP.

That’s what usually happens. Even in America, where we have excellent legal and financial systems—excellent by Albanian standards—Bernie Madoff’s investors lost billions. After ten years of searching for Madoff’s assets, $6 billion is still missing.

Albania is different from America. Albania is more desperate, more violent, less orderly. But those are quantitative differences. Are there qualitative differences? Were Albanians putting their money into pyramid schemes really different from Americans bankrolling Charles Ponzi or giving their money to Bernie Madoff to manage?

I went to Albania to learn why the country had been so vulnerable to pyramid schemes. How could a whole nation be, essentially, destroyed by a chain letter?

It took me less than an hour to find out.

The first thing Elmaz did was take me to meet editor Nishku. The first thing I asked Nishku was, “Why were the pyramids so popular in Albania? Were people just unsophisticated about money after all those years of Communist isolation?”

“No,” he said. “There had been pyramid schemes already elsewhere in Eastern Europe, and they had collapsed before the Albanian ones were started. People in Albania knew about such things.”

“Then how,” I asked, “did so many Albanians get suckered in?”

“They knew,” Nishku said, “so much money could not be made honestly. They thought there was smuggling and money laundering involved to make these great profits.”

Herein the lesson. The Albanians didn’t believe they were victims of a scam. They believed they were the perpetrators.

Lesson 3:(Topic for Discussion)If You Want Hard Money,How Hard Do YouHave to Be to Get It?

We worry about our currency, the kind of money we use, our medium of exchange.

Precious metals are a reliable long-term store of value. But they’re cumbersome. You don’t want to fall into the swimming pool at the senior living community with your pockets full of your retirement savings in one-ounce gold Canadian Maple Leaf coins.

“Fiduciary money”—certificates bearing a government promise to redeem paper currency for precious metals—presents different problems. Governments lie about having those precious metals. And governments do worse than lie. People holding fiduciary money can wake up—as they did on April 5, 1933, when FDR signed Executive Order 6102 banning the ownership of gold—to find out that redeeming the certificates for what the law says they’re worth is against the law.

Then there’s “fiat currency,” backed by nothing at all and spilling out of government printing presses in sheets, quires, reams, and bales. The reason it’s supposed to be worth something is the “Lousy Parenting Reason.” A frustrated and inept government tells us, like we frustrated and inept parents tell our children, “Because I said so!”

Maybe bitcoin is the answer. But nobody really understands bitcoin. To most of us, bitcoin seems like a weird scam invented by strange geeks with weaponized slide rules in the high school Evil Math Club.

So we worry about our currency. And we worry that if our currency collapses, our society will collapse.

Maybe one way to understand currency collapse is to go someplace where society has collapsed already.

I went to Somalia in 1992 to cover “Operation Restore Hope,” the U.S.-led military mission to save Somalia—notionally from famine, actually from itself.

I have some experience with what’s called “anarchy.” I’ve just described my experiences in Lebanon during its civil war and in Albania when its pyramid schemes went kerflooey.

But the war in Lebanon was a war, and wars, however multisided and confusing, always have an organizing principle.

And what happened in Albania was stealing. Stealing comes to an end when everything’s been stolen. Today Albania is a typical little Eastern European country—a member of NATO and an applicant for EU membership with 3 million tourists a year and a per capita gross national income of $11,880 (nearly twice that of India).

Somalia was true anarchy. A vicious dictator, Siad Barre, had been overthrown and the Somalis celebrated their independence by shooting each other.

Fighting broke out everywhere. It wasn’t traditional Africa tribal warfare—the Somalis all belong to the same tribe. But the tribe has six clans, the six clans have hundreds of subclans, and each subclan is divided into infinite murderous feuds.

The Somalis fought each other with rifles, machine guns, mortars, cannons and—to judge by the look of Mogadishu—wads of filth.

In the old town not one stone stood upon another. In the new part of the city everything was built out of concrete, and the concrete had been blasted back into piles of aggregate, rebar, and Portland cement.

There was no water and no electricity. At night the only illumination was from tracer bullets. Every tree and bush had been snatched for firewood. Sewage welled up through what pavement was left. Mounds of sand blew through the streets. Rubbish was dumped atop wreckage and goats grazed on the offal.

Everything that guns can accomplish had been achieved in Mogadishu.

I signed on as a radio reporter with a U.S. broadcast network; Somalia wasn’t someplace I could go on my own. When I arrived at Mogadishu in a chartered Cessna the first thing I encountered were armed Somalis. Fortunately they were the network’s armed Somalis, bodyguards hired to do things like keep me from being robbed and shot.

The network—presumably with the help of the U.S. military—had found a walled mansion, more or less intact, near the airport.

Some thirty of us—reporters, camera crews, video editors, producers, and tech guys—were housed in this compound, bedded down in shifts while our forty-man army of Somali mercenaries camped in the courtyard.

It was impossible for us to go outside our walls without a truckful of “security” (as the Somali mercenaries liked to be called). Even with our gunmen along there were always people massing up to beg and thieve. Hands tugged at wallet pockets. Fingers nipped at wristwatch bands. No foreigner could make a move without attracting a hornet’s nest of attention—demanding, grasping, pushing mobs of cursing, whining, sneering people. Young men waving AK-47 assault rifles pushed among the crowd. Rusted, dent-covered, windshield-less pickup trucks with gun mounts welded into their beds sputtered by on predatory errands.

Our big job as reporters was to cover President George H. W. Bush’s New Year’s visit to the American troops in Somalia.

President Bush also decided to visit a Somali orphanage in Baidoa, a small city 160 miles of bad road away from Mogadishu. The president traveled by helicopter. We were not so lucky.

Broadcasting the president’s visit required a Land Rover full of reporters and another full of technicians plus two trailers, one carrying a satellite dish and another loaded with a generator. Somali “security” were needed to guard these—two truckloads in front of us and a truckload behind.

On our way to Baidoa we were escorted by U.S. Marines. The trip was uneventful. The trip back was not. The Marines had stayed in Baidoa.

A dozen impromptu roadblocks had been set up by the locals. These were lengths of iron pipe balanced on an oil drum and counterweighted with a chunk of concrete. One harmless-looking old fellow squatted at each roadblock. He was not asking for a toll. You could see what the deal was when you stood on the Land Rover seat and looked out the sunroof at the surrounding thornbush. Armed creeps lurked.

If you had more guns than the creeps the harmless-looking fellow raised the pole and obsequiously waved you through. If you did not have more guns you were robbed and shot. We had more guns.

But then we got a flat tire. The flat occurred where the thornbush was thick, providing an uncomfortable amount of creep cover.