Month: April 2020

The Myth of the Myth of the Myth of Barter


Some years ago, anthropologist and Wall St Occupant David Graeber wrote a history of Debt in which he debunks the “myth” of barter. In his telling, barter never exists in human history – Any transfer of property is the result of an exploitative power relationship, therefore ownership is theft, debt is slavery, and socialism is the answer.

In short, Graeber was questioning Adam Smith’s thesis that the division of labor leads to the voluntary exchange of surplus goods, which leads to the emergence of money. Chartalism vs Metallism.

George Selgin debunks Graeber’s “debunking” by pointing out that barter is an unstable system, and any population that engages in barter will quickly progress to monetary exchange or perish from unmatched needs. Anthropologists rarely encounter barter societies in the wild because it’s a temporary state.

Here we are in the time of coronavirus, where preppers and hoarders have emptied store shelves and I’m forced to violate social distancing to trade toilet paper for distilled water from a neighbor. Barter is back. Will TP become the new store of value, or shall we starve?

In California, anti-gouging laws prevent retailers from raising the price of goods to meet heightened demand. Six months ago, Clorox disinfecting wipes averaged $3 a can. Today, it’s illegal to charge more than $3.30 even though I would gladly pay twice that.

This isn’t barter; it’s demonetization. Dollars no longer serve as an accurate unit of account for Clorox wipes, especially since no amount of dollars can buy wipes that are out of stock. This is the point where essential items should gain intermediate commodity status and evolve into money.

Except that can’t happen. The FBI has a Hoarding and Price Gouging Task Force that prevents enterprising citizens from providing much-needed liquidity on scarce products. It’s illegal to even source them from elsewhere. My mother tried to buy a box of Chinese KN95 respirator masks for my brother’s hospital, but the masks were seized by customs at the border.

Even in the brief historical periods where barter may have existed, it was never really barter so much as bilateral monopoly. Do you think tribal chiefs allowed members to freely negotiate with hostile tribes? Of course not – some of the earliest traded goods were women and children.

So Graeber was wrong. Power isn’t the ability to assert ownership over property. Power is the ability to control how others assert ownership over property.

Blame China

China lied about their numbers.

Ohhh, I am so mad. The local stores have been out of toilet paper for four weeks. I asked why they didn’t restock in greater quantities; the stockers said their shipments had been calibrated to China’s Numbers. Health care workers don’t have protective gear – turns out our Strategic National Stockpile was downsized according to China’s Numbers. Hospitals, facing immediate bankruptcy, are forced to reduce physician pay and furlough staffers – a key component of their annual budget hinges on, what else, China’s Numbers.

Turns out China’s Numbers are a lot like LIBOR, a reference rate that serves as a keystone for the entire economy. The US Surgeon General, CDC, World Health Organization, are still advising us not to wear masks. Mask effectiveness models undoubtedly based on China’s Numbers.

The medical community made — interpreted the Chinese data as: This was serious, but smaller than anyone expected. –Dr. Deborah Birx, Deep State Department

This is stupid, but remember Russia? They spent a few rubles buying Facebook ads in 2016, and set off a butterfly effect that hacked our election, undermined democracy, and placed a Putin puppet in the Oval Office.

Initially, no one believed the DNC’s excuse that Russia had thrown the election. Even Mark Zuckerberg said the idea was crazy. But a constant drumbeat of establishment figures chanting nonstop about Russian hackers and Russian disinformation campaigns, and anyone who disagreed was accused of being a Russian shill. It turns out if you bleat nonsense for long enough, people… well, people still aren’t dumb enough to believe it, but they’ll accept it. They’ll pretend to see the Emperor’s clothes to avoid being canceled.

So even Trump had to play along, acknowledge the Russia narrative.

Billboards at the Moscow airport

Anyone could appreciate the value of having a general-purpose scapegoat. Vermont’s power grid went down – blame Russia! Yahoo suffered a major data breach – definitely Russian hackers. Experian loses everyone’s social security number – Russia again!

If China didn’t exist, we’d blame Iran for lying about their numbers. Or Russian disinformation campaigns.

The real victims in all of this are not the COVID-19 patients who will die, but the journalists hoodwinked by public health officials. Excuses are now acceptable substitutes for results. After multiple generations of rewarding failure, we’ve come to believe that everything will be fine as long as we can blame someone for our oppression.

And maybe this works in the West. Maybe if the virus had originated in Germany, we could cry foul and demand another century’s worth of reparations. But it didn’t, and we can’t. Strange, that the Marxist countries that celebrated class struggle refuse to recognize our victimhood.

Racist Virus? (part 2)

This was supposed to be an appendix to the last post, but there were too many images.

Here’s a breakdown of NYC COVID-19 cases by zip code.

Census data here, but this map may be more informative (most commonly-spoken language after English and Spanish):

COVID-19 cases by zip code in Seattle:

Census map here.

Analysis left as an exercise for the reader.

(Census data may be more useful for showing population density than racial distribution)

Update: I’m a little hesitant to link to this, as it appears to be the sort of website one might get canceled for reading. The author is doing a COVID-19 analysis for Los Angeles by zip code. (02-Apr)