Lawrence Hall, HSG
Kryptonite Rocks
and Invisible Magic Coins
Most
ideas are merely structures – things built on bits of knowledge and insight you
already possess. If the knowledge you possess is in error, the structure will
be flawed.
-John D. McDonald, “Reading for Survival”
In my youth comic book ads offered mail-order invisible helmets,
sea monkeys, x-ray glasses, jet planes you could actually fly, kryptonite rocks,
nuclear submarines, machine guns, army tanks, life-size moon monsters, hypno-coins,
frontier cabins, silent dog whistles, time machines, and Count Dante’s Deadly
Fighting Secrets, all really-real!
This was pretty stupid stuff, but it was directed at naïve
children, and sold well for generations. An adult, of course, should see
through such mummery.
Unfortunately, many do not. Adults continue to buy this
century’s invisible helmets offered in new forms.
A modern variant of x-ray glasses and kryptonite rocks are
invisible magic coins.
The sales patter is that modern fiat money has no value,
and so we should all invest in invisible magic coins. These invisible magic coins
are generated by computers grinding away in their circuitry for hours. After the
computers have spun millions of numbers around within themselves they come up
with things that don’t exist, and those who control the computers propose to sell
to us these things that don’t exist.
And how does the awe-struck victim buy invisible magic coins?
Why, with that worthless fiat money.
The victim fails to consider that if invisible magic coins
possess value, and fiat money does not, then the possessor of the invisible magic
coins would hang on to the invisible magic coins and leave everyone else to
their fiat money.
You don’t need x-ray glasses to see through invisible magic
coins because they don’t exist. They are magic beans, the emperor’s new
clothes, a fortune teller’s readings, a political party’s promises, magic
crystals, your rich uncle in Nigeria, the South Sea Bubble, the Great Texas Emu
Bubble, the Dot.Com Bubble, Enron, and whatever Next Big Thing is being peddled
this week.
You might as well invest in one of those old comic book hypno-coins;
you’d at least have a disc of pot-metal or plastic with a swirly image. You
could look into it and say to yourself, “You are getting smarter…smarter…smarter…get
a job…a job…a job…”
-30-
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