(Dedicated to Kilgore Trout,
The character in Kurt Vonnegutīs books)
So the national boundaries had been eradicated and Earth was now one big brother-hood of profiteers. Earth was also a stock market that people could invest in. Earth was still as a planet.
Earth had also a big pollution problem. Back in the days of nations,
nations had not been content with mere nuclear redundancy. It was not
enough for some nations to have enough nukes to destroy the world once or
twice. They needed enough nukes to destroy it several times over, just to
really scare the other guys.
So now, the businessmen who wanted free trade had won over nationalists
who wanted boundaries and nukes, Earth's nukes were a liability to
everyone. And so was its money.
Capitalism permitted money to make money, so that the rich made money
easier than did poor people who needed it. Utopian ideas about how to fix
this had been tried, but the people who tried them either changed their
minds under the weight of evidence of failure, or they went down with the
ship. Darwinism of ideas triumphed and so did capitalism.
But although unrestricted trade was good and natural to tribes trading
crockery for feathers, or for farmers selling food for cloths and farm
equipment, it was not so good when the rich sat back and watched money grow
on their computer screens because their grandfathers had done well in the
lottery once, while the person who cooked their food found money
frighteningly scarce.
Also everyone got cancer. There was so much cancer that the magazines sold
in supermarkets have expanded their repertoire from weight loss and
desert-cooking to include quacky cancer-prevention and treatment. The
captions next to those plastic surgery models who sucked their stomachs in
for the camera read: "Living next to a nuclear stockpile? New organic
wallpaper can filter some of those rays!". The National Enquirer was more
to the point: "Historians uncover scientific way of surviving meltdown
called 'Duck and Cover'". The trashier ones even proposed that "Duck and
cover" was a good survival strategy in case of Armageddon, which was
permanently scheduled a month or two after the publication of the paper
predicting it.
So the government of Earth found a way to get rid of both the stockpiling
of self-perpetuating money and the rotting piles of nukes everywhere.
(Overpopulation made it impossible to keep nukes in unpopulated areas.)
Although some senators were proposing a natural solution to overpopulation
in the world and in prison would be to let all the prisoners, especially
murderers, go, Earthlings would not do that for some time yet.
Now they got rid of the money problem and the nukes in one fell swoop:
they put the radioactive stuff in the money and got rid of electronic cash.
Money was now orange, with a picture that could either have been an atom
or a planet with many moons drawn in black on it. On the reverse was a
surgeon generals warning.
The warning said "owning too many of these is hazardous to your health" or
"pregnant women should let their husbands manage finances or risk birth
defects" and other stuff like that. The larger bills had more nuclear
material in them and said so.
Banks didn't do so well. No one would work for them, and paying employees
more for hazardous work that involves money didn't solve anything.
People had to keep their own money or give it away. Trying to place it
elsewhere caused the people who did have to live next to it to sue. Thus,
faced with the choice of getting cancer or getting sued, most people just
gave it away.
The overall health didn't suffer much because there was just as much
radioactive material as there always was, but the very rich either died or
gave everything they didn't need or want away, and the very poor no longer
found money in such short supply.
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