Showdown in the Economy of Good and Evil Read online

  Evan straightened up, his chest puffing out. “Yes, I suppose that’s true. We could overcome these shortages if we just shift some resources around. I could adjust the direct deposit to—”

  “Adjust the direct deposit?” Laz said. “And how is that ever going to help my dairy cows? You expect them to line up and scan for Shit-Bowl too?”

  While the men tumbled into another argument, Meryl set her forehead in her hands. It seemed to her that food was terribly easy to get in this country, localized drought or otherwise. How hard could it be to order a shipment of feedstock? In Meryl’s view—and clearly it was a view that Laz and David shared, and probably Carl too—Justin and Evan were making an enormous mistake. They were too much the idealists, too focused on the sanctity of their experiment and not focused enough on how all this was impacting the lives of hundreds of people. Just like all that time they wasted by not picking up a wrench on their own and fixing the windmill. And really, how much would it impact the sanctity of this experiment? No one in the outside world would ever know, probably—at least as long as Justin didn’t keep doing interviews on Fox News.

  Honestly, that was the elephant in the room, the Fox News piece. How many times had Meryl—and everyone else, for that matter—heard Justin swear post-interview but pre-airing that the whole thing had gone off without a hitch? Evan and David had been skeptical from the start, even with Justin’s assurances that Connie would control the message.

  “I’m telling you,” he’d said, “they aren’t going negative with this thing. It’s a puff piece.”

  “How can you be so sure?” David had asked.

  “Because Connie wouldn’t have steered me into this if she thought it would damage what we’re doing.”

  “She’s on the network all the time, yeah. But tell me this, boss. Does she run it?”

  Justin had blanched at this. “No,” he’d said begrudgingly.

  “And who does run it?”

  “One of the Murdochs,” he mumbled.

  “One of the Murdochs. Would you say those gentlemen are as fair and balanced as their network’s tagline suggests?”

  Point very well taken, but Justin had remained defiant. “Doesn’t matter. They can’t go negative.”

  “Why?”

  “Because Connie gets them ratings. If they go negative on her fucking boyfriend, they’ll lose their best insider to the administration.”

  “They ain’t exactly hurting for insiders to the administration. I mean, Trump himself was on just this morning. Guy was rambling like some old coot caller on a public access radio show.”

  “I’m telling you, if they go negative, there’ll be hell to pay. Might be they won’t find the president so sympathetic to their cause anymore.”

  David had chuckled. “So you’re tellin’ us that we’re supposed to put faith in the whims of Donald fuckin’ Trump?”

  This had put an end to the conversation, but not to the anxiety about the whole thing. For ten long weeks, they had waited for the piece to be edited and spliced together and set for airing. That airing had occurred on Sunday night earlier this week. Contrary to what Justin had been assured and had been aggressively assuring, the piece turned out to be in no way puffy.

  Nearly every resident on the Farm had gathered in the classroom—a movie-night-like screening in the space that Valence’s movie house no longer occupied—standing shoulder to shoulder like sardines so everyone could watch the boss nail it on television. The harvest had gone so poorly, and there was so much unrest on the Farm, that they all needed the jolt of positivity that a puff piece about their own home and businesses would bring.

  Justin had stood there before them, slouching against the podium and staring up at the big screen onto which the broadcast projected. It had been a strange sight, watching him from the back, Meryl’s hand holding Bob-O’s while the real-life Justin craned his neck up to look at the larger-than-life version of his face on the screen. It didn’t take thirty seconds before everyone—Justin included—realized what Fox News had done. The questions from the interviewer were pointed, with Justin’s responses edited excessively. There was a huge disconnect between the jovial expression on Justin’s face throughout the interview and the content of his heavily doctored answers.

  The result: Justin Wolfe, billionaire financier of one of the most benevolent social experiments in the history of economic thought, came off looking like the next David Koresh.

  Even as his on-camera self smiled through assurances that there was nothing cultish or even socialist about the Farm, the background footage would be showing arguments between residents and patrons at the Circus, lines at the restrooms, and even a fight in the kitchen over Donatella’s last fancy ham sandwich.

  And there had been an egregious amount of voiceover from the wildly opinionated host. This too played in stark contrast. This host appeared sympathetic while interviewing Justin, his expression demonstrating an honest and effortless rapport with his subject. Then his voiceovers would carry these incredibly ominous undertones as he mentioned things like IRS investigations, FBI raids that never actually happened, and supposedly warring gangs within what he called a makeshift society. But the real kicker was when he postulated about how long it might take before these unnaturally wealthy former homeless people started using their excess fake money to start stockpiling guns and ammunition.

  The whole thing had rather crippled Justin emotionally. Bless him, he’d stuck it out through the full airing in the classroom. It had to have taken an enormous amount of willpower and pride to stand there in front of a society of his making, everyone watching him torn to shreds on national TV. The second it ended, Justin had slinked out of the room wordlessly, leaving everyone to sort of mill around, shoulder to shoulder, wondering what the hell they should do or say. They’d all filed out of the building like a driven herd of cattle. Most of them had never seen anything quite like it.

  Meryl, however, had seen something exactly like it. She had received the same treatment from 20/20 just prior to the downfall of her church. Also similar: after the 20/20 takedown, protestors had started showing up at her church, rendering any effort at damage control utterly moot. Same deal here at the Farm. On top of the harvest problems, the shortages, and the growing tensions between the residents, the Farm had been forced to deal with an ever-increasing number of protestors. Oscar and his swelling force of guardsmen and guardswomen had done a commendable job of keeping these protestors to the perimeter of the Farm, but there was nothing they could do to keep the negative energy at bay.

  Justin had been forced to drive through this mob every day since the airing. No wonder he’d been so irritable. No wonder he’d been so dismissive of any suggestion that his economic experiment wasn’t completely above board and untampered with. Sure, in this case, refusing to buy feed for the livestock was a mistake that Meryl suspected Justin would regret; but anyway, she could relate to his hesitation on the matter, and to his pain.

  “I don’t want to hear another word on this, you understand?” Justin said to the four other men and Meryl. “This Farm is self-organizing. Evan will pull the levers he needs to pull, and the economy will adjust. We’ll all just have to tighten our belts a little in the short term.”

  “Should I ask the cows to tighten their belts as well, boss?” Laz asked.

  The scalding hot stare that Justin and Evan fired at Laz would have melted a lesser man’s face. But Laz just cracked a sarcastic smile and rumbled into laughter. With the tension lifted, the others followed suit. Meryl was the last to join, her own laugh sounding nervous and maybe a little haunted. Hell, she was a little haunted. Those damn protestors were causing flashbacks and costing her sleep.

  As she often did when fretting, Meryl quickly parsed through the things that made her thankful. Bob-O, of course. Her thriving business? That went without saying. All the friends she had made on the Farm? No question. She was particularly proud of how she had finally been welcomed into the Women clique. It had taken nearly
a year, but Aria and Donatella, the unofficial leaders of the Women, eventually realized that Meryl, too, was a woman, and not just an educator and administrator. Their acceptance and camaraderie was enough on its own to fill Meryl’s heart with contentment.

  Then there were the matters to celebrate about the Farm. Bob-O had another water collection unit up and running, and once construction on the new bathroom facility was finished, the lines would finally come under control. While the steady influx of new residents had seemed unsustainable at first, Evan had somehow managed to keep everything more or less in balance. That young man really did shine with brilliance.

  Outside the Farm, Valence would stage his grand opening next week, and already the buzz had carried all over town. He had rented the former community center downtown, right next door to Nora’s restaurant. Something about that street drew the Farm businesses in. Probably it had something to do with how the whole retail area had essentially been foreclosed, and so the rents went for a song. In any case, you couldn’t deny the natural synergy of how it had all worked out: a movie house next door to a hot new restaurant, which itself stood next door to the highest-reviewed bakery in the city. Forget the protestors on the Farm itself; public opinion among the locals who actually visited Farm-related businesses had reached heights never before seen.

  “I don’t understand why those protestors haven’t gone home yet,” Carl was saying to David. “It’s been days since the story aired. Don’t they have anything better to do with their lives?”

  Having overheard, this appeared to stir Justin up. This was the last thing Meryl wanted, so she jumped in to change the subject.

  “Let’s turn our attention elsewhere, shall we?” Meryl suggested.

  “Suggestions?” Evan asked. He was examining his notebook, having apparently come to the end of his prerecorded points of order for this meeting.

  “I see we had another busload arrive this morning. Are Jao and Hap going to have to construct another barracks?”

  Evan groaned. “Don’t get me started on that one.”

  “They had a rough look about them.”

  “Can’t deny that.”

  “Anything to be concerned about?”

  Justin leaned in between them. “I dropped in to check out Natalia’s operation just yesterday. She was interviewing some of them at the time. It’s all good. Yeah, they’re a little rough around the edges, but the time has probably come for us to see whether this experiment works even if we introduce a less savory element. If this system ever transitions to the real world, it’s not like the real world is full of prescreened angels.”

  “Aw, he thinks I’m an angel,” Laz said, his tone dripping with sarcasm.

  Meryl didn’t like this idea about letting in the riffraff, but no one else objected, so she let it lie.

  “To Meryl’s point about needing a new barracks,” Laz said, “where exactly are we going to house them?”

  “I thought we had a few residents moving into private houses this month,” Justin said. “Won’t that clear some space in first-tier housing?”

  “For every resident we have moving up, there are six more new residents coming in,” Evan said. “I hate to say it—especially since we just shot down the idea of a loan for feed—but we might need to float another loan for new construction.”

  The billionaire hung his head. “We keep doing these loans, we’re going to run into inflation.”

  “No reason to worry about that if we keep the interest rate on the loan high.”

  Meryl had studied enough of Evan’s system to know why this would control inflation, but David looked lost.

  “Wouldn’t high rates make it harder for us to pay off the loan?”

  “You used to be an electrical engineer, David, am I right?” Evan asked.

  David brightened up.

  “Think about debt like an electric load from a battery. A battery has a positive side and a negative side, right? The way a battery works is that the electrons zip out of the positive side, creating energy on its way to the negative side.

  “A loan is very much the same thing. You borrow the money, it does some work, and then eventually that work has to return the money to the bank. Electrons and dollars behave the same way, in other words.

  “This is a huge part of why a loan to offset the losses from the harvest is so concerning that we’ve decided not to do it. Loaning money for food doesn’t create work that can repay the loan; it only creates consumption. But if we’re loaning for a big project, like building a new barracks, then we’re creating work for the construction teams, and we’re creating a new stream of income from the rent we collect from the new barracks’ occupants.”

  “But shouldn’t Hap and Jao and their construction teams be paying for these things with their direct deposit savings?”

  “On a project like this, a small direct deposit isn’t going to get it done. Only a loan that can pay their dozens of workers and cover their material costs will make it possible. But if we just loan the money without carefully considering the interest rates, then we risk essentially throwing the money away. It’s like that battery again. We have to figure out where the loan interest rates need to be—this is the positive side of the battery—and where the savings interest rates—the negative side—need to be. If we balance them out properly, then the economy will stabilize, and we won’t have to worry about inflation.”

  David sat for a moment, mulling over this concept. Just when it looked like he was going to ask a question, the whole meeting tumbled into chaos. In rushed Donatella, a mixing spoon caked with Shit-Bowl swinging above her head.

  “There is stampy!” she yelled, her Italian accent thick enough to obscure the meaning.

  When nobody moved, she cocked her full hips to one side and circled the spoon in their direction.

  “You no hear me?” she said. “Or you no help?”

  “Help with what, Donatella?” Evan asked, his expression calm but his tone anxious.

  “There is stampy.”

  “I’m sorry. Stampy?”

  Meryl caught on to Donatella’s meaning before anyone else. Her heart leapt from her chest as she sprang to her feet. The men looked up at her, confused. “She means there’s a stampede!”

  “Sì, grazie,” Donatella said. “Animals are running. Trampling things. Men fighting. Destroying Circus. Stampy.”

  Now the men were rising with her, and Meryl started running for the door as quickly as her new heels could carry her.

  Chapter 21 Insurgent Markets

  Blaming the rich for poverty is like blaming water for a fire. The rich have money to help the poor, but that doesn’t mean they made them poor. This tells us that it’s not the rich who are draining the middle class; it’s the poor who have no money to lift up the middle class. If the poor do not have money at the bottom to hold up the middle class, then by extension, the middle class will not be able to hold up the rich.

  —Justin Wolfe

  Trying to calm a stampede of aggressively hungry animals wasn’t in Carl Franklin’s purview. He’d been living on this Farm for quite some time now, but that didn’t make him any more the expert on compelling a two-thousand-pound dairy cow to return to its more typically docile state. And since there were two dozen or more of them on the rampage, he figured he’d best leave that effort well enough alone—or at the very least, leave it to David, Laz, and the other farmhands.

  There had been enough chaos immediately upon exiting the classroom building that Carl had only been able to piece together small parts of what happened. But it seemed that the cows managed to get out of the barn and had followed their instincts toward more nourishing pastures. This had taken them directly through the Circus and across the street. En route, they’d turned over almost every table under the tent.

  Meanwhile, with tensions already high from the new arrivals’ refusal to fall in line with the residents, people began looking for someone to blame. Maturely, a fight broke out.

  About this
much, Carl was certain: by the time he arrived on the scene, the fighting was well underway. He was also certain of this: fighting came as something like second nature to Carl Franklin. He was an old man, to be certain, but he’d spent some time in his youth at local boxing gyms. The gyms had been his community’s attempt to keep otherwise at-risk kids off the street. Carl’s family didn’t have much money—at least not since his ancestors had lost it all to the race riots at Greenwood—but neither Carl nor his siblings had ever been anything close to what you might call an at-risk kid. He and his siblings joined their local gym because they had always rather liked socking people.

  So now when he joined the riots that had resulted from the stampede, Carl started socking people. At first, it proved difficult to distinguish between attacker and defender. There was just so much confusion. So many people and animals running in all directions. Cows bellowing, dogs barking, horses rearing, chickens chickening. So much screaming. The first few fights Carl jumped into, he didn’t know whom to sock and whom to hold back.

  Then it hit him: sock the people you’ve never seen before. Longtime residents would never indiscriminately destroy the things they had worked so hard to build. The only ones doing the indiscriminate destroying were the newcomers.

  So Carl did some punching. From that moment forward, he directed the punching at all the faces he didn’t recognize. After he’d leveled a few goons, another observation struck him as meaningful. All these new, unfamiliar residents who cared enough to punch back? They were all large, muscular white men wearing overalls and caked in filth. Several things stood out about this observation. First, the Farm had accepted dozens and dozens of vanloads of new residents over the last few months, and all of them featured a mix of men and women of varied races and backgrounds. To see that all these newcomers were of the same race and general build raised the alarm in Carl’s mind.