Sixty days and counting - Kim Stanley Robinson [57]
“Listen to this,” Edgardo said, and read: “ ‘The less certain the prospect of obtaining goods, the more intensively buyers have to hoard.’ Oh dear, oh my; here we are in a partially adjusted demand, not in equilibrium at all, and we don’t have what he calls monetary overhang, or even a gray or black market, to take care of some of our excess demand.”
“So, not much adjustment at all,” Frank noted.
“I’ve seen examples of all these behaviors already at the grocery store,” Anna said. “The frustrating thing is that we have adequate production but excessive demand, which is the hoarding instinct. People don’t trust that there will be enough.”
“Maybe thinking globally, they are right,” Edgardo pointed out.
“But see here,” Anna went on, “how he says that socialism is a seller’s market, while capitalism is a buyer’s market? What I’ve been wondering is, why shouldn’t capitalism want to be a seller’s market too? I mean, it seems like sellers would want it, and since sellers control most of the capital, wouldn’t capital want a seller’s market if it could get it? So that, if there were some real shortages, real at first, or just temporarily real, wouldn’t capitalists maybe seize on those, and try to keep the sense that shortages are out there waiting, maybe even create a few more, so that the whole system tips from a buyer’s market to a seller’s market, even when production was actually adequate if only people trusted it? Wouldn’t profits go up?”
“Prices would go up,” Edgardo said. “That’s inflation. Then again, inflation always hurts the big guys less than the little guys, because they have enough to do better at differential accumulation. And it’s differential accumulation that counts. As long as you’re doing better than the system at large, you’re fine.”
“Still,” Frank said. “The occasional false shortage, Anna is saying. Or just stimulating a fear. Creating bogeymen, pretending we’re at war, all that. To keep us anxious.”
“To keep us hoarding!” Anna insisted.
Edgardo laughed. “Sure! Like health care and housing!”
Frank said, “So we’ve got all the toys and none of the necessities.”
“That’s backwards, isn’t it,” Anna said.
“It’s insane,” Frank said.
Edgardo was grinning. “I told you, we’re stupid! We’re going to have a tough time getting out of this mess, we are so stupid!”
AGAIN FRANK FLEW OUT TO SAN DIEGO. Descending the escalator from the airport’s glassed-in pedestrian walkway, he marveled that everything was the same as always; the only sign of winter was a certain brazen quality to the light, so that the sea was a slate color, and the cliffs of Point Loma a glowing apricot. Gorgeous Mediterranean coast of the Pacific. His heart’s home.
He had not bothered to make hotel reservations. Rent a van and that was that—no way was Mr. Optimodal, Son of Alpine Man, going to pay hundreds of dollars a night for the dubious pleasure of being trapped indoors at sunset! The light at dusk over the Pacific was too precious and superb to miss in such a thoughtless way. And the Mediterranean climate meant every night was good for sleeping out, or at the very least, for leaving the windows of the van open to the sea breezes. The salt-and-eucalyptus air, the cool warmth, it was all otherworldly in its sensuous caress. His home planet.
During the day he dropped by his storage locker in Encinitas and got some stuff, and that night he parked the van on La Jolla Farms Road and walked out onto the bluff between Scripps and Black’s Canyons. This squarish plateau, owned by UCSD, was a complete coastal mesa left entirely empty—a very rare thing at this point. In fact it might have been the only undeveloped coastal mesa left between Mexico and Camp Pendleton. And its sea cliff was the tallest coastal cliff in all of southern California, some 350 feet high, towering directly over the water so that it seemed taller. A freak of both nature and history, in short, and one of Frank’s favorite places. He wasn’t the first to have felt that way; there were graves on it that had given carbon-14 dates around seven thousand years before present,