Surely it wasn’t always like this. At some point economics had to have made some kind of sense or they’d have never been adopted. It stands to reason that at the incept, such concepts worked fairly well, and only began to falter as they grew more complex, and as more corrupt people sought ways to take advantage of them. What could this perfect state have been like?

The barter system? HAH! Barter is just capitalism with eggs and sheep instead of pieces of paper and metal which represent eggs and sheep. What most people fail to understand about capitalism is that it’s the base economic system, the natural state of economic being. Eliminating all attempts by conscious minds to rise to a higher level, capitalism is what naturally occurs, literally the attempt to get the most for the least, in relation to what you want.

No, what’s truly amusing is that we, as a species, have achieved economic perfection several times in our history, and yet no one remembers. In every instance, the secret is lost time and time again, through catastrophe, invasion or simple greed. That secret is a set rate of trade.

Have you ever glanced through one of the first Sears Roebuck catalogs, or, indeed, any of the basic printed media advertisements at the turn of the century? You may have noticed an odd phenomenon. Everything is priced at five cents. Metal bed frame? Five cents. Box of matches? Five cents. Model A Auto? Five cents. Iron nail? Five cents.

I’m sure you’ve wondered at the apparent discrepancy here. They don’t appear to have any level of relative value. Every good is worth five cents. And, of course, if every good is worth a fixed rate, then it stands to reason that every service is, likewise, worth a fixed rate. From boot blacking to mechanic, you probably got paid something like seven cents an hour.

This may sound ludicrous, but on closer inspection, it’s an economic utopia. Think about it. Why would anyone forgo value comparison on a service? Why? It’s simple. Because the value was an idea, not a material unit. At the turn into the twentieth century, our nation’s people had reached a state of perfection, a form of what you might refer to as economic anarchy, where the currency merely denoted a place in society. So long as you were doing something for the general populace, you were being paid (you were being given a marker that labeled you as a productive and beneficial member) and with that payment you could acquire your needs and wants, which all enjoyed a set rate of value.

In essence, it’s the best parts of communism, only without all the crap about giving up property. Simply put, everyone was allowed to indulge in wealth and property to their leisure, but no member of society was said to be more ‘valued’ than another member, nor was such a value implied through wealth. And in this way society flourished, with all members equally valued and promoted and all goods costing a mere, a MERE five cents.

The first question you’re going to ask is undoubtedly, "Why five? Why not eight, or fifteen?" In the case of the United States during the early nineteen hundreds, you could merely point to history. The idea wasn’t new. The Romans and the Chinese had both, at one time, used coins entirely as a form of representative inclusions, and in both instances the value was five. Plato describes the Atlanteans as each being given a disc with a five on it to represent their inclusion in that society. And it’s no coincidence that the Iroquois nation, which had yet to truly grasp the notion of a representative economy, was none-the-less constructed of five tribes, representing the placement in the community. But even then, it seems odd that each of these different cultures would adopt, coincidentally, the same base for the system.

Of course, five has always been a deeply symbolic number to our species, and for good reason. As a naturally occurring symbol, we are cornered by it. Five branches, fingers, toes. Five has always been the number of man, and it stands to reason that our subconscious would grab onto this numeral as the basis for our ideal economy, truly the very pinnacle of what set us apart from 4, the number of nature. Five was nothing more than a subconscious representative of our own egos.

Your second question, then, might be, "So what happened?" In each case, the fall of the utopia is different. In the case of Atlantis, it appears that natural forces looked unfavorably upon the arrogance of man. Rome was the victim of less developed tribes operating under the barter system. Barter made them greedy, short sighted and violent, and when they witnessed the glory of Rome, they were incapable of comprehending inclusion, instead accepting only conquest to gain such fruits, as is ever the result of capitalism. But in the early parts of the twentieth century, one man was responsible for the fall. That man was Henry Ford.

It’s generally well known that Ford was fairly anti-Semitic. What is not usually told is how deeply his anger against the Jewish people ran. Ford studied the works and writings of Judaism with a passion, ever looking for new secrets with which to condemn the people he harbored such a bitter and irrational grudge against. What he discovered, instead, was Kabalism.

Kabalism taught Ford one of the lost secrets of mathematics, the art of applying mathematical values to non-mathematical concepts, like philosophical notions or political value. He came to realize that if, somehow, he could have two fives, in place of the one he was fairly accorded, then he would be literally worth twice as much to society. It would demonstrate that he was worth two normal citizens. Expand the formula, and it suddenly becomes painfully clear why the price of the Model K shot up to $2,500 dollars, an amazing 500 times the standard of value. Within a couple of years, Ford had a social value equal to the entire west coast of the nation, and was easily the most valuable citizen in the United States.

The predictable result occurred. Suddenly, the resources of hundreds of thousands of people had to be diverted to meet the new demands brought on by this super citizen. It’s easy to see that under the current system, the resource demand would overload the nation, so particularly competent citizens were given new values, until a class system was forced into place, with a vast lower class, a small middle class of overworked exceptions and Ford at the top, his power ever growing.

By 1914, the USA no longer had the internal work force to support Ford’s daily expenses and, as a result World War I began, in hopes of a: taking resources from other nations by force and b: culling out many of the ‘lower class’ in order to divert their base representative values back to Ford and his cronies.

In the 1920’s, the system collapsed. The imbalance was too great, and the standard of value system had to be abandoned. It wouldn’t be until the New Deal, during which societal value was reassigned, based on a system by which each citizen was assigned value arbitrarily based on other peoples’ desire to eat contrasted to their desire for yellow alloys, that things began to achieve a state of stability, although at a terrible price.

Since that time we are forever fighting to increase our societal ‘value’, one way or the other. The value of the citizen has been replaced by the value of wealth, and as a result those without wealth likewise have no value. Perpetual imbalance spells perpetual conflict, and this conflict naturally manifests in forms such as poverty, war, fraud and environmental destruction.

How do we regain that period of incredible, almost miraculous cooperation? I have no idea. The competition for societal value has mired us all, dragging us down into a conflict spiral that actually makes hunting down and devouring the raw flesh of our fellow humans seem like a fairly reasonable alternative. Even I am left trapped in the vicious cycle, since the only way anyone could hope to effect change would be to become ‘most valued citizen’ and the only way to become that citizen in this world is to be willing to undervalue everyone else, which seems to require the sort of mindset that would preclude a desire to alter the system for everyone’s benefit. So instead we fight and claw to make ourselves important enough to be heard, to undervalue our fellow man so that they must pay attention to our demands and desires. We are forced to fight and steal and lie, all merely to be thought important enough merely to be allowed to eat, a pack of savages in a savage, savage world.