a book by James Gibb Stuart, Ossian Publishers, Glasgow, UK
“Fantopia”
Reviewed
by
William Krehm
This is a worthy sequel to the first of the series, written with the same dry, uplifting mockery, tongue ever in cheek but never bitten. To begin, Gibb Stuart neatly disposes of the eternal evaders, who slip out of the back door of any serious discussion pleading that they “are not economists” – as though being an “economist” were a blessed estate “Like Nelson at Trafalgar, they put the telescope to the blind eye, and thereby manage to ignore the obvious.” Instead, Stuart betakes himself to his beloved never-never land, and invents a new set of characters for the occasion. “Once upon a time there lived a Talented Engraver who worked on specially etched and watermarked paper to produce beautiful designs which became highly prized and admired. And because he was concerned for the happiness of the society around him, he bestowed some of his coveted designs upon distressed areas of the community, and soon discovered that they could trade the engravings for food and shelter and all things a poverty-stricken environment would most require.
“In response to increasing demand, the Engraver moved on to produce a range of designs that were even more remarkable than the first, and stamped them with denominations in Fantopian paper crowns, so that the recipients would know what value to put on their acquisitions when they exchanged them for necessities of life. The engravings spread far and wide across the queendom, were universally accepted, because they put purchasing power in the hands of the erstwhile deprived and sought out the otherwise unused resources within the community.
“Only the bankers and economists were worried. They said the design notes had become a new kind of currency which would be vastly inflationary because it increased the money supply, and encouraged excess activity within a monetary system whose checks and balances depended upon a continuing measure of unrequited demand.”
There you have the naked essence of a hangup laid bare in terms that can be fully grasped by even those without a Ph.D.
“They tried to have the Engraver arraigned as a forger and counterfeiter, but failed to substantiate the charges because he was shown not to have peddled his notes deceitfully, and deriving no personal benefit from the distribution of his handiwork beyond the cost of paper and printing.
“In retaliation, the various private banking houses seized and sequestered the design notes whenever they came into their hands, using them as collateral for the issue of negotiable bank credit which was loaned out at the going rate of interest.” Bull’s eye.
But isn’t this a fairy tale? To meet that objection, Gibb Stuart, like the Talented Engraver punctuates his wonderful story-telling with quotations in red ink: from Plato: “I wonder if we could contrive some magnificent myth that would in itself carry conviction to our whole community (from Smith, H.N., MP (1944), The Politics of Plenty, G. Allen & Unwin Ltd., London).”
“As long as money has to perform two functions – that of ‘tickets to consume’ and at the same time that of a store of ‘wealth in itself’ available for saving and investment – there will inevitably be a shortage of purchasing power in the consumers’ market.
“This was not a threat to be taken lightly, for the bankers had much power in Fantopia. At the advent of the New Era a benign Chancellor of the Exchequer had bestowed upon them total control of interest rates and money aggregates. They were to be his champions in the battle against inflation, and few could agree about its effects and causes. In the old days of strikes and industrial disruption it had been diagnosed as a situation where too much money was chasing too few goods. But when automation and technology had solved the manufacturing problem, and the shops and supermarkets were packed with many more goods than the public could want or need to buy, there had to be another reason.
“The economists said that the matter was more complex, much more so than the ordinary person could be expected to understand. The trick, as they explained it, was to see that a certain level of demand was never satisfied. It meant lowering the expectations of certain sections of humanity, deferring their prospects of social and material uplift so as to cultivate a pool of idle resources which could always be used to soften the impact when there were signs of increased activity within the economy.
“‘The poor are always with us,’ said the dignitaries of Church and State, and if they said it with regret and piety, and accompanied it with a prayer for the ultimate salvation of all mankind, the dictum was generally accepted without qualm or question. People just had to realize that everything from the food they ate and the water they drank, perhaps one day even the air they breathed, came at a price that would have to be paid if this inflation monster was to be fought to a standstill.”
Since the public has through advertising been led to overdevelop their taste for fair tales, Gibb Stuart gives his tale a turn at this point that, though couched in mythic language, becomes very concrete and practical, the sort of thing you can knock your knuckles against even while your exhausted mind takes a holiday.
“The controversy was still raging when two major construction projects began to attract nationwide attention. Tumbledum and Tumbledee were two similar towns situated at extremities of the queendom, each built upon broad river estuaries which, with the rapid development of motor traffic, eagerly required bridging.
“But whereas the town fathers of Tumbledum proposed to pay for the entire outlay by means of sound city finance – and engaged a renowned firm of merchant bankers to guide and advise them – the inhabitants of Tumbledee were electrified by the news that their elected members had been in touch with the Talented Engraver, who was promising to produce a unique range of designs which, stamped in appropriate denominations, would be presented as collateral for free, stage payments and all other costs and expenses that would fall due during the various stages of construction.
“There was surprise and fury, disbelief and derision all at once in the City. They had accepted the design notes circulating amongst the poorer communities, stimulating a certain amount of enterprise and commercial activity where none had existed before. But to consider such unorthodox methods for funding a major infra-structural project costing in excess of a million paper crowns? It was absurd. It had never been done before. It would make a nonsense of Exchequer constraints on the economy. It would destroy the value of the Fantopian crown on the international exchanges. The bridge would never be finished. Its approach works would lie mouldering and rusting, waiting for some wiser heads to assume responsibility.
“By contrast, said the market analysts, Tumbledum would have its bridge on time. It would be up and functioning, and beginning to pay for itself, the citizens of all Fantopia would come to rue the day when even a tiny minority of their number had been tempted to pursue the illusory benefits of maundy money, as the Engraver’s notes had come to be called. Maundy was a medieval distribution by the monarch to the poor.
“Only in the manner of financing did the contracts differ. At Tumbledum, when staged disbursements were due, there were simply credited in bank drafts drawn upon one of the most highly respected of City institutions. For the progress payments at Tumbledee, the Engraver produced designs of such artistry that they immediately commanded their face value in the market, and the construction work went on unhindered. Both bridges were completed on time.
“For the Tumbledeenies traffic rolled freely across the estuary as soon as the visiting dignitary could deliver his speech and cut the red tape at the opening ceremony. For the Tumbledummies there was a short delay as the builders hurriedly installed toll booths at each end of the approach roads. This was necessary to cover the cost of the bank interest, which had been levied progressively on each of the stage payments, and was now accumulating.”
However, it is doing our readers no favour giving them a disjointed second-hand version of something that in the original is pure delight. It sheds light on a broadly misunderstood subject that holds a headlock on all of society’s aspirations. You will shortly be able read the original and enjoy Gibb Stuart’s cast of characters, chosen to illuminate the amazing phenomenon of the engraver’s miraculous designs. The panel consisted of a Banker, an Economist, a Politician, a Journalist, and an Antiquarian. It was the Antiquarian, undoubtedly because of his professional knowledge of history, who peered best into the future, and understood what was needed in the present. How the panel members interacted is a rich study in psychology that confronts us every day in whatever political arena.
The book is a little marvel, quite the equivalent of painless dentistry, but completely living up to its claims. With one tiny lapse. The quotation from Abraham Lincoln on monetary reform was actually not said by him, but has long since been proved to have been a translation into words of what he did with his issue of unbacked Greenbanks that made the Civil War a struggle against not one but two forms of slavery. Our American cousins have a weakness for exaggeration, and we rely on the Scots to keep the record straight.1 With that little reservation, I highly recommend the sequel to the original Fantopia for delightful learning. Further information can be gotten from Ossian Publishers Ltd., 268 Bath Street, Glasgow G2 4JR, UK.
1. Our conscientious research department pulled me up on this bit of unconscious jingoism. As Keith Wilde so well set forth in our last issue, one of the most effective promoters of the unauthentic Lincoln quotes was actually a heroic Canadian monetary reformer, G.G. McGeer. In his enthusiasm he actually translated Lincoln’s great deed in issuing unbacked Greenbacks to finance the Civil War into a direct quote. As Mayor of Vancouver, and eventually a federal Senator, his tremendous efforts were largely responsible for the nationalization of the Bank of Canada in 1938.