An Improvement Close To Our Hearts

Every so often the TV companies drag out old film of life in the Weimar Republic in 1923. In that year of chronic hyperinflation German workers were paid daily with sackfuls of notes which they then spent as quickly as they could before the currency went down in value again. The economic chaos and resultant social misery were so bad that Germans looked for more and more extreme solutions for their problems. Eventually this led to the Nazi regime and the horrors we all know too well.

All of this could have been avoided by facing one simple fact. Money is not actually worth anything at all. Its value is set by international speculators who choose to believe that such and such a currency is worth a certain amount against others. These values are completely arbitrary as there is no index to set them against. Even our banknotes have no real meaning as they are merely promises to pay. If someone wanted to make good on the promise they would receive gold of the same value as the banknotes but the price of that gold would be an equally arbitrary value.

We all seem broadly content with this system of imaginary values for imaginary money. But for centuries we have also been seeking alternatives to it. The old barter system still exists in one form or another and indeed enjoyed a revival in 1976 when the Multi-Coloured Swap Shop programme tried valiantly to exchange Noel Edmonds for something someone actually wants. Various communal systems exist where everyone owns everything and no one has any personal money. There have also been famous attempts to find alternatives to Income Tax and thus create a non-monetary system of valuing things. Pitt the Younger invented Window Tax until people started living in the dark and there were Hearth Taxes and Work Taxes and Salt Taxes. All very ingenious but ultimately doomed. No one has ever developed a viable alternative to money. Until now.

One thing which distinguishes developing nations from developed ones is that their more traditional peoples do not have underwear. We have all seen the footage of women with bare breasts dancing for dignitaries and men with loincloths and nothing underneath hunting with spears. In more urbanised areas these practices are infrequent but still not entirely absent. In the developed world however it is a very different story. We are urged never to leave the house without our best underwear in case a car knocks us down and the family is shamed by our nakedness. We are inundated by advertisements offering us underwear for every occasion. A more accurate measure of personal and national wealth is how much underwear we have. An economic system based on underwear is a lot more rational and a lot more interesting. Low priced items such as bars of chocolate could be paid for in the constituent threads of the underwear with different rates for cotton, silk, polyester, lace etcetera. Larger items could similarly be paid for in different combinations of underwear of different kinds. Of course values would need to be set but these would vary from place to place depending on indivudal need or fetish. A company which only accepted payment in female lace underwear would attract a better class of customer than a cotton gentleman's briefs operation etcetera.

In England there is a phrase "losing your shirt" which applies when you lose or risk losing a lot of money. It is not a state you would want to be in but it is not as serious as being destitute. This is a clear indication that the true value of underwear is already embedded in the human psyche. You may lose your shirt but as long as you have underwear you still have some wealth. Surely an economic system based upon it would have more real meaning for people? It would also have considerable social benefits. Promiscuity and the diseases and corruption associated with it would soon decrease if by discarding underwear you discarded your wealth. Removing someone else's underwear would be the same as theft. Underwear economics would not only make us all self-sufficient it would also make us better people. The love of money is the root of all evil. Could this ever be said about the love of underwear?