The Canals

Two Paths

(Part 8)

by

Lawrence Abby Gauthier

ace reporter

The Westphalia Periodic News

My friend, Ralph the economist, said to me: “Is anybody really serious about this canal business you’ve been writing about?”

“Maybe,” I said. “That’s what I’m trying to find out. It’s possible.”

Something is “possible” if we have the tools, raw materials and knowledge to construct what we want to construct. Only then does a nagging thought mass begin to form on the horizon – dinero! The money. Show me the money.

That’s why I called my friend, Ralph the economist.

Ralph doesn’t actually have an official university degree in economics. By the time he went to college in the 60s he had other things on his mind. He was raised on a farm in northern Iowa where the family grew and built things to survive. They had a black-and-white TV. He watched Mr. Wizard. Then we were on our way to the moon. By the time he went off to college, he was more interested in mathematics, physics and engineering – building things out of wavelengths and equations. He wound up in California. Married a gal who drove race cars. He started companies and made lots of money and only got interested in economics after he lost a lot of money in the crash of 2008.

I don’t know how he wound up in Denver, but that’s where our paths crossed.

It was 2019 and I had just retired after spending the final 20 years of my work-for-pay life as an over-the-road trucker – living in a truck for months at a time. Good pay. No rent. The kids and grandchildren had wound up in Colorado, and now, me too, like in the Eagles’ song, find a place to make your stand.

It wasn’t long after I got settled into a place that I met a retired professor of languages (mainly French) on a dating site. She was a writer, too. She sent me some of her stuff before we first met at a coffee shop. At the time, I had a trucker’s body, a hundred pounds overweight and a wardrobe appropriate for truck stop cafes only. My oldest granddaughter took me to J. C. Penny's for a loose-fitting outfit with no coffee stains, and new socks. To this day, the retired professor always says that what first attracted her to me was what I said about her writing.

Not long after we first met she invited me to tag along with her to a social gathering of people she knew. It was just before Covid, so nobody was wearing a mask. It was an “eclectic” group, I think you could say – lawyers, pipefitters, the former chairman of a university physics department, mothers… others. There must have been a couple dozen people gathered together there in a nice house with a patio with a view of the lay of the land… people from all over to bullshit with, to get their stories, just like in truck stops.

I had a great time!

They had beer and hamburgers from the grill and chips and veggies and cheese and wine for the more refined.

A warm fall afternoon.

My “date,” the retired professor of languages, pointed out a guy around my age on the patio out back. “He’s interested in economics, too,” she said.

Ralph was drinking a beer, too, and within moments we knew we shared a common language. Inside, a couple people were conversing in French. Pretty soon, Ralph and I were talking in economicese.

I told him I was writing a book about economics. He said he was, too.

I told him I thought it was the biggest story in the world and he said he thought so too.

I told him about Richard T. Ely, one of the founders of the American Economics Association. In his 1889 book, “An Introduction to Political Economy,” which influenced many of the leaders of the Populist Movement then on the horizon, as well as me, he wrote: “An entire scientific treatise is nothing but an expanded definition.”

Ralph nodded. He agreed. What was economics? That was the thing.

I told him I first approached the question by looking up the word’s etymology, from the Greek word “oikos,” meaning home, a noun, and “nemic,” a verb meaning to manage.

Like Ely said, I said, I began to expand my definition. What did “home” mean? What was humanity’s home? Obviously, it was the biosphere. It’s where we lived, in the earth’s biosphere. Economics meant management of the biosphere. But to manage something well, you had to know it well, to possess the knowledge – knowledge, from the Greek word “gnosis.” I told Ralph that my book was entitled “Oikos Gnosis.”

He slapped my shoulder. He liked it. If I’d've said something like that to anybody who didn’t share the language, they’d think I was crazy.

Ralph said that when he started to learn the language after losing all that money in 2008, he noticed two paths, one labeled “Orthodox” and the other labeled “Heterodox,” from Greek words meaning “correct” (ortho) and “different” (hetero) “beliefs” (dox).

He said he was a Heterodox.

“Me, too,” I said.

We talked about our research. We’d both read the foundational Orthodox texts – Smith, Ricardo, Malthus and the 20^th century exegesis projects at the London School of Economics, Harvard and Yale and the Rockefeller’s University of Chicago where economics was officially proclaimed to be “the science of choices in a world of limited resources.” The definition was expanded to include money, transsubstantially turning money into a limited resource as one of measurable nature's Revealed Truths.

I told Ralph that in my book defining economics I write about “High Priests in the Church of Economic Orthodoxy.”

Cracking open another can of Coors, Ralph nodded and said he liked it. “It’s kind of like that. Stray from the righteous Orthodox path and you’re labeled a sinner.”

Ralph was first lured into sin by a group of Heterodox economists at the University of Missouri/Kansas City where the conceptual foundations of Modern Monetary Theory (MMT) were being constructed.

I was first lured by Karl Polanyi’s 1942 book, “The Great Transformation: The Political and Economic Origins of Our Time.” He said that money does not grow on trees like apples bought and sold in a market at a price inversely proportional to supply. He said money was an idea and that you can’t limit an idea. He quoted Abraham Lincoln who once said that money was our most creative idea.

Ralph nodded. “Yup,” he said, “I think you’re right.”

“Ortho,” I said, and we both had a good laugh. Then we went back inside to mingle with other languages.

Driving back to Denver after the gathering of ideas in a home where the mountains become the plains, my date, a retired professor of languages, said: “Looks like you made a new friend back there.”

“Yup,” I said. “I think you’re right,” and she was. Ralph and I have been good friends ever since.

So, naturally, when the question of financing the Ben Gurion Canal came up, I called Ralph, but I already knew what he was going to say.

(to be continued...)