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My wonderful wife from Western Ukraine once related a story to me about how she got a new mattress as a teenager that really opened my eyes to the stupidity of a planned economy.

It's often the case that people believe something is true but still don't quite hold that belief as fact until it either happens to them or to someone they know and care about. That's definitely true in this case, as the story she told in deadpan monotone so casually, as if it were completely normal, was a story I would have believed no matter who was telling it before she even opened her mouth. That said, it's a story that hit me hard and definitely solidified my belief in individual liberty and a free market economy.

Sometime in the 90's in a village outside Lutsk Ukraine, a teenage girl climbs a latter into the attic of her childhood home. She's seen the contents of the attic before but not until this moment has she ever thought to question why her parents would have several brand new mattresses hiding away in a dusty old attic.

She thinks about how her mattress is old and uncomfortable and how nice it would be to use one of these nice new mattresses. She decides to ask her parents if she could have one. It's not as if her parent's had forgotten about them but they weren't needed in the late 1980s when they got them and as the saying goes, "out of sight out of mind." Of course she could have one but the girl wanted to know how her parents came to have them.

The girl, now decades older and my wife, trying to give me some context, explains to me casually how all the shops in town had many goods in the windows but you couldn't just go in and buy them. You had to know someone who was in charge of the shop to get them to sell you something. How you got put in charge of a shop, I'm sure we can all guess had to do with either favours or nepotism or some other crony device.

In any case, Dad told her that they had an opportunity to buy something. It happened to be mattresses. They could not pass up the opportunity to get rid of some rubles. The fact that they had no use for mattresses didn't enter into the equation. It was like an IRA. Money in the bank, so to speak.

The absurdity of an economic system that can devolve into that has no place in this world. Even more absurd is the fact that we have many people in this great country begging and pleading for us to adopt a more fair and equitable system in line with this type of government control and central planning - because, of course, we can't have someone having more money than they have. The irony in the end result of this system is an economy where all the transactions are taking place in the black market and you'd rather have a mattress than a dollar whether you need one or not.

Thank you Oleg for saying what needs to be said in the way it needs to be said.

And so the saying "have money in/under the mattress" gets a refreshed glorious shine.

Using mattresses as an alternate form of currency is still in the testing phase on American college campuses. Here is Mattress Girl trading her mattress for fifteen minutes of fame:

The college was sued for allowing her antics and settled for an undisclosed amount of money, so it is difficult to determine the exchange rate between Mattresses, Fame, Defamation, and Dollars.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/gra ... girl-case/

This actually may have hit on a brilliant idea to further streamline the peoples economy. By using mattresses as currency we can move hundreds of thousands of our brothers and sisters out of the underpaid and difficult conditions of the ruble factory to more well paid and comfortable jobs in either the mattress factory or beet farm. We may even get to the point where all our brothers and sisters work in cushy jobs in beets or bedding and have a simple economy that produces the only two things the people need, beets and mattresses. Glorious!

The possibilities are endless:

Mattresses for The People!™

Mattresses maîtresse matters! MMM!

hahaha, cracking jokes.

But, Komrades, isn't the Mattress Story an ultimate argument for total liquidation of "money"?
That's one small step for [a] "dollar", one giant leap into Kommunizm!

(ensuant liquidation of mattress kulaks? well, there is no omelette without, um, ...)

It was Sandra Fluke who was generously sharing her mattress with the underprivileged of Georgetown University in trade for the women's choice of birth control before the glorious day of Obamacare, no?

It no longer surprises me, the lengths some comrades will go to service the Collektiv.