VOLUME III, SEMESTER 2, CHAPTER 25
Three Moves for Making Scarcity
Start where the last chapter left off, with scarcity split in two and the made half revealed as a wall a hand built. This chapter is about how the wall gets built, and there turn out to be three ways, each more labor-sparing than the last, each nearer to power, until the third needs no brick and no paper at all, only a decree. And by digging under all three, the chapter reaches the stroke it exists to set down, that the road of making scarcity walked to the innermost has its root not in the economy. It holds the volume’s method throughout, wiping each move’s real merit before its real cost, taking no side and judging no one.
The first section is monopoly, the coarsest and most visible move, gathering what many houses could do into one house. It need not hide the thing or seal the well, it need only make the doers come down to one, and where five smithies gave you the choosing, one smithy prices as it pleases though hammer and fire and iron are unchanged, the one changed thing being that you have no second house to go to. The diamond used exactly this, gathering the ore of many places into one house and putting out not what the earth holds but what it would sell, needing not to make the diamond fewer but to make the sellers one, the one door at the village well. The section wipes the merit honestly and it is real: some matters only one house can afford, a national grid or a city’s water where five sets of pipes under one street would be waste as great as heaven, some matters take a dozen years of loss up front like a new medicine that no one would fund if the day it was made all could copy it, and one house doing it costs less. And it wipes the cost, also real: the price is his to say and the rule no longer reads but he quotes, he need no longer grow better because whatever he makes you must take and the sieve fails where there is nothing else to choose, and the door is locked from the inside against the young man of good craft who would open a sixth smithy. And it leaves the question of how five houses became one, buying or out-competing perhaps, but perhaps a faster cleaner method needing no buying or contending, only a written paper saying only he may do it.
The second section is the twins, patent and franchise, far more refined, refined to where you feel not a wall but something right by heaven and earth. Ringing in a notion first: a thing thought up over ten years and hundreds of tries is learned by another at a glance and copied at a fraction, so who would spend the ten years, and the method is a written paper granting so many years in which only he may do it. Its merit is solid and to be owned heavily, it lets the willing be willing, for if the new medicine could be copied the day after it were made no one would ever make one and the next generation would keep dying of the healable, and this wall is built for the people of the future. But it deforms: it has a term after which it must come down and its whole rightness is on that temporary, yet it can be dragged long by altering and reapplying and ringing hundreds of papers around one thing, can be rung too wide to cover a whole class of methods so the ones behind cannot go around, and most painfully some can afford the life-saving medicine and some cannot, the wall keeping the cold wind off the future and off the one person before the eyes at once. Ringing in a trade is more direct, a paper that only he may do this business, and where the first guarded him because he thought it up, this is only because the paper is written with him, and he may have thought nothing up. And the section shows the move is old, the salt-and-iron debate of 81 BC where one decree took the folk’s salt-boiling and iron-smelting to the court, and Guanzi long before, only the governing of mountain and sea will do, his mind not to grow rich but to answer where the state’s money comes from, since raising the tax makes the people cry out but a little added to each catty of salt they cannot see, a most clever person’s move whose merit-or-fault the next section weighs.
The third section is sole sale, the most labor-sparing, needing no buying or contending and not even a paper, only a decree, this thing only I may sell, and it submits because the one who issues it has other things in hand, which is the door of the whole chapter. Why salt, dynasty after dynasty, and not silk or tea or jade: because everyone wants it so none can dodge, the amount is small so a little added to the price draws no cry, and the sources are few so guarding a few mouths guards all under heaven, a thing born fit to be rung in. The 81 BC quarrel had one side holding that the treasury and the border need money that salt and iron to the official supplies without another cent of tax, and the other that the official doing trade makes things dear and bad and stops being the one who governs the rule once it comes down onto the field, neither side a bad person, one guarding the state’s life and one the people’s pot, pieced at last into iron loosed in part and salt still governed, and quarreled in truth to this day. Then it digs the root: a wall at the village mouth you can push down at night and a paper you can ignore and copy, but a decree you cannot ignore because behind it stands not a merchant but a position that can fine and seize and shut your shop, so this move leans at root not on the economy but on the character volume four will speak of, sealing, drawing a line by power that the ones on the far side may not cross, itself a kind of sealing. Three moves gathered show each more labor-sparing and nearer to power, monopoly still doable by money, patent needing approval, sole sale a decree outright, and the deepest stroke lands: making scarcity walked to the innermost roots not in money but in power, and a semester spent on the economy has dug to the bottom and found what is not the economy.
What you carry out of this chapter is a way to read any wall you meet. Ask first which move built it, and then ask the question the moves get more labor-sparing precisely to avoid, who backs it and by what right, because the answer slides from money toward power as you go, and the last move is not an economic act at all but a line drawn by force. The chapter is careful that every move has real merit that is not to be wiped, the grid and the new medicine and the treasury are real goods, and real cost that is not to be hidden, and that the honest reading is not a verdict on the wall-builders but a seeing of the position. And it closes by naming the anger that has gathered across two chapters, whether the wall-builders are bad people, and hands it to the next chapter to face, with the reminder that having set out positions to here it has judged no one and will not begin.
SECTIONS
Section 1 Monopoly, Gathering What Many Houses Could Do into One House
Section 2 Patent and Franchise, Ringing In What All May Use
Section 3 Sole Sale, One Decree, Only I May Sell
Credit to the ancestors; the mistakes are mine: Tiger Lyon.
Section 1 Monopoly, Gathering What Many Houses Could Do into One House