“And because they’re smart at everything,” Seth said, “that makes it okay for them to be evil bastards?”
“Exactly,” she said. “So people like my dad are good at figuring out how to take your company with its ‘smart people’ and get it declared illegal, poach its best ideas, or just buy it and leverage it and financialize it until it doesn’t make anything except for exotic derivatives and tax credits. And the thing is, that’s not good enough for him! He wants to be the one percent of the one percent of the one percent because of his inherent virtue, not because the system is rigged. His whole identity rests on the idea that the system is legit and that he earned his position into it fair and square and everyone else is a whiner.”
“If they didn’t want to be poor, they shoulda had the sense to be born rich,” Seth said.
“No offense,” Hubert, Etc added.
“None taken.” She picked through a pile of laundry, producing a loose-knit eggplant colored cardigan, a pair of twisted underwear hanging off a sleeve. She slingshotted them toward the stairs. “I know my family is richer than Scrooge McDuck, but I don’t pretend we got that way by doing anything except getting lucky a long time ago and using graft, corruption, and sleaze to build that luck up to this tacky place and a dozen more like it.”
“And what about last night?” Hubert, Etc asked, emboldened by her frankness. “What about that party and all?”
“What about it?” she said, her tone playful and challenging.
“What about being richer than Scrooge McDuck and staging a Communist party?”
“Why shouldn’t I?”
“It’s not like you need to—”
“But I can. Remember, it’s not just ‘to each according to her need,’ it’s ‘from each according to her ability.’ I know how to find factories that are perfect for direct action. I know how to get into them. I know how to pwnify their machines. I know how to throw a hell of a party. I have all this unearned, undeserved privilege. Apart from killing myself as an enemy of the human species, can you think of anything better for me to do with it?”
“You could give money to—”
She froze him with a look. “Haven’t you figured it out? Giving money away doesn’t solve anything. Asking the zottarich to redeem themselves by giving money away acknowledges that they deserve it all, should be in charge of deciding where it goes. It’s pretending that you can get rich without being a bandit. Letting them decide what gets funded declares the planet to be a giant corporation that the major shareholders get to direct. It says that government is just middle-management, hired or fired on the whim of the directors.”
“Plus, if you believe all that, you don’t have to give all your money away,” Seth said. She didn’t seem pissed.
“What the fuck do we need money for? So long as you keep on pretending that money is anything but a consensus hallucination induced by the ruling elite to convince you to let them hoard the best stuff, you’re never going to make a difference. Steve, the problem isn’t that people spend their money the wrong way, or that the wrong people have money. The problem is money. Money only works if there isn’t enough to go around—if you’re convinced scarce things are fairly allocated—but it’s the same circular meritocratic argument that Etcetera annihilated for my dad: markets are the fairest way to figure out who should get what, and the markets have produced the current terrible allocation, therefore the current terrible allocation is the best solution to a hard problem.”
“Every time I hear someone saying that money is bullshit, I check to see how much money they have. No offense, Natty, but it’s a lot easier to talk about money being bullshit when you have it.” Seth sat up and rubbed vigorously at his legs. Dried mud flaked off his jeans.
She snorted. “Is that all you’ve got? ‘Champagne socialist?’ You think the fact that I was born into a lot of money—a lot of money, more money than you’ll ever see or even imagine—disqualifies me from having an opinion about it?”
Seth wandered over to the larder and pulled out food—fresh fruit, royal jelly rehydration drink, pizza in a M.R.E. box whose tab he pulled and pitched. The silence stretched. Hubert, Etc was about to speak, then Seth said, “I’ve met a lot of cops with bullshit theories about crime and human nature. Generals clearly have batshit opinions about the gravity of ending human life. Every priest, rabbi, and imam seems to know a lot about an invisible, all-powerful being who appears be a fairy tale. So yeah, having a lot of money probably does disqualify you from knowing a single fucking thing about it.” He unboxed the pizza, avoided the rising steam. “Slice?” he said, the smell of garlic, tomato, corn niblets, and anchovies swirled like an oregano dust devil.
Hubert, Etc hunkered down for Natalie’s eruption. Seth was a master of provocation. But it didn’t come.
“That’s not entirely stupid. Let’s say that we’ve got different perspectives on money. Tell me, Steve, do you think you can spend and redistribute your way to a better world?”
“Damned if I know.”
Hubert, Etc took the pizza box and had a slice. It was good for flash-baked M.R.E. The sauce was tangy and spicy and might be addictive as crack. When he realized that there were as many pizzas as he could eat lurking in potentia in the Redwater estate, he took two more.
“I’m suspicious of any plan to fix unfairness that starts with ‘step one, dismantle the entire system and replace it with a better one,’ especially if you can’t do anything else until step one is done. Of all the ways that people kid themselves into doing nothing, that one is the most self-serving.”
“What about walkaways?” Hubert, Etc said. “Seems to me that they’re doing something that makes a difference. No money, no pretending money matters, and they’re doing it right now.”
Natalie and Seth looked at him. He finished his third slice. “They’re weird and sketchy, but that goes with the territory whenever you’re talking destroying the world as we know it and putting another one in its place.”
“He’s kidding, right?” Natalie said.
“Damned if I know,” Seth said. “He’s strange. Etcetera, you’re kidding, right?”
Hubert, Etc warmed to being the center of attention. “I’m totally serious. Look, I’ve heard the stories, too, I don’t know if they’re true, and if you two are serious about all this change-the-world stuff, I don’t think you can pretend that a couple million weirdos who have exactly that mission don’t exist because you’re uncomfortable with their lifestyle. It’s not like self-heating pizzas are an innate human institution we’ve enjoyed as a species for thousands of years.”
“What are you proposing?”