John Horner
The US dollar lost ground today against a strong Deutschmark, and the All-Ordinaries Index finished the day firmer at 1684.1. In the pollution exchanges, rotting fish belly-up in poisoned rivers made strong gains against dying pine forests and a basket of childhood respiratory diseases.
If this was Monty Python or the Young Ones, it'd be funny. In America it's already started to happen.
Imagine for a second that you're the Wisconsin Power and Light Corporation, and that I'm the Tennessee Valley Authority Electricity Generating Board. The US government has decreed that we can pollute the world around us to the tune of 35,000 tons of sulphur dioxide per year and no more. Those are our "Pollution Credits".
However, you've invested in some nice clean technology and got your output to a mere 25 tons. I'm struggling along with stuff left over from the Roosevelt years and can't get mine below 40. What can we do? Easy — you sell me your spare pollution credits! You make a bit of extra money, I don't have to pay the fine, and everyone's happy. Everyone who doesn't live downwind of my plant that is...
It's so simple it's brilliant. And the implications are staggering.
You, for example, might be the quiet, sensible, weekend-only driver of a V-dub bug, and the holder of a pristine Gold License. I, on the other hand, might be the hoon in a red company Paseo who speeds through quiet residential suburbs full of toddlers on tricycles, talking on a cellular phone with one hand and shaving with the other. What could be simpler than my buying a few Sensible Driver points from you against the day when I get pulled over by the cops? You profit from your good conscience, I keep my job as a photocopier salesman.
Or say you're a business owner, and you like to hire pretty teenage girls to work in your factory in preference to the middle-aged or the long-term unemployed; and you don't like "foreigners". I, on the other hand, am a fair minded, church- going sort of a chap whose factory is simply bursting at the seems with ex-convicts and Aborigines. Why don't I make both our lives easier by flogging you a few Anti-Discrimination Board points? It's a pleasure doing business with you. And your lovely secretary...
Where will it end, now that the Americans have shown us the way?
The opportunities are endless. Will errant husbands, returning home blind drunk from the Leagues club with a couple of mates and loudly demanding bacon sandwiches at 1 a.m. pull out a wad of Sensitive New Age Guy coupons to placate the long-suffering
Come to think of it, most churches encourage cash donations, don't they? Really, isn't that providing a sort of spiritual credit to be redeemed on judgment day? The millionaires might endow a new organ or pay for a church roof, but even the small investor puts a few dollars into the plate, and his sins would be less serious that those of a millionaire — he has less spare time...
All we need to do is sort out a few ground rules and the various forms of salvation, nirvana, and eternal life itself can be quoted on the stock market. Brokers would anxiously study work news for hints as to which religion might have the inside track on eternity. Stock would rise and fall every time a statue of Our Lady wobbled in Paraguay or a Beirut housewife saw the name of Allah in an eggplant. "Buy Shi-ite, sell Buddhist," "Go long on Zen, unload Born Again!"
After all, is it not written that the Lord rejoices more over one sheep that strays and returns to the flock than over the other 99 who stay faithful? If that's not the basis for a flourishing exchange-rate market I don't know what is...