If You Want Hard Money, How Hard Do You Have to Be to Get It?

By P.J. O'Rourke

I have some experience with what's called "anarchy."

I've written about Lebanon during its civil war in the 1980s...

And Albania in 1997, when nationwide pyramid schemes went broke and chaos ensued.

But the war in Lebanon was a war, and wars – however multisided and confusing – always have an organizing principle.

What happened in Albania was stealing. Stealing comes to an end when everything has been stolen. Today, Albania is a typical little eastern European country – a member of NATO and an applicant for European Union membership with 3 million tourists a year and a per-capita gross domestic product (GDP) of $11,400 (nearly twice that of China).

But Somalia was true anarchy.

I went to Somalia in 1992 to cover "Operation Restore Hope," the U.S.-led military mission to save the African country from famine. A vicious dictator, Mohamed Siad Barre, had been overthrown. The Somalis celebrated their independence by shooting each other.

Here in the U.S., we spend a lot of time worrying about our currency, the kind of money we use, our medium of exchange.

Precious metals are a reliable long-term store of value. But they're bulky and heavy. You don't want to fall into the deep end of the senior community swimming pool with your pockets filled with your retirement savings in one-ounce gold Canadian Maple Leaf coins.

"Fiduciary money" – certificates bearing a government promise to redeem paper currency for precious metals – presents different problems. Governments lie about having those precious metals. And governments do worse than lie. People holding fiduciary money can wake up – as they did on April 5, 1933, when FDR signed Executive Order 6102, which banned the ownership of gold – to find out that redeeming the certificates for what the law says they're worth is against the law.

Then there's "fiat currency," backed by nothing at all and spilling out of government printing presses in reams, quires, bundles, and bales. The reason it's supposed to be worth something is "the lousy parent reason." Our frustrated and inept government tells us, like we frustrated and inept moms and dads tell our children, "Because I said so!"

Maybe Bitcoin is the answer. But nobody really understands Bitcoin. To most of us, Bitcoin seems like a weird scam invented by strange geeks in the evil high-school math club.

So we worry about our currency. And we worry that if our currency collapses, our society will collapse.

Maybe one way to understand currency collapse is to go someplace where society has collapsed already. Somalia in 1992 was about as broken as a society can be...

Fighting broke out everywhere. It wasn't traditional African tribal warfare. The Somalis all belong to the same tribe. But the tribe has six clans, the six clans have hundreds of subclans, and each subclan is divided into infinite murderous feuds.

The Somalis fought each other with rifles, machine guns, mortars, cannons, and – judging by the look of Mogadishu, the capital of Somalia – wads of filth. In the old town, not one stone stood upon another. In the new part of the city, everything was built out of concrete, and the concrete had been blasted back into piles of aggregate, rebar, and Portland cement.

There was no water and no electricity. At night, the only illumination was from tracer bullets. Every tree and bush had been snatched for firewood. Sewage welled up through what pavement was left. Mounds of sand blew through the streets. Rubbish was dumped atop wreckage, and goats grazed on the offal.

Everything that guns can accomplish had been achieved in Mogadishu.

I signed on as a radio reporter with a U.S. broadcast network. Somalia wasn't some place I could go on my own. When I arrived at Mogadishu in a chartered Cessna, the first thing I encountered were armed Somalis. Fortunately, they were the network's armed Somali bodyguards, hired to do things like keep me from being robbed and shot.

The network – presumably with the help of the U.S. military – had found a walled mansion, more or less intact, near the airport.

Some 30 of us – reporters, camera crews, video editors, producers, and tech guys – were housed in this compound. We bedded down in shifts, while our 40-man army of Somali mercenaries camped in the courtyard.

It was impossible for us to go outside our walls without a truck full of "security" (as the Somali mercenaries liked to be called). Even with our gunmen along, people were always massing up to beg, gape, and thieve. Hands tugged at wallet pockets. Fingers nipped at wristwatch bands. No foreigner could make a move without attracting a hornet's nest of attention – demanding, grasping, pushing mobs of cursing, whining, sneering people. Young men waving AK-47 assault rifles pushed among the crowd. Rusted, dent-covered, windshield-less pickup trucks, with gun mounts welded into their beds, sputtered by on predatory errands.

Our big job as reporters was to cover President George H. W. Bush's New Year's visit to the American troops in Somalia.

President Bush also decided to visit a Somali orphanage in Baidoa, a small city 160 miles of bad road away from Mogadishu. The president traveled by helicopter. We were not so lucky.

Broadcasting the president's visit required a Land Rover full of reporters and another full of technicians, plus two trailers, one carrying a satellite dish and another loaded with a generator. Somali "security" was needed to guard these – two truckloads of bodyguards in front of us and a truckload behind.

A group of U.S. Marines escorted us on our way to Baidoa. The trip was uneventful. The trip back was not. The Marines had stayed in Baidoa.

A dozen impromptu roadblocks had been set up. These were lengths of iron pipe balanced on an oil drum and counterweighted with a chunk of concrete. One harmless-looking old fellow squatted at each roadblock. He was not asking for a toll. You could see what the deal was when you stood on the Land Rover seat and looked out the sunroof at the surrounding thornbush. Armed creeps lurked.

If you had more guns than the creeps, the harmless-looking fellow raised the pole and obsequiously waved you through. If you did not have more guns, you were robbed and shot. We had more guns.

But then we got a flat tire. The flat occurred where the thornbush was thick, providing an uncomfortable amount of creep cover.

It took some convincing to get our Somalis out of their trucks and into a semblance of a perimeter while the tech guys changed the tire.

We had plenty of guns. The problem was the fellows wielding them. Aside from the question of whether our hired Somalis were trustworthy (a good question), some of them were young enough they did not need to shave yet. I walked around to the back of our convoy, and the "security" standing solitary guard was maybe 4 feet 10, possibly weighing 90 pounds, and was straining to keep his AK-47 at port arms. I took the gun from the kid and stood guard myself. I am not a fearsome-looking man. But SpongeBob SquarePants would have been fearsome compared with our miniature Tail End Charlie.

Thus, I came to understand that there's always a currency, there's always a medium of exchange. And although I haven't been back to Somalia since 1993, I know from the news that the medium of exchange there has not lost any value in the past 22 years.

A few days after I got back from Baidoa, another reporter (whom I'll call Leon) and I decided to go to downtown Mogadishu, or what was left of it, just to look around. We went with an armed Somali driver, an armed Somali translator, and the requisite truck full of security.

But nonetheless, Leon was carrying a 9mm Glock. When we got out of the car, Leon held the Glock above his head and racked a round into the pistol's chamber with a dramatic flourish.

Leon turned to me and said, "I call it the Visa card of the future."

Regards,

P.J. O'Rourke