"Robert A. Heinlein - Beyond This Horizon" - читать интересную книгу автора (Heinlein Robert A)

entrepreneurs, lucky, and unlucky, shrewd and stupid, millions of producers,
millions of consumers, each with his draft book, each with printed symbols in
his pouch, potent symbols-the stuff, the ready, the you-know-what, jack, kale,
rocket juice, wampum, the shekels, the sugar, the dough.
All of these symbols, the kind that jingle and the kind that fold and, most
certainly, the kind that are only abstractions from the signed promise of an
honest man, all of these symbols, or more correctly, their reflected shadows,
passed through the bottle neck formed by Monroe-Alpha's computer, and appeared
there in terms of angular speeds, settings of three-dimensional cams,
electronic flow, voltage biases, et complex cetera. The manifold constituted a
dynamic abstracted structural picture of the economic flow of a hemisphere.
Hamilton examined the photostat. The reinvestment of accumulated capital
called for an increase in the subsidy on retail transfers of consumption goods
of three point one percent and an increase in monthly citizens' allowance of
twelve credits-unless the Council of Policy decided on another means of
distributing the social increment.
"'Day by day, in every way, I'm getting richer and richer, '" Hamilton said.
"Say, Cliff, this money machine of yours is a wonderful little gadget. It's
the goose that lays the golden egg."
"I understand your classical allusion, " Monroe-Alpha conceded, "but the
accumulator is in no sense a production machine. It is merely an accounting
machine, combined with an integrating predictor."
"I know that, " Hamilton answered absently. "Look, Cliff -- what would happen
if I took an ax and just beat the bejasus out of your little toy?"
"You would be examined for motive."
"Don't be obtuse. What about the economic system?"
"I suppose, " Monroe-Alpha told him, "that you want me to assume that no other
machine was available for replacement. Any of the regional accumulators could
-- "
"Sure. Bust the hell out of all of them."
"Then we would have to use tedious methods of actuarial computation. A few
weeks delay would result, with accumulated errors which would have to be
smoothed out in the next prediction. No important result."
"Not that. What I want to know is this. If nobody computed the amount of new
credit necessary to make the production-consumption cycle come out even-what
would happen?"
"Your hypothetical question is too far-fetched to be very meaningful," Monroe-
Alpha stated, "but it would result in a series of panics and booms of the
post-nineteenth century type. Carried to extreme, it could even result in
warfare. But of course it would not be-the structural nature of finance is too
deeply imbedded in our culture for pseudo-capitalism to return. Any child
understands the fundamentals of production accounting before he leaves his
primary development center."
"I didn't."
Monroe-Alpha smiled tolerantly. "I find that difficult to believe. You know
the Law of Stable Money."
"'In a stable economy, debt-free new currency must be equated to the net re-
investment,'" Hamilton quoted.
"Correct enough. But that is Reiser's formulation. Reiser was sound enough,
but he had a positive talent for stating simple things obscurely. There is a