We are told that in socialism all were, more or less, equally poor. However, shortly after the iron wall’s fall, the oligarch appeared in the former countries of the soviet block. People with nearly obscene fortunes, a very small minority between many that were now really becoming poor.
Flashback: Our little plane was preparing for landing. Below I saw the grey, dessert like earth suddenly turning green. Palms, gardens, straight street design, beautiful houses, golf courses: Palm Spring.
With a few hundred fellow dealers, we had been invited to a magnificent meeting. It seemed that the whole beautiful resort hotel was booked only for us, as I saw all other guests with the same kind of name plates around their neck as we had received. Our particularity: We were four Germans, all others Americans.
For the evening the program announced a first gathering. We met in a huge hall, displaying all the known gambling sets you may have seen in a casino. Each one of us received a little cloth bag containing gaming chips, which were decorated with the companies logo on and summed up to 100 points. The croupiers invited us politely to test our luck. A host explained that the chips were not to be changed to real dollars (which then, by the way, still had certain value), but could be used for an auction of some prices in two hours time.
A big blue curtain opened and the prices to be bidden for appeared. A pink old-timer Cadillac. Wow! A Harley-Davison. Also several consolation prices.
This waked up our usually sleepy capitalistic genes. We wanted the car! At least the bike. Our collectively minded European background let us put the starting capital into one venture, administered by the only woman of us four, betting on her innate intuition. Now we had already 400 token, with which alone we felt sure to beat the rather individualistic Americans around us. Our controller started to calculate in which kind of games and playing strategies our chances were highest. A winning team!
Soon we saw the first losers with empty bags looking how we first maintained our capital and eventually increased it. When the bid started, we had nearly doubled what we received at the beginning. Confidently we looked forward to the auction.
First little things found their new owners. I wondered that somebody would spent 1,200 for a rather scruffy scarf. With great fanfare the two vehicles went to auction. The motorcycle went for over 40,000 and the Cadillac for more than 70,000. What a disappointment. How could this guys have made this huge amount in only two hours? And we hat only a bag with a few now useless chips.
After working now for many years in Eastern Europe, I have good explanations about what happened in Palm Spring and why here, in the former socialist countries, a few could make so much money, hopping in a short time to the sunny side of capitalism.
Money clumps. The same as matter, of which only few chunks float in a rather empty universe, there are these rare elementary particles that produce the money gravitation. Very seldom somebody comes across the Higgs Boson for money, may it be of luck, cheekiness or, in some cases, persistent hard work. For the rest of us wealth remains a shiny object we sometimes can distinguish far away in the firmament.
