Bubba Island, Episode II The Britney Menace

When last we checked in on our infant economy, Slash had just planted his beans and Bubba and Earl had invested in bean futures and were working on getting their livestock ventures off the ground. Well while we were away, Slash brought in a bumper crop of beans, giving Bubba and Earl a pretty good return on their investment. Bubba and Earl streamlined their livestock operations in order to increase production to meet new demand. Oh, yes, the new demand. During our absence, a small ship wrecked near the island and a few more people washed up on shore. While none of the newcomers brought any new products to trade, they all possess a specialized job skill. Frank is logger who immediately began harvesting the island's trees to provide Betty the carpenter with lumber. Two friends, Gary and Steve have joined forces to produce sweaters and leather goods from the by-products of Earl's sheep farm. Gary is the creative force behind the enterprise and Steve is a whiz with leather goods and knits a mean sweater. Britney, is a twenty-something former teen pop-star who possesses certain skills essential to a society consisting of a bunch of men and Betty.


Betty built Bubba a new chicken house in exchange for some eggs, Earl a new barn in exchange for some leather, and Gary and Steve a design studio in exchange for some leather pants and a new handbag, which she traded to Frank for the wood to build the buildings. Anyway, now everyone is busily trading with their neighbors, and enjoying a cornucopia of goods and services; the variety and quality of which none of our islanders could have hoped to produce individually.

The increase in islanders and in goods and services, however, is causing more than a few problems. For example, Britney is really fond of eggs. However, Bubba has no interest in Britney's services, but he does fancy a new designer handbag and a pair of tight leather pants. Neither Gary nor Steve has much use for Britney's services, either but they do need a new showroom and they are both terribly fond of beans. In direct contradiction to the island's founding charter, Slash has recently become a vegetarian and has decided to save himself for marriage. Frank, Slash, Betty and Earl all like Britney well enough, but Frank, and Betty have no use for handbags or leather pants, and Earl is betting government will soon be invented and thinks he'd best not risk ruining his chances of being elected by being seen doing business with Bubba or Britney or seen wearing leather pants.

Britney is trying really hard to figure out a way to get her eggs, but she may end up having to steal them. Our little island doesn't yet have a police force, after all. However, it also doesn't have a court system and its citizens are therefore subject to vigilante justice.

Will Britney get her eggs? Will Earl realize his political ambitions? Will Frank be voted off the island for his vegetarianism? Stop by next when these and many more questions might just be answered.

Getting up to Speed

Before we continue the story of our little island, I think a little history is in order.  Here is the post in which our island got its genesis (with a couple of corrections).

The computer is an amazing machine. With the exception of the airplane, the grilled cheese sandwich, and possibly the wheel, it’s man’s greatest invention. Computers allow us to communicate almost instantly with anyone on the planet; they’ve increased productivity in almost every industry while creating new, high-paying jobs. Oh yeah, and they offer us nearly unlimited access to mindless entertainment.


With all that computers can do, the most amazing thing is how they do it. You see, at the most basic level, computers can really only do one thing; they can add. Not only are they limited to addition, they only get to use two digits, 1 and 0, to do so. Actually, if you want to be picky, it’s just two electrical states, on and off. If you think about it, though, the principle’s not much different than that of a light switch. Programmers and computer engineers use this basic principle to make computers do all of the cool stuff computers do-computer aided design, complex structural analysis, Grand Theft Auto, etc.

If something as powerful and complex as a modern computer can be reduced to such a simple idea, maybe other complex things can be as well. Perhaps the key to understanding things like government and the economy is to ferret out these simple, first principles and understand them.
Let’s start with the economy. We’ll create our own little, imaginary economy and use it to try to understand the big economy which our government seems Hell-bent on screwing up.
In his book Basic Economics, economist Thomas Sowell defines an economy as "a means for distributing scarce resources", so we’ll need some scarce resources and a distribution network.

We’ll start out using chickens and sheep as our scarce resources, and our distribution network will consist of a couple of farmers, Bubba and Earl. In this sort of exercise, most folks would probably call their farmers Farmer A and Farmer B or some such. I’d like our economy to have a little more color, though, and I don’t know any farmers named A and B, so we’ll stick with Bubba and Earl. We will follow standard convention in not naming our sheep or chickens, however. We won’t even bother to give the animals letters as they’re really just extras in our little exercise and we don’t want to grow too attached to them just in case our farmers get hungry. We’ll have no vegetarians in our economy. It’s unnatural. If God didn’t want us to eat animals, He wouldn’t have made them out of meat.

Anyway-our economy. We’ll let Bubba raise the chickens and Earl can raise the sheep because, as we all know, you can’t trust a guy named Bubba around a bunch of sheep. It’d be like Temptation Island with wool sweaters. Oh, I almost forgot to mention that our economy takes place on an island. This will be important later on. Right now let’s concentrate on livestock.
Earl raises sheep and Bubba raises chickens. But Earl likes eggs for breakfast and fried chicken for dinner (our economy doesn’t have any doctors, so cholesterol hasn’t been invented yet), and, as we mentioned above, Bubba is particularly fond of sheep. Bubba can’t raise sheep, though because he has no place for them to graze, and Earl can’t raise chickens because…well, he just can’t.

If Earl wants fried eggs and chickens, and Bubba wants companionship-I mean mutton, our two farmers must work out a deal. After much haggling, our heroes decide that one of Earl’s sheep is worth two of Bubba’s chickens and a dozen eggs. All is well in our little world. Earl has his eggs and yard pimp, and Bubba…well, let’s move on.

By and by, another farmer, we’ll call him Slash, washes up on our island. Now Slash doesn’t have a clue about raising sheep or chickens. Even if he did, it wouldn’t do him any good because the only thing he has to trade for the livestock is a small bag of dried beans that he managed to hang onto when he was thrown overboard (while Slash’s story prior to his washing up on our beach is full of adventure, romance and intrigue, it has little bearing on our current subject and so the telling of it must wait for another time). Even though Slash doesn’t know beans about raising livestock, he knows quite a lot about raising beans. And honestly, after years of eating nothing but chicken, eggs, and mutton, Earl and Bubba really need some fiber in their diets.

Since Slash’s beans aren’t magic, and our economy really can’t develop much farther until Slash gets his first bean harvest, we’ll have to leave off here for now. Don’t worry, though. Our farmers got together and invented credit so that Slash won’t starve before his beans come in. Bubba and Earl will trade Slash some chickens, eggs and sheep for bean futures.