A Very Silly Story About Money
Once upon a time, there was an earth pony named Brickwork, and he worked very hard. Brickwork helped build houses, but not simple little houses like the one he lived in. No, Brickwork built big houses, houses that could fit as many as twenty ponies all at once. He built them for unicorns, even though unicorns almost always had the smallest families, but he didn't ask questions about that sort of thing. The unicorns asked him to please build a very big house, so he did.
Brickwork worked very long and very hard. When the sun started to go down, he would stop working and start to go home. Now, while he was working, Brickwork never really felt tired, because he had a cutie mark for building houses. But when he stopped working, he would start to feel tired, because building a house is a lot of work. But ponies don't just get tired when they've done a lot of work, they also get hungry, and since Brickwork worked so very hard, he got very hungry and very tired.
Now, Brickwork really didn't spend a lot of time at home, or even close to home. Unicorns liked to have their big houses on the tops of tall mountains, or just very big hills. Sometimes they wanted their big houses in the middle of huge valleys, or on islands that Brickwork couldn't just swim away from. If Brickwork wanted to go all the way home, he would need to stop working at lunchtime, if not earlier. And because Brickwork was a very hard worker, he wasn't the sort of pony to leave a job half-done when he could have kept working. By the time he was done working, there just wasn't time to go home and cook a proper meal unless he wanted to get to work half a day late tomorrow.
So instead of eating a fancy meal made of random flowers and bread and vegetables, Brickwork bent down and ate some grass. And instead of going to sleep on a bed, he just straightened his legs and fell asleep standing up. And when the sun came up, it warmed his coat enough to make him wake up, eat some more grass and then get back to work.
Yeah, I know. Shocking, isn't it?
But that was how earth ponies lived, once upon a time. They built big dumb houses for unicorns because they were asked to, they grew food for all the ponies too stupid to find their own because they wanted to, and they ate grass and slept under the stars because they could.
And then some stupid unicorn discovered gold, and everything went wrong.
You see, unicorns always loved to stare at shiny things. They would knock down perfectly good mountains so that they could stare at the pretty rocks underneath, and they'd spend hours and hours twisting metal around bits of these pretty rocks and putting them all over their bodies. The unicorns called it jewelry. The earth ponies called it a waste of good food. But you couldn't even say that much about gold.
Gold is soft. Like, really, really soft. The big draw of diamonds and rubies and other stuff like that, for earth ponies at least, is how crunchy they are. There's a sort of juicy flavor that builds up in crunchy rocks, and I've heard a lot of my friends say that they taste really good. But you don't get that flavor with gold. Gold feels like chocolate, or really soft cheese, except those taste good. Gold tastes like old socks and tin.
It also isn't really good for making anything else. A whole bunch of those shiny rocks weren't just shiny. They got used as parts of really cool inventions, like clocks and paperweights. But gold is too soft to make gears out of, and it takes a lot of work to make gold pretty enough that it can just sit on a desk with nothing else to make it fun to look at.
But the unicorns didn't care. They passed the gold around just so they could take turns staring at it, and they told all the other ponies about it too. When the earth ponies came to build houses, the unicorns showed them the gold, and went on and on about how it sparkled and glittered. When the pegasi came to arrange the weather, the unicorns arranged their gold so that the sun would shine off of it and get in their eyes. It was annoying, but it wasn't getting in the way, so the other ponies let them have fun with their new toy.
But it didn't stay a toy for long.
Ponies have always traded when they needed stuff. That's just how ponies work. If I have a fluffy cloud, but I want a potato, and you have a potato but need a fluffy cloud, then we trade what we have for what we want. If you need something done, and I need something different done, we help each other out, and everypony's happy. It's a simple system, so simple that fillies and colts know how it works.
As long as they aren't unicorn fillies and colts.
Before they discovered gold, unicorns didn't really have much to trade. Oh, sure, they had their shiny rocks, but that was pretty much it. Anything a unicorn's magic could lift, an earth pony could lift better, and getting teleported was always way more dangerous than just getting a pegasus or three to carry you. Or just walking. A lot of ponies walked back then, and just ate grass and slept standing up.
So, if the unicorns couldn't really do a lot of trades, why did ponies like Brickwork build super-big houses for them? Because it was fun. Because ponies like Brickwork had cutie marks for that kind of stuff, and there was no way they'd ever want enough potatoes at once for it to be a fair trade, so they just helped out the unicorns for fun. No, it wasn't because anypony felt sorry for the unicorns. They may be stupid, but they're not stupid enough to forget how to eat grass.
But the unicorns didn't think that was why the earth ponies and the pegasi helped them with all the crazy stuff they wanted to do. They thought that they were getting help because some of them were really good at convincing other ponies to do stuff. They never realized that the unicorns with more awesome houses were just friendlier than the rest. They thought it was all some big awesome trick to get around having to trade stuff they didn't have. But now they had something that they thought was worth trading.
Unicorns started to offer gold in return for what the other two tribes were already doing. They'd wave around big bricks of it, or sometimes little nuggets if they were especially stupid, and say that they'd give the workers some gold if they did stuff. After the first few earth ponies tasted the stuff, word got around and they didn't want to take it. And since pegasi would only want rocks to trade with earth ponies, they didn't have any reason to want gold either.
A lot of ponies from back then probably wish that the story of gold ended there. Hay, I know a few ponies from right about now that wish it ended there. But we all know it didn't, even if not everypony can tell you what happened next. I mean, I can, otherwise I wouldn't have brought it up, but they don't all know this stuff.
Even though nopony except unicorns wanted anything to do with gold, the unicorns still kept losing their minds over it. They traded it between each other, pretending that it meant anything more than "could you please ask those earth ponies to build a house for me after they're done on your house". Then they realized that, magic or not, gold bars are really heavy, and you have to have custom-made saddlebags to carry them in. So some unicorn decided to make tiny little bits of gold that were easy to move around. And that's how the bit was born.
With the invention of the bit, unicorns became even more gold-crazy than they had been before. Gold bars vanished almost overnight, and more than a few worker ponies accidentally thought that the new form of gold was tasty crackers. Now, I don't have any evidence that the unicorns meant to trick everypony into taking huge bags of bits only to find out they weren't food, but whether they meant it or not, it is what happened.
Now everypony had bits, and earth ponies and pegasi had no idea what to do with all of them. The unicorns didn't want to take it back. They came up with the word 'charity', which means getting money for nothing, just so they could say they wouldn't accept charity. And everypony knew that unicorns had nothing to trade, so there was no way to make them take back the bits.
So the earth ponies came up with what seemed like the greatest idea that anypony could have ever come up with, and because they were nice they shared their idea with the pegasi. Their idea was that, if they couldn't get the unicorns to take back their stupid bits, the only thing left was to take all the bits away from the unicorns.
They stopped working for free. They demanded bits for their work, and not just one or two bits but as many bits as the biggest number they could think of off the top of their heads. It turned into a bit of a game among pegasi to see how many bits they could get away with charging for weather. The earth ponies, though, figured out that the unicorns were happier when they only had to pay with a small pile of bits instead of their entire treasury. Any time an earth pony heard that one of their friends was charging less, they'd drop their own prices.
The unicorns didn't make a game out of bits like the other races did. For them, this was a happy time. The rest of ponykind had joined them in their love of gold, and the other tribes were obviously having so much fun with the whole idea that they were coming up with cool new ways to move gold around. That was when the unicorns decided to do the only thing they've ever been good for: Making up words that are really fun to say, even though a lot of them are kind of hard to write.
The unicorns ran down to the places where ponies were showing off all the things they had grown and made and talking about how much it cost, and they called those places 'markets'. Then one of them made up the word 'marketing', which meant the things that sellers do in a market, and also words like buyer and seller and buying and selling. The way that earth ponies did marketing got its own words, which were 'competitive marketing'. The pegasi also got a word for how they did marketing, and it was 'extortion'.
Somewhere along the way, all of this stopped being a game. Earth ponies started to buy shiny rocks from unicorns to sell to other unicorns at real good prices, pegasi tried to justify their high prices by inventing new weather, and all the while the unicorns kept minting new bits to meet demand. It wasn't some scam to take away the unicorns' favorite toy anymore. It was just business. Cold, hard business over cold, hard bits.
So, why did the windigos come? Because we made the world cold. And not cold like we cast a bunch of freezing spells, no, cold like in the heart. We stopped caring about friendship. We used to make houses and double rainbows because we wanted to, and then we just made them because that got us bits. Bits, bits that don't care if you love them or hate them or just never got the point. Cold, dumb bits of gold that aren't even gold anymore.
I still see earth ponies and pegasi doing trades, you know. They trade things for things, actions for actions. Lots of ponies still know how to pay fairer prices than the markets ever will. Of course, lots of ponies still think the bit is more important than actually being happy, so it's not all nice. But... two thirds isn't bad, right?
The Court of the Sun was silent. They had been respectfully silent as the little filly read every word of her short essay, but this was a different kind of silence. This was the silence of primitive villagers as they try to work out if that rumbling sound just now was the volcano waking up, or Uncle M'Gundu getting hungry.
Princess Celestia sat on her throne, her face immobile and betraying nothing. Oh, there was a smile, but it was the default smile she always wore to court. Behind that practiced smirk, who knew what inscrutable gears of reasoning were turning?
The little pegasus filly certainly didn't know. She just sat there on the cold marble floor, fluffing up her feathers and clearly struggling with the moral quandary of whether to close the journal that held her essay or keep it open. Judging from the look on her face, she was also suddenly feeling all of the eyes on her, and the old fight-or-flight instincts were bubbling up. Something would need to be done, and fast.
"What?"
Something that preferably wasn't that.
"Seriously, what?" Princess Celestia was just staring boggle-eyed at the filly, her disbelief plain for all to see. "I mean, why? I mean..." The Solar Princess of Equestria shook her head violently, as though she were a dog shaking off water. "I think I'm missing something here."
The filly smiled at the princess, and held up her journal. "Well, if you want, I could read through it again, and you can ask questions abou—" She stopped. Princess Celestia had lifted a hoof.
"No, no. I didn't mean that you should read your..." the centuries-old alicorn who had personally mentored some of the greatest ponies in history was briefly stumped for words, "essay again. I'm just not sure what brought all of... this about."
"Oh." The filly looked a little bit crestfallen at not getting to present her labor of love twice in a row, but Celestia weathered it. There were lines, and she was fairly certain that all of them had been crossed. Then the filly smiled again. "So, you want to know why I wrote it?"
"Precisely." Celestia hated having to say that word with such dread.
"Well... Princess Platinum's birthday is coming up, right?"
"Right."
"And to celebrate, our teacher suggested that we each write an essay about one of the biggest unicorn achievements." The filly's smile widened, as though the answer was now obvious. "I decided to write about the invention of money."
"Really." Celestia had to fight not to hang her head. "Of all the adventures of ponies like Starswirl the Bearded, Clover the Clever, Princess Platinum herself... you chose the discovery of gold and Equestria's transition to a market economy?"
"Well, yeah," the filly answered, "it's basically the biggest change that unicorns ever brought about. Plus, everypony always does the big adventures. I wanted to do something original!"
"And... why are you presenting this to me instead of your teacher?" Celestia raised one eyebrow, a subtle gesture of questioning that was completely lost on a younger mind.
The filly just stared up at Celestia. "I thought you'd like it." Her face shifted just a little, going from a curious filly who doesn't understand her situation to a confused filly who's about to cry. "Do you... not like it?"
What Celestia wanted to say was that the essay was only accurate in the sense that it had fired an arrow in roughly the same direction as the target. What she wanted to say was that she hadn't heard something so clearly charged with unfair tribalist undertones in two centuries. What she wanted to say was that the reason that fillies and colts wrote essays like this about great heroes of folklore was because they weren't really expected to do research on those, but the theories behind complex economics were the sort of thing that needed a bibliography.
Instead, she simply said, "I'm not your teacher, Silver Glow. You should be asking your teacher what she thinks of it. I know I will."
