Of course, we would all be paying a million dollars for a loaf of bread and we'd probably have to do what Brazil or Argentina were forced to do and drop several digits because their calculators and cash registers wouldn't handle all of the sums things had risen to. Oh well, I've had dreams disappear before.

The only relationship between Ponzi and Social Security is that both are riddled with schemes. And as far as schemes go, they are radically different schemes. Social Security is an insurance system where the scheme has been to rip-off its profits or surplus. Ponzi invented a system to rip off postal coupons in a pyramid scheme. Social Security pays its benefits from the premiums paid by today's working members just as every successful insurance company pays its benefits from the premiums of current customers, hoping an unforeseen disaster does not force them to draw upon their reserves, invested profits, or equity. Social Security has no real reserves because management stole them just as unscrupulous corporations steal pension funds and are punished for doing so. No one calls Enron a Ponzi scheme.

Charles Ponzi has been described as a dapper five-foot-two Italian immigrant who convinced hundreds of people in the Boston area to invest in his get-rich-quick scheme during the Roaring Twenties. Basking in having successfully netted about $15 million for himself, Mr. Ponzi hung around Boston too long. Instead of getting out of town when he should have, he ended up in the slammer.

Ponzi is also attributed to be the inventor of the age old pyramid plan that has since caused others grief. It's also known as the "chain letter" which can be fairly innocuous and even put to some limited good use as a telephone tree, a way to get out the vote, or raise money and canned goods for church or social events. For Ponzi, it was a way to defraud people.

We all know how it works. You get a certain number of people involved, paying or investing their dues to the leader, and then each getting another group of the same number. Five to 25, to 125, to 625, and so on with whatever multiple you want. The last groups are feeding their money, or whatever, back through a chain of hundreds, even thousands, of other people each taking a share. The one on top gets the lion's share.

The trouble is that Ponzi schemes generally collapse under their own weight and confusion after four or five of these tiers. If Social Security had been a Ponzi scheme, it would have died in the Forties.

However, Charles Ponzi was so famous and gained so much notoriety for his deed that I think people who remember him have taken to describing everything they see as a scam or a rip-off as "a Ponzi scheme." Sort of a shotgun effect that has survived generation after generation with little basis in fact.

It's very much like the public's awareness that "something is wrong" without quite being able to put their finger precisely on the cause. We've got a lot of that these days. And it's not easy to put things in their proper causal relationship, evaluate the balls in the air, or deal in proper vector analysis when what you have around you are thousands who refuse to see the forest for the trees.

Social Security's main problem is the government itself. A government that steals the surplus, spends that surplus wherever it chooses, and then awards us with debt in return just because it's easier and safer to print up debt instead of more money or raising taxes. Instead, they issue some demands that the original contributors pay the same taxes again, plus interest. The Pay-It-Again, Sam scam. This is a much more subtle and costly scam than a Ponzi scheme.

Too many people hang their hat on this false story. Let's put Charles Ponzi to rest and start dealing with the real issue—a corrupt government.

One day over their lunch buckets, Rock found himself engaged in a casual conversation with some of the workers in this small nation of about three and one-half million newly freed people. A nation that had just been granted independence after being under the Russian yolk for ages. A new democracy struggling to organize.

The conversation ranged through many subjects common to a new country, when suddenly the subject of setting up some sort of retirement plan came up. Rock jumped in with an old story his grandfather had told him. He passed it on to his new friends by telling them that the United States, the richest most successful nation in the world, had a Ponzi plan that had worked well for more than 60 years.

Before he knew it, Ponzi plans were everywhere. His friends must have gone to the library to look up and read about Charles Ponzi. Even the government was behind these get rich quick schemes for awhile. Everyone was plunging in and it seemed that many were actually gaining wealth.

Of course it all collapsed. But by that time Rock was back in America with his family. After reporting to the company about how well his mining improvements had been received in Albania, he was promoted and given a new assignment. Now, he just reads about the old communist bloc in the newspapers now and again.

Meanwhile, hundreds of thousands in Albania had lost everything. They lost their savings, homes, and whatever other possessions they could sell. Most blamed the government for allowing the Ponzi schemes to exist. Most also left the country with whatever they had left, looking for a chance to start over somewhere else. Roads were lined with people getting out.

Many of them went to nearby nations like Greece or Italy, but these older countries watched their borders closely and turned the Albanians away. They knew better than to let these hard working people into their country to take jobs away from the natives. So most of the nomads ended up in other former Yugoslavian nations that were not guarding their borders and struggling to set up new democracies themselves.

The sudden influx of so many people caused all sorts of grief. Conflicts broke out all over Bosnia, Serbia, and other new countries still defining themselves.

Before long, the superpower sent Mad Albright over to figure out what the hell was going on with these new allies and where so much uranium was at stake. After all, uranium was important to many of America's big weapons of mass destruction.

Soon the superpower was describing conditions as "ethnic cleansing" and settling matters in their usual way. Rough them up, blow up some bridges, trains, and such, then go over afterwards to build some playgrounds and prove how much you love children.

Rock Earthbuster thought it was depressing to find that the people he had spent so much time with, even began to like a little, were actually such evil monsters. Over lunch at the club, he was now telling his new friends how you never can tell what people are truly like underneath.