Vega Five

- by Katharine Louw

Piet and I were walking beside each other down the passage having just attended a talk by Peter Thiel. Thiel founded PayPal and was its CEO and he was one of the first investors in Facebook. He now sits on the board of directors of Facebook.

“I thought it was interesting,” I said to Piet, “When Peter Thiel said he invented PayPal because he wanted the power of currency to be back in the hands of the people and out of government hands. Often the perception of people like him is that they are only trying to make a small fortune on good ideas.”

Piet and I were chatting thus, excited by Peter Thiel’s talk, when we bumped into Bob Glenister. Bob sent five South Africans to FreedomFest because he wants South Africa to be liberated from ‘bullies.’ ‘Bullies’ is an apt way to describe authoritative people in power, lobbyists, majorities and governments. It is because of Bob that Ivo, Piet, Vivian, Jasson and I were in Las Vegas.

Dinner in the Great Pyramind of Las Vegas

Bob doesn’t expect anything in return from us, except that we save the world. At least that is what he seemed to imply in a modest statement during the dinner he took us to that evening. The four of us in attendance fell silent. Our brains were gradually accelerating to a conclusion, “Is that all he wants?”

Bob is not a man of modest ambition. When he was twenty-two years old he turned a division within a large company around, by working twenty hours a day and depending on power naps for six solid months. It’s a lovely story, but it is his to share.

Bob arrived at the conference on day two and that is when Piet and I bumped into him. After pleasantries he said in his low, gruff voice of curious accent (slightly cowboy American perhaps), “Do you have dinner plans tonight?”

None of us had plans except Jasson, so Bob booked a table at the Luxor Hotel.

Therefore, after a day of world class speakers, the Vega Five and Bob took a taxi to Luxor Hotel. We didn’t have time to change into nice outfits, so we were all wearing rather drear conference clothes. Luxor is the Egypt of Las Vegas. It is a massive jade black and glossy pyramid that was built on the coins that people sink into slot machines. Thus, slot machines lie in rows in its beating, flashing and trilling heart. Like white and red blood cells, the dimes and the dollars are the blood that rush along Luxor’s pyramid veins.

Around the slot machines are dancers, bars and restaurants. We went to one of these restaurants and had dinner. There was rich talk of freedom and South Africa. That is when Bob told us the story of what he describes as his ‘first success’ – turning a division from being the lowest performing division to being the top performing division within the company for which he worked, in less than a year – when he was a mere twenty two years old.

After dinner we walked back through the Luxor casino and out the doors into a blast of heat from the desert night. Instead of returning via taxi, we decided to walk in the balmy, dry air, amidst the lights, lights, liiiiggghhhhts. Las Vegas lights are like a permanent, over-eager orgasm.

The walk between Luxor and Bally’s is about a two mile walk that stretches from one end to the other end of the main section of Las Vegas, the Las Vegas [Boulevard] Strip. Nineteen of the world’s twenty five largest hotels (by room count) are on this Strip, with a total of over sixty-seven thousand rooms. Need I say more?

Well, I will, because a lot can happen in two miles.

People don’t cross roads around Las Vegas Boulevard. Perhaps experience-based-paranoia has resulted sky pedestrian bridges that span every entering and exiting road along Las Vegas Boulevard. This means between blocks there is a lot of stair climbing and descending, or for the tired, hot and lazy: escalator travelling.

For Bob Glenister it is an opportunity to run up a flight of stairs and expend some of the wilful adrenalin and energy he exhibits (leaving the younger generation feeling sheepish). So, we happily exited Ancient Egypt and walked straight into medieval Europe. Yes, medieval Europe. Excalibur Hotel is a monstrous indelicate sandcastle made up of thick white turrets with blue and red witches’ hats. It is like ogre’s fingers made of chalk are protruding out of the ground into the sky with red and blue nails. It is not sand or chalk at all, but the turrets are casinos and hotel rooms. Personally, I like the concept of Excalibur Hotel, but it failed to capture the stone, mist and mystery, moss and moisture that makes the medieval times magical to me. Where was the Merlinesque? Or the steely romantic knight feel to it? Ah well, still good fun.

The Indelicate Sandcastle of the Nevada Desert

Across Las Vegas Boulevard from Excalibur is the Tropicana. We came to the edge of Excalibur and climbed up stairs to cross the road into “New York, New York”, in the heart of Las Vegas (Déjà vu?). In the blink of an eye we had shifted into another continent and historical period. This hotel is made of scaled, iconic New York skyscrapers. Mid-span on this bridge, between 12th century England and 21st century America, is a street act of buskers – hard rock.

I was walking with Bob and Piet. Vivian was somewhere ahead and Ivo was somewhere – who knows where? Vega Five members would disappear and re-appear mysteriously ahead or behind each other in this journey – indiscriminately and illogically, regrouping and then re-disintegrating into the surreal tapestry of Las Vegas. Libertarians are notoriously like cats.

Back on the time-travel bridge, the two man Kiss-like hard rock band seemed quite talented. Bob veered off route to give them some money. He then re-joined us and said, “They are adding value, don’t you think?”

I said, “Yes.”

‘Value added’ is a catchphrase to economists. Value added can refer to an extra feature of a broadly defined product that goes beyond one’s expectations and provides something more while adding little or nothing to its cost. In economics ‘added value’ is the difference between the sale price and the production cost of a product. At root, however, this concept is more complicated. It is useful to know that the value of a product is more than its cost of production, transport or packaging. However, how much something is valued will differ from person to person. Ultimately in any unregulated exchange, value received exceeds value given to both parties – leaving each ‘richer’ for the exchange. A variant can occur when one entity is happy to become poorer from the exchange, which would be their free choice.

Opposite New York, New York, is the MGM Grand hotel. The MGM Grand is a shiny, reflective teal-turquoise building. At night the whole building is lit in horizontal strips of luminous green. Before this building stands a gold statue of the MGM Lion. The Lion’s pedestal and enclave are bedecked with green lights rising like waves of imminent riches or of beckoning promise. It is an eye-catching façade, even for Vegas. The Lion assumes presence as it gazes magisterially down the Las Vegas Strip as though it is the king of this fluorescent jungle.

Climbing stairs, descending stairs, climbing stairs, descending stairs, lights flashing, giant cinema screens explaining, it seemed endless. Yet, according to the map stairwells could only have happened four or five times in total. To walk through a city of lights that are spinning, twirling, talking and beaming is a surreal experience.

Suddenly, descending a flight of stairs in the sea of stars – I was with Ivo. I was like Dorothy from the Wizard of Oz, losing and finding her friends – the scarecrow, the cowardly lion, the tin man and Toto. Which one would Ivo be then? The scarecrow I reckon, since he arrived early on and is a brainy, country lad who wears a straw hat.

As he and I were coming down some steps we came upon three young male hobos – footloose drifters upon the stairs’ mezzanine level. They looked to be in their early twenties. One of them was a handsome blonde boy with blue eyes and a toothy grin. He was wearing dungarees and was shirtless, so his skinny arms reached up and were hanging on the stairwell rail bar as he balanced in a crouched position. He looked like a monkey farm boy. He caught my eyes with his. His tourist fatigue evaporated when he saw me and his gaze sent lightning bolts into mine. He said, “You are beautiful.” I looked away and walked on. “Really, you are!” He called after me.

I stopped Ivo. “Ivo,” I said, “We have to take photos of those three.” Ivo grumbled something about having to give them his smokes, but we went back. The vacant boy sitting next to the blonde had a cardboard sign that read, “Why lie? I need some weed.”

I laughed and asked them, “Are you hobos?”

“Yes.”

“Why?” I said.

So the mischievous charmer kid said, “I sold everything I had to go look for God.”

Ivo said, “And you didn’t find him, did you? He was too fast for you?”

The boy replied, “Oh yes!” His eyes were twinkling, his grin the size of Texas, “I found him. I found him everywhere and in everything.”

“Really?” said Ivo.

“Yes!” He smiled. “He gives me everything I need and I am well off…” he hesitated, “…well, not in the sense that most people understand the term ‘well off,’ but I have everything I need.’’ 

“Really?” said Ivo.

“I smile more than most of these people.” He said, and gestured at the crowds passing us.

Ivo smiled, and said, “True.”

The boy then turned to me, and gave me his massive, but clearly, malnourished smile. He said, “You are beautiful.”

His eyes sparkled. I don’t think I have ever seen so much sparkle in single person’s eyes before. They sparkled more radiantly to me than the Las Vegas Strip around us.

“Thank you.” I replied

Drifters in the Rifters, "Stay beautiful..."

Ivo took photos of the happy kid and his two canine-like compatriots. Ivo gave them the rest of his box of cigarettes. Then we turned and walked away. The boy called after me, “Stay beautiful…” He said it with a lingering, hopeful, hopeless longing that resonated softly in the desert along the invisible thread of uncertainty and vulnerability that had sprung up between us – like a heat mirage – so fragile and easily lost.

It happened so quickly, but in my hands was a takeaway packet of left-over tuna steak from the Luxor restaurant. Why didn’t I give it to the kid, who gets everything he needs from God? In hindsight, I felt like I wanted to give him $100 and it would be money well spent, because I would have spent it on a human being. I imagine that $100 going into his living flesh and bones, his story, his next few meals, his heart, his history and his future.

Anyone who knows me knows that I am sucker for boys that don’t have jobs and don’t want jobs – and who drop everything in search of God. I have a colourful, entirely unintentional history of dating this type. Some part of me, upon meeting this fellow, wanted to drop everything and join him in the streets of Las Vegas. But I was a foreigner at an economics conference and sitting around begging would have been neither wise nor constructive. Besides, my heart lies elsewhere.

In my mind, the little farm boy monkey was adding value… and I wish I had given him something more than my bewilderment.

My whole point in this long article is to somehow capture a beautiful concept that was revealed to me on this walk. What adds value to an individual in a free marketer’s eyes emerges from a broad spectrum of possibilities, even something as utterly uneconomical and unforgiving as a hobo in Las Vegas or even a Vegas slot machine itself.

Value adding, whether it is the difference between the cost to produce and the worth to the recipient or whether it is an added, extra, free feature exists in a metaphysical field beyond banks. How can I capture that ineffable charm? I have tried, because I wish to illustrate that capitalists and libertarians are not simply cold intellectuals conceptualising in a realm of dollar bills, or money hungry and selfish (as many paint them to be). They are humans with dreams, feelings, values and vision. It is most often due to these qualities that they become successful and it is because of these qualities that many have had the drive to understand what truly underlies wealth, poverty, economics, law, truth, justice, politics, ethics and happiness. A desire to truly understand what makes or breaks a society and what creates or dispels poverty, is born of passion and passion alone.

Libertarians and capitalists are not a product of divorced, machine-like intellectualising. They felt first, and thought second. Value is not merely money and many capitalists know this. Money is a convenient variable that we have all agreed to disagree on the value of. Buskers and hobos, on the other hand, are a pleasure to some and a nuisance to others and therefore it would not make for a good currency. They would also be tough to carry around. Paper and coins give everyone a way to lightly skip along and yet also have a way to tap into exactly that which gives them the unique value they find in the universe.

Quite often, capitalists and libertarians give things away for free, and they expect nothing in return. The truth is capitalists give more away for free than any other entity, ideology or group in the world, ever. And when they are not giving things away, they are not taking things (like the church or the government). Rather, they are entering into mutually enhancing and freely contracted exchanges. Ironic, isn’t it?

So I wandered off, alongside Ivo, slightly dazed. Criss-crossing the 3D labyrinth of connections, we eventually came to the Bellagio Hotel, opposite our hotel, Bally’s. Here we encountered street performers in outfits. One fellow was dressed as a red devilish creature. He had horns and yellow eyes. He had cloven hoofs and a tail. He was tall and powerfully built. I gravitated towards him through fascination and fear, mesmerised.

“May I have a photo with you?” I said.

Katharine Louw and the Red Devil Creature

The man said, “Sure you can have a photo with me, but it will cost you.” He had a sharp-toothed grin. So I made a deal with this devil. A photo for a few – a fair exchange I would say.

After that we found a decent spot to await the show of the Bellagio fountains. These powerful fountains lie in a large pool of clear water. When they came on, they were synchronised to a famous Italian Opera. It was amusing and moving (as Italian Opera is)… curious, to say the least.

We humans can find value in a taxi cab and a balmy walk, in angels and demons, in hard rock and Italian Opera. Sometimes, value can be found in all those things all in one night and all by one person.

I have been blessed, that in one night I experienced receiving, giving and exchanging – all done freely, and in every instant, value was being poured into the universe, everyone involved benefited and we were happy, for one hot and magical night in Las Vegas.

 For more on Las Vegas hobos: http://abcnews.go.com/Nightline/las-vegas-strip-home-homeless/story?id=8652139