This reminds me of an incident from the later Roman Empire, during the reign of the Emperor Valens, a rather dimwitted and boorish, heavy-drinking fellow with a more capable elder brother (Valentinian, his co-ruler).
Some people were accused of conspiring against Valens by working a magic device, rather like an Ouija board, to find out the name of the next emperor. The device spelled out T H E O D. . .(Ammianus Marcellinus 29.1.29-32)
And everyone named Theod- immediately became a suspect. In the very Christian Greek East, Theodorus, Theodosius (the actual name of the next emperor), Theophilus, Theosebius and many others.
The equivalent of the DHS in the later Roman Empire then went after anyone who had worked magic with letters. Most magical spells (many spells have survived, written in Greek on papyrus) did something with letters.
People were arrested who merely had on amulets with letters to guard against stomach aches. Others hastened to burn their libraries, lest they be suspected of having magic books.
What will it be next, Halloween decorations?
There is a larger question with which most of you are probably familiar: why does SF traditionally ignore economics? Pointed out by Aldiss and Wingrove in Trillion Year Spree (the money quote is in my copy of The Oxford Book of Money (1986),47).
This is less and less true, yet in war SF and space colonization SF you still often wonder how it's all being paid for.
Many authors now suggest that future economics might change in some way that Marx never dreamed of. What happens if nanotech makes it possible to copy any physical object perfectly, for instance? Including money?
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