John Zube, 7 Oxley St., Berrima, NSW 2577, Australia       25 March 88

Christopher J. Budd, NEW ECONOMY, Institute, Magazine, Publications,
Hoathly Hill, West Hoathly, West Sussex, RH19 4SJ, England

Dear Christopher,
                  thanks for your letter of March 14th, received today. Since the jets doubled their speed, air mail has slowed down to about one half. The monopoly mail sorters do apparently think that they have to make up for this increase in speed. I air mail letter from England, not long ago, took 20 days!

   The four articles that I found interesting did, unfortunately, not include your own. I do not, at present have it on hand ( there are x stacks of unfilmed material around ) and thus may have to postpone replying to it some other time. While you do not seem to advocate monetary freedom in practice, at least you practice the advocacy of it in your own journal. That is an important step towards full tolerance for alternative tolerant actions, too.

   If one merely advocates one of the mainline monetary reforms, e.g. :
a) a reform of the central banking system - there are hundreds of different types,
b) a reform embodying social credit notions, not many social credit people fully agree with each other,
c) a reform based on the ideas of Silvio Gesell, - even here there are many variations,
d) the introduction of a 100 % gold standard,

then one has to expect opposition against such proposals, which has accumulated since they were first promulgated.

   If all that opposition had been combined and made easily and cheaply accessible, indexed and abstracted and had been reviewed from the standpoint of monetary freedom then, I believe, these monetary reformers would either have given up these particular reforms or advocated their realization only in a tolerant form, among volunteers, as experiments, which anyone might join later, once he is personally convinced, and from which each participant might at any time separate himself by individual secession, but which no one would be forced to join merely because he happens to live and work in the same country. Alas, most people still imagine that they are greater men and thinkers by merely designing plans for all, followers, neutrals and dissenters alike, i.e. when they adopt the dictatorial stance. At most they want it backed by a majority, as if on such questions the highest degree of enlightenment were likely to be achieved by the majority.

   Seeing how often and for how long governments have practised their monetary reforms upon the backs of their subjects, you must not be surprised if most people are rather wary of being threatened by various new monetary experiments in which they will have to participate willy nilly. If the reforms were quite clearly advocated as mere voluntaristic experiments, then at least antagonism and fears would be reduced to a minimum and one could cope with the remaining counter-arguments.

   I do not believe that there is a good point or occasion to introduce monetary reforms into ordinary political and economic conditions. During such times one can only attempt to make the best possible use of the remaining freedom of expression, information, association and assembly opportunities - and attempt to increase them by the further development of old institutions, e.g. like bulletin boards, open air speaking, discussion coffee shops, special library services, and the development of new communication and information storage and retrieval options, like micrographics, PCs and computer networks, bulletin boards and data banks.

   Here newsletters like your own have also a role to play but suffer under the old and persistent difficulties : high paper, printing and postage costs, difficulties in finding regular sales outlets, shortage of space for articles, shortage of space for permanent storage among the readers. Consider the average life-span and failure rate of such publication and how rarely they pay their way. If they do persist for a long time then this is usually only upon great personal sacrifices by the prime movers.

   The political and economic opportunities that I am interested in for the introduction of monetary freedom are : revolutions, military insurrections, large refugee streams, mass unemployment and expropriation due to massive deflation, inflation and stagflation, severe capital shortage under an exclusive paper currency. In such situations one can sometimes get away with breaking the existing very restrictive monetary legislation and one can even do this in a way that achieves its objective, without wronging or defrauding anyone. In such situations one could even obtain rapid legal changes or post facto legal sanctions of previously illegal but moral and economically rational self-help actions.

   If I lived in England, I would attempt to find out whether Henry Meulen was right in asserting towards Ulrich von Beckerath that there would be no constitutional, legal or juridical restriction against the issue of private goods and service warrants and clearing certificates, standardized and typified like money, in standard money denominations, as long as they did not promise redemption in English Pounds or in gold or resemble the nots of the Bank of England. If he was right ( I entertain considerable doubts on this, particularly seeing the age and persistence of the anti-truck legislation and jurisdiction ), then this would amount to the scandal of a large and so far missed opportunity for English monetary reformers.

   Rather than attempting to enter the inevitably dirty and turbulent waters of conventional politics, I would attempt to appeal to the remaining and revivable self-help instincts and rational and practical inclinations of modern Englishmen, whether socialists, conservatives, liberals or anarchists. It would be easy to point out that the government experts and practitioners have always failed to deliver in this sphere and that they have done and are doing great harm. It is high time for English dissenters and nonconformists claim it as their basic right to do their on thing in this sphere, following their own faiths and convictions and theories rather than those of the Bank of England and the Treasury Department.

   However, such a transformation does require the backing of an extensive and accessible and affordable literature. Otherwise ancient errors will be uncritically perpetuated and acted upon and so many mistakes will be made that there will be screams, again, for governmental controls and restrictions. In their ignorance and prejudices, many otherwise quite honest and decent people will then also become involved in monetary schemes which are deceptive, coercive, fraudulent and exploitative. The same could and would happen there as happened in the religious and ideological sphere. Undoubtedly, the total harm done by liberated monetary barbarians and savages would be much smaller than the harm done by their monopolistic, coercive and gigantic monetary machines and systems of governments but the harm would be exaggerated and might thus strenthen the position of the statists.
   Consequently, not only should all the diverse monetary reform literature be accessible but each particular monetary school should also be systematically confronted with all the arguments, references and facts opposing it and all should be made acquainted with the full monetary freedom option and the chances they would have, within it, to realize their particular pet scheme, at their own risk and expense.

   As for an article on microfiching. I will attempt to write one for you but want to point out that in the meantime you are welcome to any of those so far reproduced in various leaflets, booklets and microfiche of mine, especially in PP 707/708.

   I'm fed up with modern scientologists who keep on bombarding me with their literature, even after I protested about it. ( Well, at least I can recycle some of their envelopes. ) I had initially bought some of their paper backs and mentioned their Sydney meetings in my meeting calendar for Sydney. That was about 20 years ago. Since then they have not left me alone. I knew a number of members whom I highly respected - but for other reasons than their membership in that organization. Ron Hubbard did have some debatable social reform proposals, some of which I mentioned in my series, but modern Scientologists do not seem to discuss them at all. As for myself, I believe that I can manage well enough without the "total freedom" they offer through their auditing process and I can save quite a few dollars, too, by ignoring their efforts. Persecution arouses fanaticism and sympathies which the same cause could not rouse otherwise in many cases. The only thing that I really admire about the movement is the way they sold themselves, rather expensively, to their members. I wish I would have sold the microfiche reading and self-publishing option as successfully. Imagine how much could have been achieved if all contributions to this or to any other kind of church had been used for this kind of enlightenment!

Enclosures : 707/708, 759, 765.         PIOT, John.