STYLE LeftMargin 3,RightMargin 6,TopMargin 1,BottomMargin 1 John Zube, POB 52, Berrima, NSW 2577, Australia, T. (02) 48 771436 7 March 1998 Dr. Steven Horwitz, Asst. Prof. of Economics, St. Lawrence University, Canton, N.Y. 13 617 Dear Dr. Horwitz, thanks again for letting me reproduce some of your free banking writings. See the enclosed PP 803, 1104, 1105, 1183, 1184. I do have at least one more of your fb articles on hand : Banking and Freedom in the Fifty Years of FEE, in THE FREEMAN, May 96, and intend to reproduce it in one of my next monetary freedom compilations. Alas, I have once again fallen behind with compiling such issues, updating my free banking bibliography, my alphabetical notes towards a free banking bibliography and my project to fiche the rest of the correspondence of Ulrich von Beckerath, 1882-1969, dealing mainly with monetary freedom and related subjects. A further major job would be indexing and translating them. Unless I could arrange to have the indexing and translation computerized. In spite of having a large backlog of such and other libertarian jobs already, I am still always on the lookout for more such material, either in good print-outs, or photocopies of them or in ASCIII disks that I could print out myself. Sooner or later I do hope to get around to fiche all the FEE articles on this subjects, at least whenever copyrights are not an obstacle. Well printed or typed material gets preferential treatment in my publishing, since it saves me much labour or costs me hardly any in preparing it for filming. I wish division of labour would be much better organized among those who appreciate monetary freedom, other freedom aspects and lovers of free markets generally. One of several preconditions would be a directory listing all relevant interests, a guide to all relevant projects, a growing ideas archive, a refutations file, a freedom bibliography, an alphabetized handbook, a comprehensive index and a collection of of abstracts to all the relevant literature. Electronically all efforts in such directions could be so easily combined, once they are organized. A project list with an open invitation to all interested, could do much in this direction. Electronically, and through microfiche and other affordable media, such efforts could grow fast, using all special interests, energies and resources, with each involved according to his highest priorities. I know very well that science is supposed to advance in this way through universities and academic papers. And certainly, it does, in many ways. But libertarians know also how imperfectly, if at all, their own ideas tend to be represented in these hallowed halls and publication avenues. Thus my interest in helping to build up other avenues, especially for libertarian ideas and information. Yesterday, at an IT exhibition in Sydney, I saw CD-ROMs priced commercially for as little as $ 2.75. Since they are now usually attached to computer magazines, they must, in quantities, come even much more cheaply than that, even cheaper than floppy disks, which, in spite of their cheapness, are rarely ever attached to such magazines now. According to an Australian TV report, 15.1.98, 100 million new words go onto the Internet every day. That is around 100,000 pages. Impressive in a general way. But how many of them are pro-freedom words, anti-freedom wordings or irrelevant for or against? For me the easiest and cheapest method of text publishing, making use of a PC for some aspects of it, is still to include them on one of my microfiche. However, I am also trying to promote interest in compiling freedom texts on CDs, that can be commercially pressed for as little as $ 1 each. Naturally, even more powerful media are coming up but the greatest difficulty, as I see it, still lies in getting the cooperation of e.g. those who appreciate monetary freedom to combine all the information they do have digitized on this subject or could get into this format, with a small reference library being already offered on a single CD-ROM. If filling 650 MBs with e.g. monetary freedom information sounds too ambitious, even for a small network of monetary freedom advocates, then a start could perhaps be made with filling at least a 100 MB ZIP drive disk from IOMEGA. Lateron several of these could be combined on a single CD-ROM. Even write-on CDs and the equipment for them are becoming relatively affordable, at least for single high earners. So one would not even have to pay a service bureau to do such a job for a common interest group. The easy search options that this medium would offer would tend to greatly help to advance monetary freedom ideas further. If my memory does not deceive me, Nicholoas Albery wrote to me some time ago that on the Internet a search engine could peruse 5 million words in a second. Thus, once material is digitized there is no longer much risk of any information remaining largely hidden, in some more or less obscure writings, for years to decades. Computerized translations are also promising, especially when they are afterwards edited by groups of interested people. Moreover, all the relevant texts could become much more affordable. How many texts are not acquired by interested people because of their prices in print on paper? Naturally, time to read them poses a natural limit. But once review,s abstracts, bibliophies and indexes are complete, and can be electronically searched, on could concentrate one's reading on those texts of highest interest to oneself. If an updated list were compiled of all those with monetary freedom interests and circulated among them, with an appeal to submit titles for microfiching, floppy disk publishing and common publishing on text-only CD-ROMs, and also to make such titles accessible as completely as possible online, then, I believe, much could be achieved. According to some estimates, there are now about 1 billion unemployed and underemployed in the world, with Red China alone having up to 200 million. That could lead to further inflations, bloody civil and international wars and the maintenance or establishment of dictatorships, given current ignorance of cause and cure of unemployment, inflation and stagflation. Maybe full knowledge of monetary freedom could exert an Archimedean leverage, if wide enough spread, accompanied with all the required refutations of popular errrors and myths, all in their optimal wordings and arguments, and all easily and cheaply accessible. Once unemployment rates reach 20 - 30% or more then violence is never far away nor excuses for numerous wrong and harmful "measures", in which e.g. immigrants or ethnic minorities become scapegoats. My supplementary LMP list in PP 1446 contains a proposal on how the unemployed themselves might be mobilized to work towards a solution of the problem of unemployment. But, again, organizing that involvement and achieving it for certain, would remain a major job, in spite of the inherent incentives of this project. The inherent slave mentality and the customary statism are major obstacles, so are the modern equivalents of "bread and circus". The self-help organizations of unemployed, so far existing, are mostly motivated by quite primitive, insufficient or even false ideas on the subject and might, once again, lead a guy like Hitler into power and are certainly no threat to the existing dictatorships and the powers of of central banks and their faithful. I hold as Ulrich von Beckerath did, that it would be helpful to have ready blueprints, widely enough understood, by which, within a few hours to a few days, millions of the own unemployed, as well as millions of refugees and deserters from dictatorships or aggressive armies could be fully employed, at attractive wages, paid in sound currencies. Wars could be rapidly ended or even prevented in this way. Instead of rejecting such utopican sounding proposals out of hand, we should seriously examine them, either to try to disprove them or to prove and spread them. Such options, when sufficiently proven and recognized by people specializing on such questions, could then be popularized e.g. by the above-mentioned prize competition in a self-help effort or via paper or computer games or legal or illegal experiments, well enough reported once they are successful. Under certain conditions legal prosecution could be avoided and post-facto amnesty and legalization achieved, whenever some of the laws of monetary despotism had to be broken. Personally, under certain conditions, I hold illegal monetary revolutions, very well informed and conducted, to be among the most promising prospects. Alas, so far not even general libertarian defence and revolution programmes are sufficiently discussed. Ulrich von Beckerath had finished a manuscript on properly financing liberating revolutions through monetary and financial freedom, but it was destroyed in an air raid on Berlin in 1943. Only the related dissertation by one of his friends, Gustav Holzhauer, who died probably in Stalingrad, could be published during the Nazi period, seeing that it seemingly had only military value. Title : Barzahlung in besetzten Gebieten ( Cash Payments in Occupied Territories ). Actually, quite a number of different ways have been proposed to introduce monetary freedom. Not only should all of these be listed together but all of them should be fully discussed with all their pro and con. I have still not come across again, in my still all too unordered paper collection, the final typewritten segment of his last, 5th version, still incomplete, of Professor Heinrich Rittershausen's manuscript on "Geldtheorie" ( Monetary Theory ). It may be still somewhere buried in my collection or was lost in the mail some years ago when I sent this material from Germany to my Australian address. To my limited knowledge, incomplete as this manuscript is, and its first 80 transcribed pages are, it is still the best writing on the subject. Perhaps one could get another copy of it from the Cologne University, which is supposed to have inherited his papers. I have readily on hand only photocopies of these manuscript versions, 1-5, without the final ca. 80pp transcript. That is as far as the text was finished and typewritten. Completed the work might have come to several hundred pages. But what I read of this first part appeared masterful to me. It is ironical : I tried to establish a market for such writings, especially by Ulrich von Beckerath and Heinrich Rittershausen, on microfiche at least, for the last 20 years, and have still not got around to get thousand of pages of them onto microfiche, at least in German, and then translated into English. Maybe an alphabetized handbook on monetary freedom ideas, arguments, writings and activists, no matter how incomplete the first edition would be, and no matter whether, at first, it could be only offered on microfiche and on disks or on line, might help greatly to achieve the collaboration required to get all such texts and references, resources and talents into the limelight and raise sufficient energies to put the best or the most practicable ideas into practice, soon. I would love to see a circle of monetary freedom lovers collaborating on this. E.g. each could make alphabetized notes on this subject on one or several disks. Then they could all be collected at one point, with a powerful computer, sorted there together and then distributed, as a basis to all participants, to make further such notes, to be combined next year. Would it take long to achieve a worthwhile compilation of relevant ideas, opinions and observations? Automatic indexing could also greatly help. I read this afternoon about one such programme, ISYS 5.0 for Windows 3.1 & Windows 95/NT. Alas, I have neither the hardware nor software for this at present, nor the price : $ 525. But a network of collaborators could afford such expenses and could optimally make use of them. Alas, the price is only for single users. But a single user could use this programme on all such material submitted by a network and then make the result accessible to all others on the network. Internet : www.isysdev.com. ( The Sydney Morning Herald, Sep. 30, 1997. 893, 1104, 1105, 1183, 1184, 1278, 1446, Circular March 98. PIOT, John Zube.