From: John Zube To: Subject: Re: ToJohnZub from Dave Wilber Date: Tuesday, 11 July 2000 1:46 ----- Original Message ----- From: To: Sent: Sunday, June 25, 2000 4:50 AM Subject: To JohnZubr from Dave Wilber > John Zube: St. Louis > MO June 24, 2000 > 7 Oxley St. > Berrima, NSW > Australia 2577 Note: The address is now renamed: 35 Oxley St.( still the same block 7) or: P.O. Box 52 .... > > Dear Mr. Zube, It was good to hear from you and better to see you are on the www. JZ Note: Are you interested enough in monetary freedom options to order some of my fiche, listed on my website - or just addicted to your own notions about a supposedly ideal and one and only monetary reform? W: You said that full monetary freedom is neglected on the web, Yes it is!. I have read many things written by people condemning our moneyless monetary system and argued with them to no avail. The great majority do not want to end our slavery, they just want to change our masters OR what we call them! JZ Note: Unfortunately, what you would call true money is also only an exclusive and forced exchange media and value standard system. As a value standard a gold weight unit would mostly be much better than the government's exclusive and forced paper "standard" but as an exclusive exchange medium gold coins and 100 % covered gold certificates do have their own inherent defects and insufficiency and also, except for their believers, an insufficient moral foundation. Why should those with an almost religious aversion against gold (not my particular point!) be forced to use it as an exclusive value standard and exchange medium? Consistent libertarians would, instead, favour not only free enterprise and free choice for exchange media and clearing facilities (also without a material money, just book entries or electronic ones, mutually cancelling each other - while all kinds of sound money can be seen, in principle or essence, as practical means to facilitate anonymous clearing. How much they facilitate it can be seen at any cash register, which also accepts credit cards. The cash transaction is usually done much faster. Is a minority already sufficiently enlightened to comprehend monetary freedom options and ready to practise some of them at a suitable opportunity, when they can expect to get away with it, unpenalized and,lateron, even officially praised? W: These people work without definitions and contradict themselves. Such words as pay, spend, debt, dollar, tax, money and inflation are either undefined or misdefined, so their writings are gibberish nonsense. It seems all fail to distinguish between money and wealth. I call these people "fictional reserve fanatics". JZ Note: While I appreciate your attempt to provide a small handbook of alternative definitions, sufficiently to make me reproduce it in my series, I do not agree that you have sufficiently defined all the essential terms for monetary freedom. Instead, you represent what I might call a "100 % gold reserve" fanaticism, that excludes e.g. the gold clearing and gold for account alternative, as an option, not a prescription, that is economically sound, honest and superior as a value standard and does not preempt the "creation" or issue of sound exchange media, that reckon in this sound value standard, without obliging the issuer to accumulate and redeem equivalent amounts of gold coins. Instead, he is only obliged and interested to maintain his exchange medium at par with its nominal gold value and the redemption option is transferred from him to the free gold market, which disposes at any time over most of the gold stocks accumulated or transformable into monetary gold and not yet buried e.g. in teeth or used up in various industrial products, including many computers. Among free people there would, naturally, many other exchange media and value standard options that they should be able to freely choose for their own exchanges, regardless of what you or I do think about their preferences. But none of their preferences, either, should be imposed upon anyone. I do intend to provide myself an alphabetical handbook that would survey and try to explain all essential terms, practices and experiences with monetary freedom from all sources available to me, to the extent that I find the time and energy to sum them up, review or extract them. A complete encyclopaedia of monetary freedom would require many contributors and mutual corrections of remaining errors. W: "Money expropriates wealth" said the late Merrill Jenkins Monetary Realist whom I knew well. The Fed corroborated him with: "Inflation reduces the wealth of money holders in proportion to their holdings of money". JZ Note: That applies only to forced and exclusive money issued by the government. I would not do it the honour to call it "money". It is rather a wrongful and harmful caricature of "money". The monetary freedom alternatives to it do not expropriate wealth but greatly help to increase and maintain it. The monies of monetary freedom can be very varied but would all be optional and market rated, but would tend to be circulating only to the extent that they could, at least locally, be kept at or very close to their nominal value expressed in the optional value standard which they are using. W: They admit money is not wealth. JZ Note: Some kinds of ticket or shop foundation money can well represent that form of wealth which consists in ready for sale goods and services, which constitute, in essence, the working capital of any enterprise and they could and should be freely used, while using any value standards that the issuers and their acceptors find acceptable, at least for the time being, to pay all or much of all local wages and salaries, the fees of tradesmen and professionals and salaries, also entrepreneurial profits and, upon their reflux, pay for the goods and services wanted by these people. They could be issued in very short term loans to the employers, discounting their short term claims against wholesalers for their already sold goods, with this managed by an issue and credit department established by local shops. Of such options I found nothing in your writings. You would probably oppose them and not grant other people the freedom to practise them. Future goods, still to be produced, cannot be used as a basis for currency, except when they are very near future goods, like e.g. the lettuce or other vegetables produced and ready for sale tomorrow and next week, perhaps also next month, or at most for something like 3 months, at your green grocer. Likewise, the fresh milk supply, bread supply, water and electricity supply you can not only expect, normally, today, but in the near future. But capital goods, medium and long term, or even immediately for sale ones, like houses, cannot be the basis for sound currency issues upon them, althought the can be and are often the basis for sound security issues. W: Do you have any of Jenkins books? JZ Note: I have only those of his titles and related ones that I fiched and listed in my website as part of my literature list. W: There is a web site for his works but it was not working the last time I checked. It is www.cft.net.com/members/chrishum/moneystuff.html Verify through: chrishum@cft.net JZ Note: I do have xyz websites to look up and contribute and upload myself, if and when I do get around to it. Thanks for this additional hint. W: You are a rare one, concerned about legal tender. JZ Note: We do have this interest in common. I was introduced to it by Ulrich von Beckerath back in 1952. He was the foremost expert on it in Germany and perhaps still is, for the world. You might find reading his 3 books helpful. I reproduced them in English, too. W: It is the source of all the world's ills. JZ Note: While it is a major contributor to many of the world's ills,directly or indirectly, I would not blame it for e.g. most cancers, colds or "modern and scientific" mass murder devices, although, through the inflations and deflations and stagflations that it makes possible, it makes also many wars, revolutions and civil wars and terrorism likely and has thus contributed to the building and maintenance of ABC mass murder devices and the cancers due to radioactive pollution from nuclear tests or the operation of nuclear reactors. W: Legal tender laws make it possible for the first users of legal tender to get everything while they pay for nothing. JZ Note: Legal tender does not apply to the payment of imports from other countries. They are free to refuse what is local Legal Tender or to discount it. If it were limited to paying taxes and paying government spending with it, while the rest of the economy would be free to use other exchange media and value standards, then this limited and internal clearing certificate,issued and spent to anticipate near future tax revenues, payable in it,could even be useful and honest (using e.g. a gold weight clearing standard) that only the government would be obliged to accept at par at any time when payments are made for tax debts with it, would be beneficial and rightful,to the extent that once can consider government taxes and spending to be rightful. Moreover, then it would not disturb other spheres of circulation and payment communities, as it does under a comprehensive Legal Tender system. There can be sound and can also be unsound "tax foundation" and tax foundation money. These options are not discussed by you, if I remember right. The system would work also under voluntary taxation and within in the insurance sphere, as contribution and premium payment money. A government railway or transport system could also issue and withdraw such a currency and so could private transport systems and other service providers, issuing e.g. water bill and electricity bill or gas money. All such transactions could be voluntary, rightful and beneficial, without a single ounce of gold being transferred, although all participants might fully and exclusively (not necessarily so) reckon only in gold weight units, in all these transactions, issues and their reflux, market rating and temporary and limited discounts of such issues against their nominal value standard. W: "Payment" is not mentioned in our legal tender statutes". JZ Note: The monetary theory of all monetary legislation is rather poor and incomplete and contains many false and wrongful assumptions. It is part of the monetary religion of the people, of which the central bank presidents and committe members are the high priests. It is no more rational than most religions are. W: In communist countries, the few control the many with legal tender, credit, fear, lies, illusions, disease and amusements that in inhibit serious thought. We all live in communist countries. Communism never died, it just changed its name to 'democracy'. JZ Note: Long before the communist totalitarian regimes fell most "democratic", "republican" and constitutional monarchy governments had, in essence, adopted the monetary despotism of the Communist Manifesto and its comments. Via this feature and others of the 10 point communist platform, many of the supposedly anti-communist countries have long been, to that extent, communist ones. On this I would agree with you. But there remain some important differences. W: The pope travels the world promoting democracy. Democratic process got Jesus crucified! JZ Note: The Pope is not the only promoter of democracy. And majoritarian or representative despotism has not monopoly on the idea of democracy. The best version of democracy that I know of is one that assures, as far or as little as any territorial State can, that the rights of minorities and individuals, to the extent that they are known and appreciated, are respected. The majority would anyhow get its own will, if it is somehow free to choose for itself. But its right to dominate individuals and minorities is at least intended to be limited by constitutions and bills of rights or human rights drafts. However governmental and popular notions on these are rather flawed and incomplete. W: My definition of "pay" is to deliver the service or substance that is owed. If you owe one dollar in the U.S., you owe 371 1/4 grains of silver in coin form. To pay one dollar, you must deliver that amount of silver or its gold equivalent. Our Coinage Act of 1792 fixed the dollar as this weight of silver and it provided a penalty of DEATH for officers of the mint who participate in debasing our gold and silver coins. Those wise congressmen knew that unrestrained counterfeiters could overthrow their republic. JZ Note: What is owed in payment is whatever the contract between free people states, not what some constitution or legislation orders both parties to use. U.S. monetary Acts are not obligatory prescriptions for the monetary transactions of the world, although the world might learn also from its mistakes and its better clauses. Would they have introduced central banking, the issue monopoly and legal tender, all too early and for too long, if they had been wise? Could they not have outlawed monetary despotism much more clearly than they did, so that no misinterpretation by courts and the Supreme Court would have been possible? Wise congressmen and legislators are a novelty to me. You know any? How would YOU define "pay" ? - Under monetary freedom all parties are free to determine what they consider to be a) sufficiently liquid and sound alternative means of payment for them and b) what they consider to be sufficiently sound value standards for their payments. I do not set myself up a s monetary and value standard despot and declare: you ought to use only such means of payment and value standards and clearing avenues that I do consider to be quite sound. Full freedom of contract in this sphere, too. This would be helped by sufficient publicity on all aspects of monetary freedom theory and practice. Full monetary freedom among all consenting adults. The free market would provide much more in variety than most people are able or willing to imagine now. What kinds I would prefer and recommend I have often enough stated in my series and intend to state in my future handbook - if I do get around to compile it. W: With the passage of the Federal Reserve act of 1913, Karl Marx's fifth plank was implemented and congress provided presses, paper, ink and labor for counterfeiters! JZ Note: While the Reserve Bank System, like any other existing central bank in the world, does inflate its monopolised and forced currency and is enabled to do so through its legal issue monopoly and Legal Tender legislation and the ficticious paper value standard that it is legally obliged to uphold - the notes, are still called dollars, even when reduced in purchasing power to a tiny fraction - they do hardly "counterfeit" their OWN issues, they merely issue more and more, are legally enabled to do so and use this opportunity to issue their "requisitioning certificates" which all in the open internal market are legally obliged to accept and accept at their nominal value in settlement of all debts. One can over-issue and depreciate one's own I.O.U.'s but one can hardly "counterfeit" them. Among monetary reformers, too, their own terminology is among their worst enemies. It confuses them, too, not only their opponents. w: In the same year, Marx's second plank was implemented with the fraudulent imposition of an income tax, not to finance government but to regulate our consumption by regulating our use of legal tender and credit. JZ Note: Not to finance government? What other income sources does government have than e.g. compulsory taxes, borrowing upon future incomes from tax slaves and direct confiscations of earnings and properties, in addition to some fees and charges for some monopolized government services. w: Cancer serves the same function as any tax. JZ Note: While almost taxation and government activity is parasitical, counter-productive, wrongful and misdirecting, I would not say a) that it really functions or b) that it is comparable to a spontaneous cancer development. It is legislated into existence and maintained by law and police force and bureaucratic machines. w: When governments get everything for absolutely nothing with credit. JZ Note: So why does the government bother to legally introduce taxes, raise them again and again, when, without it, it could raise, according to you, as much as it liked in income, just by issuing its "credit". The term credit for tribute collections is also rather misleading. I would have credited you with more insight into what is really happening. So the government is raising tribute payments from us just to annoy us and Impoverish us? w: Bank credit is the cancer of civilization. JZ Note: There are all kinds of different credits, sound and unsound ones, governmental and private ones, short, medium and long term ones. Not all are wrongful, harmful, and misconceived. Turnover credit is sound and honest and helpful if properly granted and withdrawn in exchange media and with value standards suitable for it. Credits by private savings banks, credit unions etc. in various loans to honest and productive debtors are rightful and economical in numerous cases. Credits by a central bank are not, because it is not entitled to dispose of the savings, earnings, properties, goods and services of the country. Reduced to voluntary acceptance the limits of their circulation would soon be appearing and could not be exceeded by it. Other banks are not free, at present, to issue notes. The opinion that they are free to "create" money or credit out of thin air, is a fiction. If they could, they certainly would, to an unlimited extent, each of them. What they do often, and what most people do not comprehend as a sound option, is to facilitate clearing between their customers, or mutual cancellation of debt. For this no money form or substance is required but just a pen or a key-stroke. I owe you the value of 100 ozs of gold and you owe me the value of 100 ozs of gold. To settle our mutual account not a single ounce of gold has to be owned by either of us. We would just agree to mutually cancel out debt. To demand that each would have to possess 100 ozs of gold, to make this possible, is nonsense, a complete misunderstanding. w: Credit is inflation. Negotiable notes are inflation. JZ Note: Nonsense again. Credit by a central bank CAN be inflationary but need not be. In post-war Germany, for a few years, there was zero inflation, although credit continued to be granted and was repaid. Negotiable notes can cause inflation only if they are given Legal Tender power, i.e., their acceptance and their valuation is made compulsory. Otherwise, their overissue would rapidly depreciate them in a free market and lead to their refusal. w: There is no measureable labor in a one hundred dollar bill -- OR of any denomination. JZ Note: Wrong again. At the end of the Big German Inflation, 1914-1923, the printing costs for the newly issued notes came already to 48% of their purchasing power and all printing presses worked overtime to produce still more of them. Long before they would have cost more to produce than they would be worth in purchasing power, their production would have had to be stopped. But possibly, in the post WW II inflation in Hungary, even higher production costs were reached. Any printing is not free of costs and the costs are measurable and are measured and often deter people from ordering any or much printing done for them. Even a rightful and truthful case is not served by fallacies, mis-statements and exaggerations. W: If government takes 5 dollars from you and gives you a note that promises to pay and you spend the note while they spend the specie, 10 units of production are being bid in the marketplace where only 5 exists. The other 5 (the note) are inflation, nothing offered for something. JZ Note: Why not pay attention to the fact that for decades now no government has promised anyone (except some other central banks) to redeem its notes in anything else than other of its own notes? And why ignore that other means of payment than promisory notes have often and for long periods been issued and freely accepted, without depreciation, although they were not legal tender and could not at any time be fully redeemed in gold? What most "gold bugs" tend to overlook is that any strong demand for any kind of currency can keep up its value at par with its nominal standard, can even temporarily impart an agio to it, because paper means are so convenient means of payment. Such a demand would come from e.g. short term debtors looking for exchange media to pay their debts with. It can come from people "owing" taxes, whose non-payment could drive them into bankruptcy. It could come from consumers, wanting to pay for goods and services. Compared with these demands for sound or at least acceptable means of exchange, the demand by note holders for redemption in gold is comparably rare, irregular and insignificant, except in times of crises and when more notes are in circulation than can be redeemed in the gold coins available to the issuer. Thinking only in terms either of legal tender money or of an exclusive gold currency and standard, can make you overlook all the natural and inherent laws of monetary circulation, of credit, clearing and value reckoning. All such remarks show how far you are still removed from comprehending and expressing the laws of monetary and financial freedom. W: My definition of inflation is non production accepted for production or nothing accepted for something. You could go to an auction without a dime in your pocket and bid prices to the sky. When you stop bidding and another party pays or "pays" a sky high price, it is because you were offering nothing for something. The nothing you were offering was the inflation that raised the price. JZ Note: You still do not understand Legal Tender (forced acceptance, forced value, combined with a monopoly for the issue of an exchange medium and for the national value standard) and its effect upon a currency so organized and mismanaged. - For every issuer there is to be an acceptor, discounter or one who refuses it. Only legal tender cannot be refused or discounted by potential acceptors and its monopoly position forces all people in the country to accept it if they want to engage in monetary transactions in the official market. Something that is not of value to the potential acceptor will not be voluntarily accepted by him. Thus it cannot act as an inflationary currency when it has no inherent or given or guarantied value, given to it by the issuer. However, via legal tender and the issue monopoly government can enforce the acceptance of its scrip (often a waste of valuable resources like good paper and ink, as Mises said) at face value, although it is depreciating or already depreciated. Without that force, or the delusion that it does exist, no inflation is possible. Without it good, alternative and competing currencies would drive out the bad ones. Your use of the term "accepted" is entirely misleading in this context. Forced currency is the opposite of an optional and acceptable and sound and honest currency. W: Credit is nothing and everyone today offers it for something. JZ Note: Some definitions are worse than none! Credit is something valuable, not badly defined as the present value of a future good and not everyone is able to offer and receives it, to the regret of all too many. Under monetary freedom many more people would be able to offer TURNOVER credits, with their own goods supply and service potential as a backing and reflux assurance and, ultimately, turnovers and thereby output and savings would be so increased that capital would also build up rapidly and could be made available for productive investment and at lower and lower interest rates, capital owners offering it at competitive prices in sound credits. W: What the victims fail to see is that government has unlimited credit, gets everything for nothing, spends nothing and all wars are financed with bank credit that kills our sons. JZ Note: No government has unlimited credit. No government can raise taxation rates without limits and without reducing its revenues. No government can endlessly continue and increase inflation. And practically no bank today would voluntarily finance with its deposits from its savers and current account holders anything so unproductive and counter-productive as a war. But the governments' central banks, with their monopolies and powers, often legally granted for this purpose, are able, willing and obliged to do so, for all too long periods. That you cannot distinguish between a coercive and monopolistic central bank and a private one that is subject to central bank regulation and banking laws and regulations, and may deal only in the forced and exclusive currency of the own government and to a limited extent in the same kind of currencies of some other central banks, and banks of issue and other banks under full monetary and financial freedom, is disappointing to me, particularly regarding a man who has seen the importance of making and publicising sound definitions and then contents himself by offering and publicizing false ones, regardless of better definitions and criticism by others. W: I have ran newspaper and internet ads offering 100 pounds of money to EACH person who just describes the money that government spends and I get no takers! What really bothers me is that almost no one will repeat my offer. JZ Note: You haven't even clearly stated what your offer is? Do you mean 100 pounds of current U.S. dollar notes, printed on paper? Do you mean 100 pounds of fine gold or silver? Do you mean English pounds? And what do you mean by a "description" of government money? A verbal description of its graphics and inscriptions? A photocopy of it? Or a theory of the value, lack of value, flaws, foundation, lack of foundation and flaws in the foundation,cover, reflux and issue arrangements and characteristics of government monopoly money? Everyone who reads your stuff will be aware that any but your own false answers are likely to be rejected or misunderstood. W: Governments spend nothing! So their whole budgets and bureaucratic spending machines and huge salary, supplyer bills and hand-outs and subsidies and contracts are just mere illusions? No one is being paid anything in the welfare state and no one has to pay anything to them? JZ Note: What planet do you come from? What nuthouse did you escape from? You are a self-made victim of your own false definitions - and expect others to accept them uncritically. I do not value your judgment sufficiently to be polite. Nor do I entertain any hope to be able to convert you to accept at least some sound notions on money, credit, clearing and banking. We just have an opposition to legal tender in common and even on this we differ much. See my list of different forms of legal tender at the end of my little booklet on this and you will find many more disagreements. W: Those who first get the nothing for nothing will offer any amount of nothing to get something for nothing. Those who offer something for nothing, believing the nothing is something, will try to get all of the nothing they can and prices go up. Those who get everything for nothing become government no matter who is elected. JZ Note: Legal tender money is not just "got". It is legally authorized, printed and then issued in legally prescribed or permitted channels and its victims are forced to accept it as if it were full and agreeable payment. The only assurance which they get through this monopoly money is that they can likewise force it upon others. But they did not get it for nothing. They had to sell the government something for it, e.g. supplies or their labour. Even the Central Bank has its expenditures for the engraving work, the paper, the ink and the printing job. Its whole organization is monstrously large and has an enormous salary bill, apart from the building costs and maintenance and the mountains of office equipment and paper used. Bureaucracy comes nowhere cheaply or free of charge. And its issue are not entirely useless to the recipients. At least they can bribe some politicians or bureaucrats with them and can rid themselveds of their tax "debts" with them. That is valuable to any tax slave. You seem drunk on your misconceptions. Each issue of government legal tender money offers also a valuable lesson to all its recipients, who are able to read and think and could come to some sound conclusions about this kind of "money", if only they bothered to do so. Since you do no, do not expect others to do so. W: "One of mankind's most characteristic traits is the desire to get something for nothing". - Nathaniel Hawthorne (1804-1864). JZ Note: The chances this provides to a crook are limited by the disinclination of others to give voluntarily something they value themselveds for something they do not value. Any optional money that is useless to a potential acceptor would be refused by him and could not be forced upon him. That is the nature of competitive and market rated money, privately or cooperatively issued, in a businesslike way, largely backed by short term and sure credits and their certificates or accounts, and the goods and service provision capacity by the issuers or borrowers, which assure the reflux of these credits in a short period. W: "Those who issue and control money and credit determine the policies of government and hold the destinies of the people in the hollow of their hands". -- Sir Reginald McKenna, former president, Midland Bank of England. JZ Note: The issue and control of the reflux of money and credit under monetary freedom is very different to the issue of money and the granting of credit under monetary despotism. Freedom lovers should pay attention to these significant differences. Those with despotic monetary powers do, indeed & to a large extent, determine and permit wrongful policies and can victimize whole populations. Those merely free to issue optional and market rated currencies, with optional value standards, depend upon the acceptance of their potential customers. Consumer sovereignty would prevail there, too, and grant the issuers no more "power" than barbers and plumbers, greengrocers and tailors or general stores posses over their customers. The free and competitive currency provides would either provide good enough currencies, cheaply enough or would go out of business. However, they could make their issues attractive and sound enough to facilitate not only their own exchanges, sales, labour and sale of their services but that of many others, as well, who would use their sound exchange media without being issuers themselves. As many consumer goods and services could then be traded as are produced and offered, without any monetary difficulties. And this could be achieved without any gold hoards, gold coins, gold covers and redemption funds of obligations, although some might be willing to trade only under such terms. Most would soon be able and willing to do without this self-chosen and beloved restriction because they would have many other sound options which would not limite them as much or at all in any honest trading. W: "Whoever controls the volume of money in any country is absolute master of all commerce and industry". - - U.S. President James A. Garfield. (1831-1881). A bullet silenced him. Can there be absolute masters without any slaves? -- only when the people control the volume by spending or not spending lawful coins. JZ Note: Under monetary and financial freedom a large number of private and competitive currencies and of their own capital securities would be in control of their own currency issues and of the own transactions conducted in these or other currencies that are acceptable to them as well because they can use them in transactions with others, who might not accept the own currency. But if you mean under control the monopolistic and coercive control of a forced and exclusive currency issued by a government then you see SOME limited truth in this remark. But why should people, especially students of money options, be prepared to accept such a money at all, rather then resist it to the utmost? Why should they not consider and finally introduce one or several of many sound alternatives to it. Why should they grant the term "money" only to the money of monetary despotism? Moreover, not merely the volume of money is involved but its value. Its volume could and should greatly increase, parallel to an increased amount of transactions facilitated by cash payments. This can and will happen, for optional money, without the least loss of purchasing power or depreciation of the value standard of soundly issued and retrieved private currencies. Each issue stream, no matter how large, would be followed in a short time by an as large reflux stream, which would assure that the issues would remain at par with their nominal value while they locally circulate before they stream back. Even Adam Smith recognized this value guaranty for an inherently valueless paper money, in a largely ignored passage in his The Wealth of Nations. In other passages he forgot about this monetary aspect, as you are inclined to do about many aspects of money. W: Legal tender is legal slavery. JZ Note: Again, that is too loose a terminology. Politicians and bureaucrats are paid for their counter-productive labours also in "Legal Tender". They do not feel like slaves as a result. When they depreciated, through their monetary despotism, their State currency, they just vote or allocate higher salaries, payable in depreciated Legal Tender, for themselves. They may enslave, or, rather, expropriate and tax many others by this means, but for them it means a degree of personal liberation and independence - at the expense of their victims. Do not forget, either, that many of the victims of Legal Tender hanker to get jobs in which they are highly paid in it. They do not necessarily save in it but rather go in debt in it and thus partly dissolve or reduce their debts by paying them off in depreciated paper money. The last recipient is the most deprived one in the process. They do not feel as slaves, although, they, too, as victims of monetary despotism and could, usually, do much better for themselves under full monetary freedom. Even the devil should not be slandered. W: "Payment" is not mentioned in our legal tender statutes. JZ Note: The essence of Legal Tender is that by means of it a legal and juridical payment is asserted to have existed with the handing over of legal tender in payment of a debt. This "payment" is presumed to have happened regardless of how depreciated the paper money or coins have become and regardless of whether the paper money is or is not fully or partly redeemable in rare metal. The rare metal redemption option has been made legally and juridically fictitious already for many years. At most governments still offered to purchase gold at their price, for many years - but for many previous years already they were no longer prepared to SELL gold at their ficticious price. An apt name for legal tender paper money is a "requisitioning certificate" forced upon an involuntary supplier of goods or services, under the pretence that he would thereby be immediately and fully paid or could expect a full payment lateron, upon presentation of this certificate. Unfortunately, most governments did not even accept their own requisitioning certificates at more than their paper money value or accepted their other "securities", when due, in payment of taxes and other dues. W: You seem to use "currency" loosely. The only thing our Congress made "current as money" was silver coins. JZ Note: Who is "Congress" or who was? Why should I have to pay ANY attention to its legal verbiage? Whatever the congress of a small revolutionary country then did does not describe and define the natural laws of currencies and the potentials of all kinds of exchange media and avenues and of value standards money for the world. The monetary history of the American Revolution and of the later Constitutional Republic is full of monetary crimes and mistakes, all legalized and juridically approved for all too long and not prevented by sound and clear clauses in the Constitution and their clear interpretation in jurisdiction, universities and literature. American monetary history, to the extent that it was legally prescribed and arranged, is far from being an ideal model for the world. And its monetary theory was always very flawed, for which, you, as a follower of it, are all too good an example yourself, with your own false monetary notion. W: We do not use currency today. JZ Note: So what do we use? Fiddlesticks? Monopoly game money? Children's toy money? Government's false pretence, flawed, coercive and monopolized money? Are we free to use it or to refuse it? What would happen if we refused it, individually, in groups, or altogether? What makes it, unfortunately, still "current" among us? Why is it still considered as money, as cash, as currency, by most people, without monetary theory or knowledge of monetary legislation? Correct is only that we do not use competitive and honest and reliable currency. Instead, we are forced to use a monopolized, dishonest and depreciated and depreciating currency. But it is still a currency, although a very bad one and one that would disappear under free competition or would be reduced to a sound currency with sound tax foundation or, under voluntary taxation within volunteer communities, to a competing paper currency with a voluntary contribution-foundation, like the currencies which large private and social insurance companies might come to issue. - Why issue as nonsensical statements. But, indeed, we do not use what you would want to prescribe as the only sound currency. Rothbard, too, proclaimed anything but 100% covered gold certificates or coins as fraudulent. That was his wrong opinion. It was not describing the nature of all kinds of sound money but just his false and all too limited notion of it. W: All it took to enslave the world was to convince the people that paper is money or paper is currency. All it takes to keep us enslaved is to keep the majority convinced that we are free. JZ Note: It is merely a convention, but a convenient one, to follow up a full stop with a new sentence beginning with a capital letter. I get a bit sick of having to correct your punctuation, too. Take more care in your premises, thinking, wordings, definitions and conclusions. - The whole world is not totally enslaved today, nor, to the extent that it is, by "money","paper money" or even "legal tender paper money". There are other ways to reduce the liberty of others coercively or fraudulently and quite legally and constitutionally. E.g. territorialism keeps us in national prisons and sets us against each other in civil wars national wars and other unjustified and unnecessary infighting and more or less victimized by mutual domination efforts based upon the wrong premise that territorialism is justified and necessary. W: As for "hoarding", it is no business of government if people hide their property to protect it from thieves. JZ Note: I do not object to "hoarding" like some people do, who consider it to be a criminal offence. What is yours you may hoard, give away or trade away, rightfully, as you please. But, under a system of monetary despotism extensive hoarding by government departments or private persons and groups can lead to a shortage of currency, a currency famine that can lead to a severe economic crisis, with numerous bankruptcies and mass unemployment, prolonged by the upkeep of monetary despotism and the continuance of monetary ignorance on monetary freedom options and techniques and self-help measures. In these cases, too, I would not blame and try to penalize the hoarders, as most of the Gesellians want to do, within their form of monetary despotism. Instead, I follow the German School on Monetary Freedom and want to make people independent of the hoarders, permitting them to replace any hoarded money immediately by their own free and sound issues, as long as they are needed. And free monetary issues will turn out to be permanently needed for monetary despotism never supplies enough sound money while supplying a surplus of unsound and depreciating money. W: When we used gold coins, many were called "dirty hoarders". When we are all plundered with promiseless paper, those who accumulate it are called "shrewed investors". Government will stop at nothing to keep us from offering nothing for something, even if it means killing us off with abortion, sugar, aspartame, fluoride, tobacco, milk and phony wars. JZ Note: Governments generally have a vested interest in maintaining and increasing the number of their tax slaves (including the inflation victims) rather then killing them off in various ways. But, as mere pawns in their hands, they also are prepared to waste us in their power games. Rare metals fall for me like other goods under property rights. And one's property one can use, neglect or abuse as one likes to, without infringing anybody else's rights. Government's Legal Tender is NOT without its kind of "promise". In typical political territorial fashion, it authorizes you to rob your creditors with it, likewise. The law and government judges will be on your side. To some dishonest people it is a valuable promise. And since they themselves are also creditors and dishonestly and incompletely paid in this way, to pass this loss on to some extent to others, is one of their remaining permitted ways to survive. Are we offering always nothing for something and are all the others idiotic enough to accept that kind of unequal trade? Legal tender money is not "nothing". On the contrary, it is something that is very harmful, like a strong poison. It is a permit to cheat others as you have been cheated. It allows you to lie and pretend to others as you have been lied to and pretended to. Nevertheless, most peoplel have not pondered the wrongs and damages of legal tender money but take it for granted instead - or misunderstand it in several ways, like you do yourself, still. Only rarely is it governments that do abort the unborn. Red China still is and India was among the exceptions. Most abortions are done upon insistence by the mother or father or both and with the aid of medical experts. I believe governments would mostly like to see them born and turn into tribute payers or conscripts etc. Sugar, milk and tobacco are not forced upon us, nor are all or most wars phony. You are all too careless with many of your statements. Monetary science deserves a better treatment. W: They said their spurious specie would keep its value "if there were fewer people bidding (nothing for something) against each other". JZ Note: I heard that remark only from you. But, indeed, government "experts", after forcefully and monopolistically inflating the currency,through the system of monetary despotism, often want to restrict or reduce our spending options for it, as if we were to blame or to be held responsible for their over-issues. They also recommend a higher productivity, to give some more value to their tokens, as if all producers were morally obliged to exchange their output only for such tokens, while morally they are obliged only to accept at face value their own IOUs. And, naturally, goods and services cannot be as easily multiplied as printed notes and their nominal values. W: Our former Secretary of Defense, Robert, Strange McNamara said there are many ways to make the death rate increase. JZ Note: I am not prepared to accept him as an expert on anything, least of all on rightful and efficient defence and currencies. But what has his opinion on death rates and how they could be increased to do with the currency question? If he or his cohorts made us and others die off faster, then there would be less users for the government's paper money and less producers, so the value of the governments paper money would depreciate even faster. So what has this got to do with "the price of fish"? W: I will attach a list of quotes, titled How Long shall We Live. JZ Note: I don't want prophecies but sound life extension options. W: I will send you a few things via snail mail too. JZ Note: Hopefully these statements will be more correct. W: There are only two possible economic systems; barter and slavery. God commanded a barter system with: "Thou shalt not steal". Our Constitution mandates a barter system with: "No state shall make any Thing but gold and silver coins a tender in payment of debt", Article 1, Section 10. JZ Note: As a monetary reformer I would have expected you to have discovered by now that a monetary economy lies exactly between a barter and a slave economy and liberates us from the evils of both, to the extent that it introduces full montary freedom. To the extent that it is still tied to barter or the slavery involved in monetary despotism it is not something that deserves the name of "economic system". It is then, rather, an anti-economic system. As an intermediary exchange medium gold coins, nuggets or gold dust are much more than barter. They are already a monetary exchange medium that makes much primitive barter outdated and very inconvenient by comparison. Slavery, too, can hardly be classed as an "economic system", at least not from the position of the slaves. It is, rather, a system of systematic and coercive exploitation and oppression. Can you mention a single sane economist who recommends it as an economic system? Or one who recommend barter as an economic system, preferable to a monetary or clearing one? W: God promised long life if we refrained from using unjust weights. De.25:13-15. Our dollar was fixed by law as a weight of silver. JZ Note: None of the thousands of different Gods, which men invented for themselves. has ever preserved their monopolized and forced currencies any better than any of their rulers and central banks have, or any of the churches and sects worshipping any of these Gods. I for one do not accept any of the Christian holy writs as sound reference works on monetary theory and practice, either. Nor do I believe that anyone who did use, e.g. in black market transactions, sound value standards only, was thereby prevented from dying an early death. Did any law really FIX the value of the dollar in anything? How come this "fixture" disappeared, and with it most of the value of the dollar? And you must be aware by now, that silver weight units have also become one of the relatively unstable and depreciating values. So this choice was certainly not the best one. On the other hand, seeing the relative abundance of silver, compared with gold, and the notion that the value standard metal should also be used as an exclusive exchange medium, it was not the worst choice as an exchange medium. But that one tiny nation once adopted it so for itself does not necessarily make it ideal now, for the world, in this form. W: All divinity schools and the whole world operate with weightless dollars, pounds, pesos, pesetas, francs, lira, marks, etc. JZ Note: One of the great advantages of many sound exchange media, value standards and clearing as well as credit options lies precisely in this that their weight and volumes are very small and in some cases reduced to zero,compared with barter goods, including the rare metals used as intermediate barter goods in a semi-monetary way. Not loss of weight makes paper money less valuable but loss of value, via the over-issue of such paper money, made possible by legal tender, the issue monopoly and the monopolized value standard that is involved. W: "We have world government now (1979), our monetary system would not work if all the world's bankers were not in collusion." - Merrill Jenkins, and I say, AMEN! JZ Note: Luckily, we do not yet have a single central bank and currency for the whole world. And we are free of any world government in many other ways, too. Our monetary system does not function or function well enough to deserve the name of a "monetary system". It prevents sound exchange media and value standards from coming into existence and becoming predominant. It drives out sound money via legal tender and the money monopoly and assures the survival of unsound exchange media and value standards. It is not the world's bankers who passed the monetary laws of all existing territorial nations but the supposed monetary experts, those recognized and hired by governments, and the vested interest of governments, who do know that via open taxation and confiscation they could not finance much of their over-spending e.g. on welfare, bureaucratic pet projects and aggressive wars. The world's bankers are also largely among the victims of monetary despotism, not only among its favourites and protegees. And, most of them not being note-issuing bankers, I do not consider them to be "the full quid", either, i.e., sufficiently informed, about all the important aspects of banking. They are confined to trading in the government's monopoly and forced currency and clerical administrators of all dealings in these currencies, in accordance with the extensive governmentment legislation on this subject. They are not free entrepreneurs but mere subjects, too. If they had sufficient sense then they would, in their own and in the common interest, organize a monetary freedom revolution. But they are too ignorant and prejudiced and set in their dependent ways to attempt to do so. And they do not have the money creation and credit creation powers that you and others imagine them to have. I doubt that you will ever bother to attempt to enlighten yourself sufficiently about your own monetary freedom options and those of others. You seem to content yourself to just subscribe to and repeat a different set of monetary prejudices than does the man in the street and the government's supposed monetary experts. Unfortunately, there exists as yet no reliable reference work that collects all false notions on monetary questions and confronts them with each other, with their refutations and with the truths and facts and reliable references on the matter. As it is, you are just representing one among many small sects in the small army of monetary reformers and still very far from comprehending and striving towards full monetary freedom. I have little hopes for you in this respect. You do not really try to think things thru but content yourself with some superficial phrases and false premises in all too many cases. I am only grateful to you for forcing my to make at least some counter-statements that comes closer to the truth on such matters, as I see it. But even these will be of some value only if combined with many other of the better views in an alphabetized reference work, that refers to all better statements and refutations that are still required. W: Dave Wilber See attachment---if you can not open, I will cut and paste. JZ Note: I could not open your attachments with my Win Zip program. I get the message: There was an error in opening this document. File does not begin with 10/0 PDF-! The following is coded gibberish that was attached to your above text: ------------------------------------------------------------------------- > ࡱ>    >  Root EntryF ͿMatOST෻Ϳ`ͿMMMN0z  ND > FMicrosoft WorksMSWorksWPDocS T>yz?    @@=/d wt T Then you message goes on: W: HAS THE U.N. CONQUERED THE U.S.? JZ Note: Again, what has that got to do with the price of fish? What makes this remark relevant to monetary freedom? Has the U.N. ever gained a clear-cult military victory or achieved a full and lasting liberation or the protection even of its own flawed declaration of human rights anywhere? Where are the occupying forces of the U.N. in the U.S.? All kinds of wrong notions are involved here, which I do not share, although I am an enemy of the Disunited Governments, misnamed United Nations, as well. W: "Those unaware are unaware of being unaware" - Merrill Jenkins, Monetary Realist. JZ Note: O.K., so the uninformed are uninformed, also about being uninformed and the stupid are stupid and the prejudiced are prejudiced. So what else is new? W:If you make a list of all that would happen if America was conquered, no matter what you put on the list, ALL HAS BEEN DONE! While you wait for the perfidious press to tell you, they were the first casualty! The one thing conquerors do not have to do is to boast of their accomplishments. JZ Note: I know of quite a few libertarian and anarchist small presses in the U.S., all still "unconquered". Even the mass media do not always toe the government line. Not all freedom has disappeared in the U.S., although all rights and liberties are greatly threatened and many still suppressed there, as well,as in all other territorial countries or nations. W: Long before 50,000 young Americans died in Korea under the pretext of "halting communist expansion", ALL ten planks of Marx's Communist Manifesto were enforced in America by members of the BRITISH created American Bar Association.That war was financed NOT with taxes but with CREDIT from the BRITISH created Federal Reserve which implemented Marx's fifth plank. JZ Note: All that you said after America exists only in your imagination. The avalanche of U.S. laws was quite sufficient to achieve this absurd result. The Bank of England may have served as a model for the Reserve Bank System but neither it nor the Reserve Bank was a creation of all British people. Moreover, is any "credit" granted by any central bank, a genuine credit, e.g. a voluntary and temporary transfer of privately owned real values in form of certificates, to other persons, under certain and agreed upon conditions, favourable to both sides? The very fact that there are so many and quite different conspiracy theories - as well as other religions and sects, should make us suspicious of the truth contents of all of them. W: The Federal Reserve wrote that their system "works only with credit" -- Keeping Our Money Healthy (keeping THEIR credit healthy). They also said their money (credit) would keep its value "if there were fewer people bidding against each other." - ibid (J.Z.: ???) WHOSE system do(es) state and federal governments use? Does cancer leave fewer people bidding against each other? Does AIDS? Does abortion? Do wars? JZ Note: Can any system write or can only persons or machines pre-programmed by persons, do so? Who can rightly say now that central banks can be credited with anything and that was they offer is "credit"? Is it "our" money when it is issued by a monopoly institution? Credit and money are not necessarily identical. What "they" meant was that the people who earned much legal tender money should not freely spend it now, as they are entitled to, but rather hoard it or "invest" it, especially in government insecurities, so that they would not drive current consumer prices up themselves, but let this be done rather by additional government spending, with the funds the government thus obtained, and in order to give them these savers and "investors" the "chance" to be repaid, if at all, in still further depreciated government paper money. W: Just WHAT is communism? WHY are America's preachers, teachers and journalists silent and pro-communist? Why does the press lie every day of the year about government spending when government gets everything with credit? Some 30 years ago, a long forgotten journalist defined communism as "a battle for the minds of men". Those who falsely believe that government prints and spends money are not in control of their own minds. "Communism is British!", wrote Helen Peters in her newsletter, DEFENDERS OF THE REPUBLIC. Peters died in 1971. JZ Note: Repeating errors does not correct them. Teachers, preachers and journalists, unfortunately, are not mostly quiet. Most of them are not communists but all too much statists and collectivists and almost all are territorialists. If the government could get everything frictionless with credit, then it would certainly no longer lose many votes by imposing taxes but rather abolish all of them. - So only those who believe that the government does not print its money or gets it printed and those who believe that the government does not spend anything of the monies it taxed or borrowed away from citizens are in control of their minds? Like hell! Define your terms, much better than you did. But I do admit that there are flaws and false premises in the notions of government "spending". One can spend only what one rightly owns and can pay only with what the payee will freely concede to be a genuine payment. Depreciated government notes, unless in form of over-payment for inferior or over-priced goods, supplied by fraudulent government contractors, are never full payment at genuine market prices, but excessively increased payments or underpayments, e.g. of salaries and other government debts, in depreciated currency, paid at face value. To many Englishmen, but certainly not all, subscribe to State socialist ideas. But that does not make them typically British ideas. W: Our Constitution gives protection from inflation, communism and wars. None of these would exist significantly if Article 1, Section 10 was upheld by teachers, policemen, and other public office holders. JZ Note: Does it? Has it? Or has it permitted full monetary despotism to arise in "the land of the free? W: This section mandates their payment in gold and silver coins. WHY AREN'T THEY SO PAID? You aid and abet our conquerors when you say "there isn't enough gold and silver". JZ Note: A fact is a fact, no matter how unbelievable and unpleasant it is to some. The value of one or two products or elements, no matter how rare and thus valuable they are, is not equivalent to the value of all other goods and services, most of them now paid for or settled via cash-less clearing rather than by any form of cash payments. If we were from now on confined to live only off those transactions, that we would be able to pay for in gold and silver, then the majority of transactions that occurred until now (and which are already all too much reduced by monetary despotism), would become so small that most of us would die, soon. Gold and silver are only as valuable as they are. They do not carry in themselves enough additional value to become, in total, as valuable as all the other consumer goods and services in the world are, in combination. Only if all these other goods and services can also be monetized in form of optional and market rated exchange media, refusable and discountable by their potential acceptors, and rapidly retired from circulation by being used as means of payment for these goods and services, can all of them be easily and soon enough turned over without any monetary crisis occuring. Confinement, of all transactions to gold and silver cash transactions only, would bring about the greatest econmic crisis and man-made disaster ever. Just ponder, how many of your current bills would you be able to pay right now in gold or silver coins? Even if you had hoarded many of them, how would the ability to pay of most of your potential customers be affected by this kind of "monetary reform", imposed upon the whole world or your country only? W: WE can not be self governing and free unless public servants are dependent on being paid with something the people produce. When we became dependent on PAPER that they print without restraint, they became our masters, and we became their servants. JZ Note: We are not free and self-governing as long as so-called public servants are our feudal lords and masters. Do they deserve and earn any payment from us? Those who do so believe should pay them, voluntarily, whatever they think they are worth to them. We did not "become" dependent upon their monopoly and forced paper currency but were legislated into this dependency. But even this monopoly has its natural limits. Ultimately, printing costs and refusals by people who can no longer find others who sell them goods and services for it, bring any galloping inflation to a stop. Moreover, logically it is not paper that they print but notes, legal tender notes, that they print on paper. They produce or buy paper that others produced and the print on this paper or let others print on it, but they do not PRINT the paper. The paper and the ink, as well as the printing labour and the printing equipment, too, they have to "pay" for from the proceeds of this printing, from tax revenue or government loans. W: As crime in the streets is needed to take our minds off of crimes by judges and prosecutors, military conflict abroad is needed to take our minds off of the psychological and economic warfare waged at home by bankers, accountants, lawyers, judges, journalists and IRS, all of whom are victims themselves! JZ Note: While governments maintain themselves largely by the myths that they are effective crime fighters rather than effective criminals and crime producers, one should not underestimate the vested interest of any opposition party that would possess an effective anti-crime program. It could romp-in with a land-slide victory and stay in power for quite some time, enough for the official criminals and gangs of them to "earn" their high pensions. W: Lincoln said America could be destroyed only from within and Lenin said that communism must be built with non-communist hands. Keynes wrote that there is no more surer, more subtle means of overturning the existing basis of society than to debauch the currency. The Fed admits 100 per cent debasement when they said their system "works only with credit" (making taxes an effective illusion that regulates our consumption) JZ Note: Lincoln, upholding American "unity" fictions, in the face of extreme disunity, did not uphold the best of what might be called Americanism, and this at a huge price in lives and property - and with the price of a huge inflation as well. - One should not speak of "the currency" when one only means "a" currency, namely the governments forced and exclusive one. Keynes himself systematized this debauching and his disciples are still in charge, decades later. The Fed admits no such thing in this or other ways. It still pretends to be a protector of the value of the dollar. Your taxes are not an illusion. Try to refuse absolutely to pay them and you will soon end up dead, vainly defending your home against a siege by revenue collectors,trying to enforce its sale to pay your taxes from the proceeds. While taxes affect our consumption, they hardly regulate it. W: "If governments should refrain from regulation... the worthlessness of the money becomes apparent and the fraud upon the public can be concealed no longer" - Economic Consequences Of the Peace, by John Maynard Keynes. JZ Note: No amount or degree of "regulation" or price and wage control can preserve or restore the value of a depreciated currency. But an increased tax foundation can give some higher value to an otherwise over-issued paper money. But over-issue can also lead to an accellerated deflation if monetary freedom remains suppressed. Economic processes cannot be coercively reversed without causing additional harm. But one can suddenly end interventions without causing crises, if only one lets free people organize and help themselves with free market and free contract methods in every sphere. W: "We are all Keynesians!" - Richard M. Nixon. JZ Note: Did he ever speak for all? W: Just describe what government spends and we will ship you 100 pounds of it ASAP. JZ Note: See above. W: READ: "Money", The Greatest Hoax On Earth, by Merrill Jenkins 235 pages, $ 15 pp. JZ Note: Does that pp stand for paper back: pb? Usually pp stands for pages. Anyhow, only government money amounts to an immoral and very harmful hoax. Sound monies are among the greatest inventions of man and they do not require gold coins as exclusive exchange media or exclusive value standards but, rather, would exclude them, too, as exclusive tools, although permitting them and using them as optional alternatives for some who like them. W: Tape Cassette: Cancer Cure Suppression, $4. Awake America, Box 22431, St.Louis MO 63126 JZ Note: More illegible code in your message: > &Yryf. > 7 > !8{uqlqhqlqhqhqhqlqlql( (8wy{w&vxX > Z > qqkkeeeeeeeeXee  > @ ' ;=ILFHuwyyyyyyyyyyyyyyysy8y  y!"Times New Roman @@=/@@=/dCompObjE At least the coded sections do not pretend to be something that they are not, e.g. correct definitions or explanations or comparisons. PIOT, John. Slightly corrected and edited: J.Z., 24.12.03.