John Zube, 7 Oxley St., Berrima, NSW 2577, (048) 771 436 Maccuthr.ie PEACE PLANS, ON PANARCHY, LIBERTARIAN MICROFICHE PUBLISHING RESEARCH CENTRE FOR MONETARY AND FINANCIAL FREEDOM Ken MacCuthrie, Unit 2A, 19 Herdsman Pde., Wembly, Perth, WA 6014 (09) 387 1001 - after 6pm. Dear Ken, thanks for your enquiry and as promised, I enclose some of my material. As a contribution towards my costs I would like you to send me $ 5 in cash - or return the material. This and other libertarian microfiche publishing are supported by me from a very small pension. When I heard of your interest in a legal fight against "banks", rather than against banking privileges and the monopoly of the central bank, Australia's "Reserve Bank", and when you began to talk merely about "a" simplified money system, rather than a free, just and competitive one, I began to doubt that you are already mentally prepared for the monetary freedom options. When you gave me the number of Laurai Hoins in Nowra, and I rang him and asked him whether his High Court struggle was influenced by the thoughts of Major Douglas and Silvio Gesell and he replied : "both!", my doubts increased. Both these reformers occupy in money reform just about the same totalitarian position which Marx and Engels took regarding economic, social and political reforms. While I know of at least 3 Gesellians, Karl Walker, Paul Nagel and Heinz Peter Neumann, who, while believing in Gesell's depreciating money tokens, remained tolerant towards other monetary experiments, I have yet to meet or read of any Social Credit advocate who was or is similarly tolerant. Perhaps you can name one to me. Gesellians, in my opinion, want to make the present mony monopoly system even worse - but they are welcome to their experiments among volunteers : Woergel, Schwanenkirchen and x others, especially in the U.S., which are less described. The Social Credit advocates, unware of the already existing money monopoly, which was spread especially after Marx's and Engel's Communist Manifesto - point 5 of their 1848 platform - rapidly around the world, think that freely competitive free enterprise banking does still exist, even for note issues or what they misname "credit-creation" and what usually is nothing but some use of the clearing options. Thus they want to "introduce nationalized banking", which is the main evil and exists already for many decades. They imagine that it could supply all with a "social dividend." They never poked their noses into legislation on money, currency, banking and clearing but rather dream on cloud 9. The only things it can supply are deflations, inflations and stagflations, credit restrictions and recessions and monetary crises and depressions. There are only 3 points on which I can agree with the Social Credit school of thought : 1.) There is a monetary problem. 2.) It is a very important problem. 3.) We do suffer presently from a shortage of sound money - during inflations and stagflations as well as during deflations. Then there are those for whom "free money" means handouts or interest - free money. They, too, are welcome to their voluntary arrangements among themselves. Primitive systems like LETS are popular but amount only to computerized garage sales. They are economically so insignificant that neither the Federal Reserve Bank System nor the Australian Federal Reserve Bank have as yet taken any steps against them. But let them begin to provide means for ordinary wage and salary payments and the legal beavers would be rapidly after them. The law can be safely ignored only in a well timed monetary revolutions that would be so rapidly and obviously and widely successful that it would become politically impossible to repress it. I and all too few others stand not only for whatever particular monetary and currency system we consider to be rightful or best or most easy to use but for all which only aspire to be used by volunteers and among themselves and those they contract with. Most money reformers, alas, are intolerant and want monopolies and privileges, especially exclusiveness and legal tender powers, for their system, the supposedly only ideal one. Monetary freedom or tolerance is for me the name of the game. No exchange medium or value standard is good enough to be imposed upon anyone but its issuer and those who contractually obliged themselves to accept them at any time at par. ( These might be the debtors of the issuer, who would thus be enabled to rid themselves of their debts. ) Even flawed money, currency, clearing and credit systems are tolerable for dissenters - if the participation of dissenters is not enforced by the advocates of the system. Whether a money system is simplified or complicated and perfected enough, for them, should be up to the voluntary users to decide. Primary consideration should not be simplicity but rightfulness and usefulness. A 707 jet is not more simple but more useful than a glider - and both are rightful for their users. Under monetary freedom the popular version of Gresham's Law ( Bad money drives out the good - which applies only to legal tender currencies ) would be reversed : Good money would drive out the bad. While the wrongs and harms of taxation continue, governments, too, could issue a kind of clearing foundation money based on this kind of enforced "debts". And such issues could be abundant enough to make taxpayments much easier, prevent many bankruptcies and also could be made while using a sound and voluntarily accepted value standard. Afterwards, when their "services" have become reduced to competitive ones, they could only issue "contributions" and "fees" money for the wanted and supplied services they have to offer. While I hold that the shop foundation and service foundation money that I mainly represent is a simple system, so easy that it could be introduced within hours to days by people who know what they are doing ( On this see especially John DeWitt Warner's article on The Currency Famine of 1893 ), I do not hold that it could be introduced in a close to vacuum of knowledge of and interest in this system and its monetary freedom background. If left alone, a free money system could gradually develop from a cantine money or truck shop money issue or from a local currency issued first only in a village. However, for centuries the law has managed to kill such experiments in the fetus stage. Black market monetary arrangements can achieve limited successes but they cannot provide e.g. the full publicity which a fully developed monetary freedom system would need, the security from interventions and confiscations and the openness it needs and the wide-spread clearing that would help to safeguard it. Free pricing, for currencies, goods and services, needs free markets. Only limited monetary freedom arrangements can be established in this way. But if one can manage to act rapidly, rightly, sensibly and widely, achieving wide consensus and success, in a politically significant area, shortly before an election, putting hundredthousands suddenly off the relief and on the employed people rolls, before the repressive actions are conceived and put into motion, one could get somewhere fast and would not be likely to be deprived of one's achievements. Politicians might then almost fall over themselves in efforts to repeal, retroactively, all the relevant repressive legislation and praise rather than penalize the "offenders" of such a self-help action. For the transition period e.g. the Australian shop currencies, issued by some department stores but only for consumer credits, could be used and expanded and combined, to become acceptable for wage and salary payments, too. X other small beginning would be possible and all should be much more discussed than they were so far. Those academics, mainly in Germany, the U.K. and U.S., who since Hayek's writings on Choice in Currency and Denationalization of Money, 1975 & 1976, have extensively discussed SOME monetary freedom options, are, unfortunately, mostly still addicted to redemption of private currencies in rare metals only and unaware of cheaper and sound alternatives, which would help to mobilize all unsold goods, service and labour - to the extent that they are wanted by some and are ready for sale. I intend to work further to expand my free banking bibliography and my free banking series on microfiche. An alphabetized handbook on monetary freedom terms, ideas, processes and arguments is still in the works. Without sufficient references readily on hand, monetary reformers are not likely to achieve sufficient understanding and agreement among themselves to make a fruitful collaboration between them possible. They are then likely to repeat the same mistakes over and over again - and to become victims of the penal clauses of the State's monetary despotism or to continue endless sqabbles about the supposedly best monetary system, instead of agreeing on monetary freedom. The more than 1 million unemployed in Australia ought themselves to take an interest in such questions. But, are they likely to? Or are the many small manufacturers and businessmen who go bankrupt under monetary despotism, likely to question its foundations and explore alternatives to it? Without monetary emancipation, first in our minds and then in our exchange actions, we are never likely to become and remain fully free - and as safe and peaceful as we could be - and injust interventionism will go on and on. I do enclose : Mini LMP, 1980 FB lit. leaflet, Discussion Paper No. 7, Tolerance pamphlet, PP 19 A & B, 41, 868, 1022. PIOT ( Panarchy In Our Time ), John Zube.