SOME REMARKS BY JOHN ZUBE, 5 Oct. 1989, to :
   GUSTAVE STOLPER : THE AGE OF FABLE,
   The Political & Economic World
   we live in, 1943, 318pp, indexed.

This book has been all too long out of print. It was a wartime edition, using cheap paper that included small wood chips. My use of liquid paper could not do away with all these blemishes.

I have reproduced it here mainly because of its advocacy of at least a large degree of monetary freedom and its relative absence of prejudices against free entrprise capitalism. With monetary freedom he deals on pages 62ff, although still all too imperfectly. But then there were very few people in the English speaking world at that time who had clear ideas on this subject. 

His treatment of centralized and coercive planning, e.g. pp 243ff, is also pretty good and that of some of the propaganda myths of the Nazis and Soviets. 

He reports on many other fables and answers many of them well enough. But in the process he seems to be unable to avoid introducing some of his own or upholding some popular ones. This happens particularly in the second part of this book. I guess this is almost inevitable as long as an encyclopaedia of the best reftations of popular errors, myths and prejudices has not yet been compiled and sufficiently updated and made generally accessible, e.g. on microfiche. Towards such an encyclopaedic compilation this book makes many valuable contributions, at least for the first editions of such a reference works. Later arguments will, I hope, be much better still. 

While the author is, on several points, a pre-Randian defender of capitalism as the unknown ideal, he is also, on all too many points, a welfarist and statist still. The exterritorial alternative is unknown to him and he even equates conscript armies with "nations" in arms and presumes a few nearly unanimous consent situations which, I hold, did not exist. But in general, his historical chapters are also somewhat informative. 

Well, all good points combined rarely come in a single package. I recommend this book but only with some reservations and to critical readers.

Maybe this is the place to remind my readers that micrographics does offer the option of frequent refilmings - with more and more comments added by critical readers to eliminate remaining blemishes in a book.

On page 22 he overlooked the Bank Enquete of 1908, which demanded legal tender as necessary for the financing of the next war and which led to the introduction of legal tender through a Bank Act of 1909 in 1910.

Page 25 : The world of 1914 was not as simple as he tries to make it here. Many of its fallacies on an exclusive gold convertibility and gold reserve standard are still alive today in the minds of money reformers who are unaware that their personal preferences should no more determine the exchange media and value standards used by dissenters than the own religious or non-religious preferences should determine such views and behaviours among others who disagree. 

The "unintelligible complications" tend to become reduced to manageable proportions once each is confined to minding his own business and collective decision-making is confined to volunteer groups. When multiple choice seems to become overwhelming then there come into being also various "guides" and information services for the individual sovereign consumer. In future competitive court systems could come to his assistance, too, in cases of fraud or negligence. The statist courts now would all too often expose him only to further hazards.

Alas, he even defends "rationing" as a matter to secure supplies, e.g. on page 35.

Page 36 : Society needs rather to become demanaged or privatized rather than "managed".

Page 44 : Bureaucracy can have a rightful place only among those who volunteered for it!

Pages 62ff : His advocacy of monetary freedom is limited and has many flaws. Monetary freedom in the U.S. did not last to 1913. It was always limited. In 1907 like before, e.g. in 1893, some remnants of it, in form of clearing house certificate issues, saw to it that the crisis did not become as severe as it would otherwise have been.

The National Banks were not competitive but under severe legal restrictions. The right to issue is not a privilege but a right.

The money system after 1814 followed the then existing "chaotic" or confused ideas on money issues - and the market was not allowed to act as an arbitrator. Good money was not allowed to drive out the bad. The consumer did not remain sovereign in this sphere. Free enterprise was not allowed to freely develop the business of note issue and the best technique for it. Thanks to excessive legislation in this sphere, sound issue techniques are still largely unknown today. The National or Central Bank money did not "grow" but was legally boosted and privileged, even given, during the civil war and for too long afterwards and later on again, exclusive and coercive powers.

Page 64 : Mises was not for monetary freedom but only for freedom for the kind of banknote system that he considered to be ideal. So is almost every other money reformer.

Page 65 : The command economy is never forced upon a government, not even in war time. That is only the badly informed opinion of the men in power and of their supporters.

Page 88: Inflation can be conceived as an indirect tax and the costs had to come from current income and possessions. Creditors found out about this when they are finally repaid in depreciated paper money.

I could go on and on stating my questions, denials and reservations but I will, rather, mark the pages in the fiche issue of this book as I have in my original, to somewhat indicate my own position on many - not all of the issues he raised.
Signs like "<" and ">" are used by me to indicate passages that I found worth including in my "SLOGANS FOR LIBERTY" file for their future publication in form of an encyclopaedia.                                                     

If you find my own markings annoying - tough luck for you. Try to find a clean copy in the second-hand book market or in a library or issue your own clear fiched edition! Until microfiche readers pay me well and often enough, I tend to follow my own preferences rather than those of "masses" of non-existing consumers of my product. I was lucky to pick this book up once, many years ago, for a mere 20 cents - and I have never seen another copy since.

I made a short and vain attempt to find any biographical references to Stolper. Robert Carnaghan quoted him somewhat in an issue of Innovator that was dedicated to "free banking".

"Dis" indicates passages that I think deserve inclusion in an encyclopaedia of refutations.       J.Z., 5 Nov. 89