John Zube

I I I I I

IBEWEALTH.COM, The Network Marketing Success Blueprint: Applied Knowledge is ... - www.ibewealth.com/page/10/ - Cached - 28 Jan 2011 – Next, a Free Market Money emerges. This is a Need due to the fact that different quantities of different items have a “different value”. ...

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IDEAL MONEY SYSTEM OR MONETARY FREEDOM? The discussion on a supposedly ideal money system for all, if such a thing were really possible, is likely to be almost endless. Alternatively, discussion on monetary freedom for all does appear to be finite, since it would confine itself to elaborating the rights, liberties, tolerance and opportunities existing or to be established in this sphere, in order for individuals or their voluntary associations to use them as they please, at least among themselves. - J. Z., free after MFNL&MF 3/4, Feb. 89.

IDEAS: The difficulty lies not in the new ideas but in escaping from the old ones. – J. M. Keynes, quoted as motto by Dieter Suhr and Hugo Gottschalk in Optimale Liquiditaet. – When it comes to exchange media and value standards then it comes to sufficiently refuting the ancient statist errors and prejudices that Keynes popularized all too much in the 20th  century, by giving them a seemingly scientific appearance. – Did he really have any new ideas? I don’t know of any. – J.Z., 20.9.10. - EDUCATION, PROPAGANDA, ENLIGHTENMENT, PUBLICITY, DIS., REFUTATIONS ENCYCLOPEDIA, FREE BANKING VS. CENTRAL BANKING, MONEY MONOPOLY, FORCED & EXCLUSIVE CURRENCIES.

IKEDA, SANFORD, The Dynamics of Disintervention - June 2009. - "People as different as Paul Krugman and Alan Greenspan blame deregulation for the mess Wall Street got itself into. Supporters of the free market respond, correctly, that the primary culprits are the incentives and pressures government created in the housing and finance industries that precipitated the housing bubble. But in the context of the theory of intervention outlined here, the grain of truth in what the market critics say is that partial deregulation, not deregulation per se, is to blame. The problem was not too much but too little deregulation." - Roy Halliday, in section on Government-Regulated Banking

IMAGINARY DEPOSITS: They exist only in the imagination of those who imagine that they do exist because they cannot imagine the clearing and short term credit transactions that are involved. - J. Z., 8.10.92, 16.3.97. See: SOCIAL CREDIT, CREDIT CREATION, DEPOSIT CREATION, MONEY CREATION. - J.Z., 3/97.

IMMIGRATION BARRIERS: Just because governments do not know how to end unemployment, depressions, stagflations and inflation, they think that they ought to set up immigration barriers and concentration camps for illegal immigrants and deport them when they think that they are "only" refugees from still worse economic policies of other governments rather than politically persecuted refugees seeking asylum. And even then they are expected to wait their term - and all are expected to pay for their imprisonment in idleness, often in remote areas. It is really a bankruptcy declaration of governments and for their policies. Instead, they ought to allow these immigrants to opt out of all the laws and institutions that cause unemployment and other economic difficulties, so that they could help themselves via their own monetary and financial arrangements and organizations. They should be granted full exterritorial autonomy for this purpose and then at least some of their experiments would be successful and set a shiny example to the natives and previous immigrants. The problems which territorial governments, with their ignorance, prejudices and coercive and wrongful measures laws and institutions cannot solve, could be easily solved by free men - engaged in free experiments in the economic, social and political spheres, but not by wrongfully imprisoned ones "and measures" like the usual ones of territorial governments. - J.Z., 19.8.02, 14.9.02, 1.7.11. - UNEMPLOYMENT & INFLATION, MONETARY & FINANCIAL FREEDOM, EXTERRITORIAL AUTONOMY FOR VOLUNTEER COMMUNITIES

IMMIGRATION CAUSES INFLATION: Popular opinion. So, if the white man would not have come to Australia then the Aborigines would have had a stable currency? - Does every deportation of illegal immigrants, regardless of how productive they had been employed or could be employed, increase the value of the Australian dollar? Does every illegal or illegal immigrant decrease it? - The mere assertion of a causal connection cannot cause or substitute for a causal connection. Under monetary freedom we could multiply the number of immigrants and employed - and still enjoy stable competing currencies. Under monetary despotism, no matter what is tried otherwise, we have had stable and also, seemingly, sufficient currencies only for short periods; never full employment, boom economies and stable currencies for long. The cause is otherwise and so is the cure. - J. Z., 2.4.97, 1.7.11. - DIS., FULL EMPLOYMENT, INFLATION

IMMIGRATION RESTRICTIONS & UNEMPLOYMENT OR FEARS OF UNEMPLOYMENT: We do not have 800,000 unemployed in Australia because we have ca. 100,000 or even less immigrants to Australia p.a. Nor do we have a vast youth unemployment, from 20 to 40% in some areas, due to immigration. Most immigrants are adults. Nor do their young children throw ours out of jobs. All such notion are based on primitive and false nations, e.g. that there is only a limited number of jobs available at any one time, which ought to be "fairly shared" - first of all among the locally born or already naturalized citizens. At the same time, the really limiting factor: Prohibitions, regulations, red tape and, most of all, a monopoly means of exchange, especially for wage and salary payments and the suppression of monetary freedom and of freedom to clear all one's debts, is ignored, although it is the major factor in preventing all desired and possible exchanges from taking place, which would require the labour of all our unemployed and that of all the immigrants we could manage to get, by the millions, per year. - J.Z., 20.3.97. - Neither should all of them become forcefully and territorially Australianized! Let them establish their own and exterritorially autonomous communities of volunteers, their own kinds of free or even unfree societies, for their voluntary victims, as long as they are willing to individually put up with them. Let them have their own "welfare", insurance, credit and banking system. Would all of them be worse than our territorial system? Could we not learn both, from their successes and failures? Already Wolfgang von Goethe proposed self-help organizations for immigrants, rather than tax-based subsidies for them. - J.Z., 1.7.11. - DIS., IMMIGRATION, AS USUAL, IS WRONGLY BLAMED.

INCENTIVES: Cleveland industrialist James Finney Lincoln represented the best in American capitalism. When he died in 1965 he had been for nearly forty years president of the Lincoln Electric Company, the world's largest manufacturer or electric welding equipment. Back in 1934 Lincoln adopted what was at that time a highly unusual program: and employee incentive plan. This plan was so successful that in the years that followed the Lincoln Company was consistently able to undersell the competition while at the same time paying Lincoln employees nearly double the prevailing wages in the industry. The most intriguing part of the story, however, concerns the straightforward reason that James Lincoln gave for introducing the incentive program. "Selfishness", he explained, "is the motivating force of all human endeavor." - Lincoln obviously did not mean selfishness in the sense of concern for one's self "at the expense of others", but rather the natural desire of most persons to act in their own rational self-interest by means of their own productive efforts. Men are indeed selfish in this sense. They seek their own food, shelter, clothing etc. If they did not, they would die. It is as simple as that. Men will and should pursue their own welfare. Lincoln recognized this basic fact of nature and acted accordingly with results which were highly beneficial to all concerned." - Richard W. Grant, The Incredible Breadmachine, self-published, n.d., indexed, 286pp, p. 29/30. - I microfilmed it, because it was so rarely seen. A successful film was made of it or rather is popularization in form of a pocket book. However, to my knowledge, neither the original nor the popularization are so fare offered online or on disc or as an email attachment upon payment. - Libertarians have only to blame themselves for the absence of a complete digitized freedom library, which could, by now, be offered very cheaply on a single large disc. - J.Z., 4.8.11. - LIBERATION AT WORK, LINCOLN ELECTRIC COMPANY, JAMES FINNEY LINCOLN, SELFISHNESS, CAPITALISM, ORGANIZATION DEVELOPMENT, PRODUCTIVITY, STEPS TOWARDS SELF-MANAGEMENT & EMPLOYEE-OWNERSHIP, COOPERATIVE PRODUCTION

INCOMES POLICY & INFLATION: We need a sensible incomes policy approach. - Popular opinion. - The only rightful and sensible policy is to let the productive individual chose his job, trade or profession, the wage rate or prices offered to him or by him and the number of hours he is willing to work in that job, trade or profession, and the form of payment in a stable currency that is acceptable to him, useful to him and measured in a value standard that he has reasons to trust. All other incomes policies set by third parties are wrong and dictatorial, part of a centralised and planned, i.e., centrally mismanaged economy, or part of the utopia of State socialism or bureaucratic socialism or State capitalism. - J. Z., n.d. & 2.4.97, 1.7.11. - DIS., WAGE CONTROLS

INCOMES POLICY: We need therefore something new, an "incomes policy", one that will help us resolve better this vexing conflict between full employment and price stability. ... Examples of incomes policies range from the direct wage-price controls and freezes of wartime down to mere moral persuasion and verbal wrist slaps from the President. Without recommending outright wage-price controls I do urge upon the Administration an activist incomes policy - that is, a policy in which the Government, at times when labour markets are not slack and demand-pull inflation is not excessive, supplements its fiscal and monetary policies by actions that discourage price-tag and wage rate increases. - I shall not pretend here that modern economic science knows how to prescribe an incomes policy that a jury of informed people can agree will work well... Alas, study of foreign examples does not tell us how to solve the problem. - Dr. Paul A. Samuelson, THE NATIONAL TIMES, 26.1.71. - The only" incomes policy" that is rightful and useful is that agreed upon between individuals in their choices of careers and jobs and their employers, those of tradesmen and professionals and the customers for their services, that of e.g. retailers and their buyers, the individual consumers. Each consumer with one dollar to spend has a dollar vote on the market that expresses his incomes policy for all those who directly or indirectly supply what he wants. The experts and planners do not like them to have this consumer sovereignty and monopolistically inclined employers do no love it, either. Any income policies imposed upon employers or employees or self-employed, by any third parties, would represent either unearned incomes or coercive transfer payments or robberies to make these possible. - J. Z., 2.4.97. - DIS., ECONOMISTS, EXPERTS, PRICE CONTROLS, WAGE CONTROLS, INFLATION

INCONVENIENCE OF A GREAT VARIETY OF MEANS OF PAYMENT: This fact or opinion is often used in an attempt to justify the uniformity of an imposed means of exchange and value standard. But overlooked is that the inconvenience of a great variety was usually accepted because the inconvenience of not being able to sell and not being paid would have been even greater. Thus, as long as the convenience of monetary transactions was not exceeded by the inconvenience of a great variety in money tokens, a great variety was still accepted, naturally, not a greater variety than people were still able and willing to cope with. The varieties of present private notes, like cheques, is often overlooked and people can manage to deal with hundred-thousands of different kinds of tickets - or refuse to deal with them. At best and at least money can solve only the monetary problems of its voluntary acceptors. In this respect it is not different from any other commodity or service, within the circles of their voluntary acceptors. One can speak rightly of "universal" acceptability only within the circulation sphere of a particular kind of money in its payment community, whether that be small or large. In England from 1648-1672 there were over 20,000 different tokens. They were still voluntarily accepted although many of these tokens not beyond a particular street. - Source: J. Shield Nicholson, Elements of Political Economy, p.272. - J.Z., 12.4.97. - See: VARIETIES OF MONEY, UNIFORMITY OF MEANS OF PAYMENT?

INCONVERTIBLE PAPER MONEY & LEGAL TENDER PAPER MONEY: Many authors seem to be unable or unwilling to distinguish between the two. They are right only insofar as it matters little whether a 100% gold convertible paper money has legal tender or not. Legal tender then cannot depreciate it. Over-issues are prevented by the convertibility obligation and its fulfilment, as long as they function. But legal tender and its alternative, i.e. free market rating for a currency, do matter very much as soon as metal convertibility is temporarily or lastingly abolished. These undiscriminating authors then simply assume that the abolition of metal convertibility, on its own, would, quite inevitably, lead to the depreciation of a paper currency, since governments do always have a motive for over-issues. (With their exclusive or monopolistic territorial and national currencies they also manage under-issues, stagflations and credit restrictions, which could not happen under full monetary freedom, either. - J.Z., 1.7.11.) However, that applies only to inconvertible paper money with legal tender - at least until this money has been so depreciated that it is altogether refused, in spite of the severest penalties. Only legal tender and centralized note-issue banking permit an inflation and allow it to reach that stage. When a paper money has been made inconvertible but NOT given the legal tender privilege then there are at least 2 possible results: The paper money is not depreciated but kept at par with its nominal gold weight unit value, especially by being so accepted in payment of all taxes and dues due to a government. The government might then increase taxes in order to withdraw more of its paper money from circulation, giving it more of a taxation reflux or, by further taxation, increasing the demand for it. That was long the practice for sound tax foundation money that did not have any legal tender power in general circulation - but only legal tender towards the issuer, the government. The alternative to this is that the government may not care for preserving the value of its notes but continue issuing them without arranging for a sufficient reflux to keep them at par with their nominal value. Then there are two possible effects on the price and wage levels. Either these are marked in the nominal paper value units. Then they do become inflated. Or they are not so marked but expressed in e.g. gold weight units, with the government's money only accepted, e.g. in sales of goods and services, in wages and salaries, at its current discount and at par only if it is so rated in the market. Consequently, prices and wages expressed in these gold weight units remain the same - but the government's money depreciates. Moreover, as long as taxes are still expressed in gold weight units, and payable at par with the government's paper money, the taxpayers have, to that extent, reasons to rejoice. Their tax burden becomes reduced by the degree of depreciation of the paper money. A still somewhat honest government would have to continue to accept its own paper money IOUs. at par with their nominal gold weight value units and it would have to fix the taxes in such value units. But, as we well know, not all governments do so or do so all the time. On the contrary. They often express the taxes only in paper value "standards" and accept their over-issued paper money only at par with this nominal paper value standard. Then, under an exclusive currency system, it has lost all in-built restraints, any incentive to reduce further issues (in order not to lose out, while spending its notes at a discount and having to accept them at par in tax revenue). Under the issue monopoly and legal tender it might find it easier to print more and more of this legal tender ­paper money rather than raise taxes. (Towards the end of the big German Inflation of 1914 to 1923, hardly any taxes were paid any more. Most government "revenues" came fresh from the printing presses. And even they, in the last stages of a fast inflation, cannot produce enough new notes to prevent deflationary phenomena. Nor could the official and private issuers of emergency monies provide enough alternative exchange media as long as they were still as foolish as to use the paper Reichsmark as its "value standard". In expectation of further inflation, prices raced ahead of the note printing presses! - Obvious features of deflation appeared and the wonderful combination of both, stagflation, also with high unemployment. - J.Z., 1.7.11, 4.8.11.) Theoretically, through the raising of taxes, the government could increase the demand for its paper money and even restore them to par. But inflation makes it easy and profitable to delay paying taxes and, often, to avoid paying taxes altogether. During the Great German Inflation, 1914-1923, the government had finally hardly any tax revenue at all and relied on its printing presses. In practice, the attempt to reduce the circulation through very high taxes would also stifle productivity and would create deflationary difficulties. It is easier to increase taxes to keep its tax foundation money at par than to increase them later, when the depreciation has already set in, to restore them to par.) As a rule and politically, the government finds it easier to abuse it legal tender and money monopoly power rather than to increase its taxes to keep its paper money at par with its nominal value standard unit, e.g. a certain weight unit of gold. The other factor, which is almost always involved with legal tender is the exclusive currency status or issue monopoly of the central bank. Even in the absence of legal tender it would force people to accept the government's or the central bank's paper money, to the extent that they do engage in monetary transactions at all. To that extent that monopoly acts like legal tender. However, without legal tender, people would not be obliged to mark out all their contracts, prices, wages, debts, in the depreciating paper "value unit" of the exclusive currency or exchange medium. They might, instead, go on accepting it only as the exclusive exchange medium allowed to them - but only at its market rate. Their prices, wages and debt amounts, expressed in some or the other sound value standard unit, would remain the same, no matter how much the government inflated its exclusive but not forced currency. With one exception: As soon as traders and employees anticipate further paper money depreciation, they will tend to increase their prices and wages, in anticipation of further depreciation, possibly to likely (in the later stages of an inflation) even faster than the depreciation does actually occur. To this extent deflationary phenomena can then occur. There are then not yet enough exchange media printed, of the exclusive currency, to keep up with this increased demand for them. Naturally, the increased production of exchange media does have some natural limits. In Germany, in 1923, almost all printing presses were working overtime in producing more official and emergency money notes (largely due to the above hinted at deflationary effect). Moreover, the purchasing power of the exclusive and depreciated notes became so low that production costs of the notes came, according to some reports, to 48 % of the purchasing power of the notes and, according to other reports, the paper value of the notes was ultimately higher than the purchasing power that was printed upon them. Only a Hungarian inflation, after WW II, is supposed to have gone even beyond that German "Great" Inflation. When strong deflationary or stag-flationary effects appear in a rapid inflations, then, legally or illegally, private or official institutions tend to issue "emergency money", initially also using only the depreciating paper standard. To that extent such a currency is then no longer exclusive but a competition in depreciation results. After awhile at least some of the emergency money issuers (Reichsbahn and Farbenwerke Hoechst, for instance) began to issue gold-weight value emergency money. To the extent that they are thus made available, the official inflated paper money will be refused and driven out of circulation. If, right from the beginning, the government's paper money has neither legal tender nor an exclusive currency status, then the privately or cooperatively issued currencies and those by some State or local governments, provided only that they are sound alternative currencies, will tend to be preferred for most local exchanges and the central government's or central bank's depreciated paper money will either be discounted or refused (unless some taxpayers find it still useful to help them to shed some of their tax burdens with it), so that the good money alternatives will drive out the bad money, in correct application of Gresham's Law and in reversal to the popular misconception of it. - To speak only of convertibility and inconvertibility, as if nothing else mattered, is, indeed, very inaccurate and misleading. It is very similar to the abuse of the term "fiat" money as opposed to the classical gold standard (the gold redemptionist) currency. The "fiat" consists in the legal tender and the exclusive currency status of a paper money, NOT in its irredeemability by the issuer into gold. Your cheque and IOUs are also not redeemable in gold, at least not nowadays, and they are not legal tender and not an exclusive currency, nor are your current account and at any time reclaimable deposits. Potential acceptors are free to refuse them. They are not "fiat" money. FIAT MONEY & CREATION OF MONEY & CREDIT, INFLATION & ITS LIMITS, STAGFLATION, DEFLATION, DIS., TAX FOUNDATION

INDEX CURRENCIES: Free market rating of currencies and free choice among competing value standards, are also a form of indexing - but of a non-monopolistic kind and one in which the money monopoly and the exclusive and forced value standard or legal tender privilege of the government currency is eliminated. Then, and as a rule, via consumer, employee, contractor and entrepreneurial sovereignty, ensuring free competition and fully free choice, only those currencies could survive, in the long run, which remain largely and mostly at par with their value standard. In other words, under monetary freedom any additional and frequent indexing of prices, wages and contracts would no longer be required. Price and wage levels would then be as stable as they could be, and should be, from the monetary side, because they would be safe from coercive monetary interventions and policies and measures, safe from any government, as safe as measures of length, weight and volume. - J.Z., 18.10.89, 29.4.97. - INDEX STANDARDS & MONETARY FREEDOM

INDEX CURRENCY & PRICE LEVEL STABILITY: We need a currency stabilised by a price index at a particular stable price level." - Popular opinion. - What this really means is that some people do believe that they would benefit from such an index currency and thus they want all people to adopt it. While morally they do have the right to adopt any of a possible hundreds if not thousands of different index standards for themselves, they have no right at all to force their preferred index standard or any other index standard at all upon any dissenting people, not matter how strongly they believe that others would "need" it and ought to be included in their "we". - Freedom of choice for value standards, too. Indeed, most government currencies are somewhat managed, too, under the pretence that governments can and will provide stability in this sphere. What can be achieved in this political way can be seen by the more or less rapid depreciation of almost all paper currencies in this and former centuries. Stability can be best provided for when neither bad nor even sound currencies are granted any monopoly or legal tender powers - except the natural legal tender against their issuer, and when all possible, desired and practicable alternative private enterprise and cooperative currencies can freely compete even against the supposedly best one. - J.Z., 24.3.97. - DIS.

INDEX, COMBINED, AUTOMATICALLY COMPUTER PRODUCED, OF ALL MONETARY FREEDOM WRITINGS & BANKING BOOKS, TO THE EXTENT THAT THEY ARE ALREADY DIGITIZED & OFFERED ONLINE OR ON DISC: A centre should be agreed upon, to which contributions could be sent on discs or per email attachments, possibly with a small contribution towards the costs. The same should be done for a free banking bibliography, abstracts and review compilation. Perhaps this should start with the rare and out of copyrights texts. I read that programs do exist already for this purpose. But it should be able to discriminate sufficiently the different meanings and definitions of the same terms. - J.Z., n.d. & 1.7.11.

INDOMITUS REPORT, THE, The Indomitus Report 26 September 2004 - indomitus.net/ir20040926.htm - Cached - 26 Sep 2004 – The Indomitus Report on being sovereign, free market money, the space frontier, launch technology, new country developments, and longevity.

INDOMITUS REPORT, THE: Free Market Money 2004. - The Indomitus Report - Free Market Money 2004 - indomitus.net/2004status.html - Cached - 31 Jan 2005 – The Indomitus Report for 2004 on the free market money industry.

INDOMITUS.NET: About the Indomitus crest - indomitus.net/thecrest.html - Cached - Gold is, of course, a key element of our views on free market money. Within the black circle we've added a gold dollar sign. The dollar sign is in a fancy ...

INDOMITUS.NET: indomitus.net - www.serpanalytics.com/sites/indomitus.net - Cached - Description: Indomitus Report on free markets, free countries, space frontier, gold mining, longevity research, free market money, and launch technology. ...

INDSOVU.COM: Team - indsovu.com/tiki-index.php?page=Team - Cached - ... business planning, software development, real estate, toll road development, free port development, free market money, and private stock markets. ...

INDIGENOUS PEOPLE: Seven Global Currencies of the Indigenous Peoples, http://community.indigenousportal.com/_Seven-Global-Currencies-of-the-Indigenous-Peoples/audio/494697/109225.html - 5. posted by chantlaca at 05/29/2011 @ 10:59pm - THE NATION, 13.6.11. Audio only - GLOBAL CURRENCIES? - J.Z.

INDIVIDUAL SECESSIONISM & MONETARY FREEDOM: See: "ON PANARCHY" & PANARCHY.

INFLATION & CAPITALISM: Capitalism drives prices up." - Popular opinion. - In unjust discrimination leftist people tend to blame capitalism for almost everything and State socialism for almost nothing. What is true is that it drives up e.g. wages for skilled labour to their highest level, precisely by equipping it not only with training but also with much capital. Only unskilled labour, unwilling to learn enough, and easily and cheaply replaced by machines, will have to satisfy itself with lower wages as a result of a kind of referendum among the consumers, whose preferences are found out by entrepreneurs. But even while it does increase wages of those able and willing to handle advanced tools and machines, it is blamed for paying starvation or exploitation wages. The fact that demand for labour is generally, quite artificially and legally, limited by the note issue monopoly, remains widely ignored. By developing markets and to the extent that it is really free (and this requires monetary freedom, as well, which statists are not willing to concede or promote) it does, indeed, achieve the highest prices producers - including employees - can achieve on their internal and the world market. But it does not allow them to charge monopolistic high prices because it does not permit legal monopolies but rather introduces maximum competition - provided only it introduces monetary and financial freedom, too. Without these it is an incomplete capitalism or a still restricted market. Wherever its production is quite competitive, e.g. in the production of cheap nylon stockings, ball point pens and digital watches, it has obviously driven prices down to their lowest possible level, even when reckoned in already much depreciated paper money. The latter indicates that capitalism is not fully operative but that statism still mismanages its forced and monopolistic exchange medium and value standard. - J.Z., 24.3.97. - Capitalism did reduce e.g. the prices of aluminium and plastics. Also e.g. of hand-made wooden combs, still produced for some in Japan, for ca. $ 200 each, to a few cents for plastic ones. - Nonsensical assertions are still as common in what is now classed widely as "economics", i.e. degrees of territorial statist interventions with real economics, as they are in the ca. 30,000 religious faiths, sects, churches or religions. - J.Z., 1.7.11. - DIS., GREED, INTEREST, PROFIT, MONOPOLY, CAPITALISM, PRICE INCREASES.

INFLATION & COMPULSORY SAVINGS: Some form of compulsory savings would be an attractive alternative which would probably win public acceptance. - Colin Chapman, THE BULLETIN, 13.2.71. - When the managers of the central bank have so mismanaged the money issue entrusted to them, that the currency would be depreciated if everyone fully spent what he has earned, then these mis-managers and their supporters want to diminish the effectiveness of that over-issue upon the price level by depriving those, who earned this money, of its immediate use. Two wrongs do not make one right. - Further, an over-issue has already occurred and has already been somewhat expressed in nominally increased prices. To then enforce savings by everybody, e.g. through the issue of forced loans, would suddenly reduce the circulation and create a deflation. That could have catastrophic rather than healing effects upon the economy for while individually fallen prices (due to technological or agricultural progress), do encourage buying, generally falling prices deter potential buyers from buying right now as much as they could, in the expectation that prices will fall further. - Furthermore, this proposal overlooks that through financial despotism banks are already forced to deposit certain percentages of all their deposits with the central bank and, moreover, they are often and to a large extent forced to purchase government insecurities. The same applies to many public authorities and their savings and especially to superannuation and pension funds. In all these cases the victims of these forced loans are later forced, as taxpayers, to repay these loans to themselves. And all such dishonesty is smugly called "public finance". - J.Z., n.d. & 5.4.97. - All the nonsense uttered on inflation would make an interesting anthology, especially if it is confronted with its best refutations. - Compare my 16pp brochure in PEACE PLANS 19B, entitled: The Soft Option: Monetary Freedom to Stop Inflation without Causing Unemployment, 1976. - I offer it digitized as an email attachment, 114 KB, zipped 30 KB if it cannot be found online. - J.Z., 1.7.11. - It is still accessible on my old home page, although after my conversion to broadband with Acenet, I am no longer entitled to this site: www.acenet.com.au/~jzube/lmphomepage.htm.htm Google brings 7810 search results for: John Zube, The Soft Option, PEACE PLANS 19B, if I do not use quotation marks, most of them not reporting on this brochure, There are only 7 results on one page, if I put the terms in quotation marks. app17-utv.htm - www.acenet.com.au/~jzube/app17-tuv.htm.htm - Cached - - FB floppy 1.doc - www.docstoc.com/docs/74468304/FB-floppy-1doc - 22 Mar 2011 – John Zube, Berrima, February 1979. Peace Plans 41/49 ... condensed essay on this: The Soft Option: Monetary Freedom to Stop Inflation ... - J.Z., 1.7.11. - DIS., UNEMPLOYMENT

INFLATION & DEARNESS: Inflation and dearness (dearth or high prices) are completely different concepts. Inflation is caused exclusively from the monetary side, dearness exclusively from the goods side. - Ulrich von Beckerath, 25.1.52. - PRICES, HIGH PRICES, PRICE INCREASES

INFLATION & DEFLATION: Under monetary despotism they can occur at the same time and in the same country, for then different segments of the economy are differently supplied with exchange media from one monopoly centre only. There are different circulation spheres and channels as well as greater or smaller time delays. For instance, governments may insist on rapid tax payments but are not so rapid when it comes to paying the bills that taxpayers send them for supplies to the government. One area or segment of all business may be flooded with currency (e.g. the arms industries during a war) while others are starved for cash (like e.g., clothing or toy producers or builders during war time.) From one issuing centre a whole country can no more be evenly supplied with locally required currencies than water could be supplied to it from a single spring or lake or via the weather - rain clouds from evaporation of ocean waters and waters on continents. - Moreover, during rapid inflations prices can race ahead of the printing presses and thus cause shortages in the depreciated notes, to pay all these rapidly increasing prices with them. - J.Z., 9.9.02, 1.7.11. - ARE THEY ALWAYS OPPOSITES & OCCUR ONLY ONE AFTER THE OTHER OR CAN THEY OCCUR AT THE SAME TIME IN THE SAME COUNTRY? DIS., Q.

INFLATION & EXCHANGE RATES: That inflation has taken place can be best (or only) be seen in the foreign exchange rates. - A widespread opinion this but one only partly true. Other central banks, as Keynesians or Friedmanites, might inflate at the same rate. Only if they do not as much or even more, could the difference be seen. We can certainly no longer assume that all foreign currencies are sound ones. Exchange rates are influenced by many other factors as well. However, generally it is true that when internally free market rating is suppressed (through legal tender and the exclusive currency status, that outlaws competing internal currencies), then external exchange rates, against foreign currencies, where the own internal legal tender does not apply, can and often do indicate degrees of depreciation, or, sometimes, even appreciation. (As happens currently regarding the Australian Dollar compared with the USA Dollar, because the latter is even faster depreciated. - J.Z., 1.7.11.) However, e.g., a free official or unofficial gold or silver market can do the same much faster and more accurately. So can a selected basket of commodity prices. But why presume that the internal price control and monopoly for a currency must continue? Why not abolish it and subject every currency to competition and free pricing and maximum publicity and let it survive only on its merits? - J.Z., 24.3.97, 1.7.11. - DIS., EXCHANGE RATES, Q.

INFLATION & FEVER: Inflation is a type of fever. - Popular opinion. - It is certainly indicative of a disease in a currency, the disease of monetary despotism. One might compare this fever to the action of government injecting harmful germs into healthy blood streams and thereby artificially inducing a fever. But why grant any government such abusable power? Usually, the term is used by culprits or their apologists, to prevent people from looking at the real causes of inflations. One might compare it to Mafia chieftains "explaining" a rise in crime with a rise in dishonesty in the general population. - VIRUS. - J.Z., n.d. & 2.4.97, 1.7.11. - EXCUSES & FALSE PRETENCES, DIS.

INFLATION & GOVERNMENT SPENDING: Inflation could be stopped by a reduction of government spending. - Popular opinion. - Government spending is non-inflationary as long as it remains within its tax, fees and loan returns. Only if "spending" is done with newly printed or coined money, money that is an exclusive and forced currency, due to the issue monopoly and legal tender, does inflation come it and can it result. "Spending" is too good a world for legal imposition of depreciated money upon all creditors and the enforced and exclusive circulation of depreciated notes - among people not allowed to provide honest money for themselves and under no individual or moral obligation to support any wildly spending government and its budget. - J.Z., 2.4.97. - A more suitable term for governmental monopoly money with legal tender power is: requisitioning certificates. They have nothing any longer to do with sound money and sound value standards when they are issued beyond their tax foundation and upon a mere fictitious paper "value standard". - J.Z., 1.7.11. - DIS.

INFLATION & GOVERNMENTS: Governments force you into participating in the depreciation of their paper currencies by a) legal tender, b) their money issue monopoly, c) their outlawry of value preserving clauses in contracts, d) by misdirecting savings, pension- and insurance funds into governmental "insecurities". - J.Z., 10.7.91, 4.7.11.

INFLATION & GOVERNMENTS: The tenor of most of the submissions was the admission that there was an inflationary problem and that the government should do something about it, ... - On industry submissions, THE AUSTRALIAN, 11.2.71. - The offender is asked to go straight! But he is left in power over an exclusive and forced currency that is not criticised, not even doubted or questioned by industry and agriculture and business representatives, whose output and services are required to give value to any currency and who should rather be in charge of currencies issued by themselves than expect government gangsters or "representatives" to run a single currency rightfully, honestly and efficiently for all - although during all of history that was only done very rarely by them and then, usually, not for long. - J.Z., 2.4.97. - DIS.

INFLATION & HIGH PRICES: Inflation is caused by high prices. - Popular opinion. - The reverse is true, even when one reckons in an inflated paper standard. If the standard of value is sound, then prices remain the same and an inflated currency becomes depreciated against it, i.e. it is either refused or accepted only at a corresponding discount, while all other optional means of exchange, using the sound value standard, are still accepted at par. Then the cause and effect relationship in these cases will become clear very soon. Under an exclusive and forced currency it remains obscured for most people, for all too long and for some forever. - J.Z., 24.3.97. - DIS.

INFLATION & LEGAL TENDER & THE ISSUE MONOPOLY: Inflation can only happen when you or somebody else has the power to legally force all his tokens upon all others in their country, at their nominal value, regardless of how valuable or valueless they actually are. It can never happen when each is only at liberty to issue tokens which only oblige himself - and his associates - to accept them at any time at par from anyone, in payment of debts owed to him or them, or for any of his goods, services or labour offers, regardless of any discount which they may have suffered in general circulation. Each will tend to severely limit the total amount of his commitments to supply others at any time they demand it, and most potential acceptors will severely limit the amounts of such commitments by others, unless they are very convenient local currencies, with an obvious, believable and wanted local shop-foundation. Even then, they would not accept local currency, in most cases, much beyond their immediate or near future requirements. If they went beyond that, then they would carefully check out the exchange rates of this local currency, perhaps even its rating in futures dealings and they might unload their excess local currency holding fast at a local currency exchange office, like tourist do with local national currencies that they do no longer need. In other words, local currencies would not tend to be over issued and depreciated. If they were, they would soon disappear from circulation, driven out by better or excellent ones. - J.Z., 5.4.97. - DIS.

INFLATION & LEGAL TENDER: Inflation-proof money is not impossible. It is merely outlawed by legal tender legislation and the central bank's issue monopoly. Let good money drive out the bad: Repeal legal tender and the central bank's legalized privileges, especially its note issue monopoly. - J.Z., April 97, 1.7.11. - GOOD & BAD MONEY, GRESHAM'S LAW

INFLATION & LEGAL TENDER: Try to find any large and lasting inflation of the general price level, through any physical or accounts-only or clearing certificate currency, that ever happened without the legal tender and monopoly issue privilege. I would be very interested to hear or read about one. - J.Z., 3/97, 1.7.11.

INFLATION & OVERSPENDING: Is inflation due to "overspending"? What does "overspending" mean? Without legal tender, i.e., compulsory value and compulsory acceptance for a monopolistic currency, no government or its central bank could over-spend, in an inflationary way. Otherwise, it has first to extracted purchasing power, from those who still have it, via taxes or loans, which would correspondingly reduce the purchasing power of others and even, sometimes for considerable periods, leave the thus extracted monies unprofitably in government accounts, creating a degree of deflationary conditions, thus making sales for the rest of the economy even more difficult. Any spending by any government may be considered to be "over-spending", like the spending of any bank robber or mugger or thief or of anyone who forged cheques upon your account or who had stolen and used your credit card. What is probably meant is "deficit-spending" or use of the note-printing press for legal tender money. If a government had to depend upon tax foundation for soundly constructed tax foundation money of its own, its voluntary acceptance in general circulation, its value rating against a sound value standard, upon full publicity for all its issues, on the refusal option of potential acceptors, on competition with alternative and freely issued currencies and on voluntary membership of its taxpayers - would much or even any "overspending" opportunity remain for it? All thought models, hypotheses, theories and explanation attempts that take for granted monetary and financial despotism, as well as territorial sovereignty over tax slaves and subjects to its other laws, imposed by the minority which rules, in effect, however representative it claims to be, however large or small its supposed "mandate" or consent is, are all too limited in understanding the present territorialist reality or establishment and rightful as well as rational and voluntary alternatives to it. Take, for example, an ordinary citizen, one who tries to "overspend" by trying to take up more credit than he can expect to repay or tries to issue uncovered cheques. His cheques, although made out to legal tender, are not legal tender themselves and thus can be refused. Moreover, his bank will charge him highly for overdrafts and for uncovered cheques not accepted by it in advance. In the absence of legal tender and a means of payment monopoly for him, he cannot over-issue or over-spend without rapidly reaching his limits, getting into debt and bankruptcy and perhaps losing all he had accumulated. Why should we grant such privileges to governments, who almost never failed to abuse them? If a government, due to monetary freedom, could only issue its tax foundation money at 10% discount, it would immediately have to accept it at par, at 100%, from all who still owe it taxes, i.e., it would have given them a 10% tax discount. Its self-interest would prevent such issues. The others would largely refuse to accept government money at all, if it had such a discount on a free money market and would rather arrange for payments in alternative exchange media that stand at par with their nominal value and could thus be readily be passed on in payments to others. Monetary despotism leads inevitably to many and large abuses. Monetary freedom ends them, to a large extent, although, certainly, it could not prevent all kinds of frauds and deceptions. - J.Z., 16.8.91, 26.8.02, 2.7.11. - DIS., Q.

INFLATION & PAYMENT DIFFICULTIES: Without inflation there would be payment difficulties in the payment of wages and pensions. - Popular opinion. - With inflation there are also payment difficulties in the payment of wages and pensions. Wage and pension recipients are only partly paid, by being paid in depreciated money and, since prices tend to race ahead of rapid inflationary money issues, money is then, finally, so short that the government finds it difficult to pay its suppliers and employees. There is much historical evidence for the reality of such payment difficulties in spite of or because of monetary inflation. - Strikes multiply during times of inflation, indicating that the ability of employers is not so much increased by inflations that they can readily give in to any wage demands. - Nor should one assume that all sectors of an economy are equally supplied with the inflated currency. The government sector and some privileged private sectors, e.g. armament contractors, may be over-supplied while, at the same time, other sectors may be under-supplied with means of payment. Price adaptations to inflations and deflations are neither instantaneously nor completely even or proportionate. Both introduce enormous artificial distortions and miscalculations. - Moreover, the number of creditors prepared to grant medium to long-term credits, on the basis of a fast depreciating paper "value standard", imposed by monetary despotism, is also fast diminishing, which leads to a lessoning of production of goods and services, while the and less spending of earned incomes, while the note printing presses work overtime. Subsidies, "stimulus spending", bail-outs etc. at the expense of ordinary taxpayers or those of the inflation tax, cannot make up for these flaws. - J.Z., 2. 4. 97, 2.7.11. - DIS., KEYNESIANISM, MONETARY DESPOTISM

INFLATION & PRICES: Inflation is caused by excessive prices. - Popular opinion - Yes, in the same way as fever is caused by a thermometer indicating a high body temperature! - J.Z., n.d. - DIS.

INFLATION & TAXATION: The most effective thing that Mr. Gordon (then Prime Minister of Australia) could do now to contain the inflation bogy would be to cancel or suspend the personal income tax concessions he granted in the August budget. - T. M. Fitzgerald, THE AUSTRALIAN, 22.1.71. - First the victimised citizens are taxed by the government-caused inflation and then, when in their only defence left to them against inflation, they have nominally increased their incomes, expressed in the depreciated, forced and exclusive government paper money, they are to be taxed again, to counter this inflation! Then the politicians have the impertinence to call it a "concession" when they do not collect as much in tributes from you as they did before! - The only kernel of truth in the above statement is that of tax foundation, which Adam Smith did also recognize in at least one passage of his writings, On money, in An Inquiry …The Wealth of Nations. (Vol. I of the London, Grant Richards edition, page 366: A prince, who should enact that a certain proportion of his taxes should e paid in a paper money of a certain kind, might thereby give a certain value to this paper money, even though the terms of its final discharge and redemption should depend altogether upon the will of the prince. If the bank which issued this paper was careful to keep the quantity of it always somewhat below what could easily be employed in this manner, the demand for it might be such as to make it even bear a premium, or sell for somewhat more in the market than the quantity of gold or silver currency for which it was issued. - Here he summed up a large experience, which most of his fans still ignore. However, in its last part he still does, quite wrongly, assume that it must be issued upon a stock of gold or silver currency and, ultimately, redeemable in it. He, too, did not clearly realize that its acceptance like rare metal coins, in payments of taxes, whose size is measured in such value standards, can already give such paper money a par value with the chosen rare metal, without the promise of redemption and the costs of any readiness for it. - J.Z., 2.7.11.) A government's optional paper money issues can, indeed, be balanced by and limited in its amount to its due or soon due tax "revenues". Thus such paper monies have been called tax anticipation warrants. As such they are merely clearing certificates, not promises to pay rare metal coins for them. Such tax foundation money should have legal tender only towards its issuer and it should also use a sounder value standard than a managed and usually mismanaged paper standard. Taxes and tax foundation money should be expressed e.g. in gold weight units and the government should have to accept its own tax foundation certificates at their face value even when in general circulation they have got a discount corresponding to their over-issue. That would reduce the "spending" power of the government and reduce the tax burden for the tax victims. Moreover, without legal tender power and the issue monopoly, government paper could ultimately be altogether refused in general circulation, being replaced by sounder and sufficient issues, so that at last even government employees would no longer be prepared to accept it. The more and more worthless bucks should be passed back to the issuer. Pay to Caesar what is Caesar's! Do not offer him your own honest currencies in payment- and do not let your incomes, paid in these currencies, be confiscated by him! Rather go on a well organized tax strike, one that includes the total refusal to accept any government paper money. - J.Z., 2.4.97. - DIS., ADAM SMITH, TAX FOUNDATION MONEY, TAX STRIKE

INFLATION & THE IGNORANCE OF OUR RULERS & THEIR EXPERTS: I really never have confused myself with God. So I can't cure inflation. Who the hell do I think I am? I do what I can." - Alfred Kahn, Chief of President Carter's Anti-Inflation Program. - INQUIRY, June 11 & 25, 1979, p.2. - Do not forgive them - for they do not know what they are doing or care what they are doing to us - by their legalized actions, measures and programs, systems and institutions. - J.Z., 15.9.02. - Most government programs do not deserve the term "program". They neither comprehend the cause nor the cure for any problem - which, in most cases, the government has caused itself, by various wrongful interventions. - J.Z., 2.7.11. - INFLATION AN ACT OF GOD? AN HONEST CURRENCY POSSIBLE ONLY THROUGH AN ACT OF GOD? DIS., EXPERTS, BUREAUCRATS, POLITICIANS

INFLATION & VOLUNTARY RESTRAINTS: Voluntary restraints by private industry in new investments in plant, machinery and new office blocks could curb inflation. - Pop & "expert" opinion. - The ongoing inflation is a strong incentive to borrow long term and invest this money by buying capital values that preserve their value even during inflations and then, finally, repaying these loans with inflated paper money. The suggestion tackles effects, not causes. - Why not discuss, instead, a voluntary restraint of the institutions of monetary despotism and their activities - or their abdication or outlawry? - J. Z., n.d., 6.4.97, 2.7.11. - DIS.

INFLATION AN INFECTIVE VIRUS? Business and farm leaders would follow the union men to the White House within the next few days to help plan a system of wage-and-price stabilisation measures which, Mr. Nixon said yesterday, would ensure that "America is not again inflicted by the virus of runaway inflation". - THE SYDNEY MORNING HERALD, 11.9.71. - Was he really as stupid or dishonest or misinformed? - J. Z. - DIS., LEADERSHIP, PRESIDENTS, NIXON, FEVER.

INFLATION DUE TO EXCESSIVE WAGE CLAIMS? Inflation arises out of excessive wage claims of labourers. - Pop opinion. - This view is so superficial that it does not even include salary claims of employees in the private and public sector and the higher fee claims of tradesmen, professionals and of the professional con-men, the politicians. The supposedly unjustified prices of imagined "price-makers" are left out, too! - If mere claims could lead to their satisfaction, regardless of the supply of exchange media, then and only then would such assertions be somewhat right. But such things happen only in fairy tales. Real inflation has other causes - central banking and legal tender or monetary despotism, i.e. the outlawry of monetary freedom. No employer has an unlimited wage fund to pay higher wages with. No employer, except the central bank, has a note printing press, a money monopoly and legal tender powers. No employer can say to the central bank: You must give me more inflated paper money so that I can seemingly satisfy their demands for higher nominal wages. Without the circulation being further inflated by the central bank, the employer simply cannot pass on higher wage demands to wholesalers and retailers - for, ultimately, the employees themselves, as consumers, would resist the higher prices resulting. Not only that, they could not pay them at all, not even the former lower prices, when they had to be laid off, in the expectation that at the higher costs, of higher wages, many less goods could actually be sold. Goods do not have legal tender power for the consumers. The production and trade in mere survival goods and services would go on, although reduced, too. All the other production and exchanges, made uneconomical or impossible, through excess wage and salary demands, would simply come to a stop. Anyone can price himself out of his market. As a sovereign consumer he does this to others, all the time, who try to extort too high prices from him. He goes, instead, to those suppliers and their wholesalers and manufacturers with lower costs, including lower wages, salaries and profits. The free pricing system is a continuous referendum on "just" prices, wages, salaries, fees and subscriptions etc. - However, to be really free, it should also include free enterprise, free trade and free pricing for optional, competing exchange media and value standards. Workers and employees will not be fully emancipated until they are monetarily emancipated, too. - Instead of striving for nominal wage increases in the exclusive and forced currency of monetary despotism, employees should contract for wages and salaries that are expressed in sound alternative currencies, which do preserve their purchasing power and do increase only with the development of technology, science, of the economy and of individually increased higher productivity. And they should strive for autonomous work group or cooperative production contracts that would automatically increase their earnings in accordance with their increased productivity. - The highest wages were for a long time paid in the U.S. and perhaps they are still the highest there now. But in the U.S. prices were often not higher but lower. Not the hourly cost of labour is decisive but the labour cost per unit produced. A very expensive labourer may, due to extensive use of labour saving machinery and good management, lead to a smaller percentage of labour costs in the total production costs. In other countries or employments, much lower labour costs may form a much higher percentage of the unit costs. - Real wage increases should be aimed for e.g. via productivity increases (leading also to lower prices), sound currencies, free trade, cooperative production, lower taxes etc. To strive for merely nominally increased wages, paid for in the government's inflated currency, is absurd. Foolish wage demands are "satisfied" thus, in foolish ways, with which only fools will remain content. - If the government does not inflate its currency and thereby nominally increases earnings and prices, what happens? Shoe repairers may e.g. double their wages or prices. Then, if their customers were to go on to demand as many repairs from them as before, at the new prices or wages (highly doubtful), then these customers would have to reduce their demand for other goods, whose prices would correspondingly fall. Thus the general price level would remain unchanged although the shoe repairers would then have gained a larger share of the total earnings - at the expense of others. But the most likely result would be a reduction of the turnover and thereby the total income of the shoe repairers and an increase in the sale of new, cheap and factory produced and disposable shoes, which can be produced by unskilled labourers and which are never repaired but merely thrown out. To that extent their increased wage claims would make the shoemakers unemployed. That has actually happened, to a large extent, not only to shoemakers but e.g. to plasterers, too. -J.Z., n.d. & 6.4.97, 2.7.11. - DIS.

INFLATION FIGHTING: Inflation must be fought by various measures. - Popular opinion. - Why create the legal preconditions for it in the first place and then maintain it for over a century? If one does not introduce an evil or let it grow - then one does not have to fight it. - J.Z., n.d. - If you really want to fight inflation, its cause, not its symptoms, repeal legal tender and the issue monopoly of the central bank and do not grant it any regulatory and supervisory powers, either. At most it should be allowed to run the government's monetary system, but only quite non-coercively, competitively, with government paper money in circulation only upon whatever merits its voluntary customers would still see in it. Without compulsory taxation and compulsory territorial State membership only competing State paper currencies based on voluntary contributions and their voluntary tax foundations could remain. No governmental value standard should be granted any monopoly over a whole territory and all its people any longer. Free choice in currency and value standards, confining all bad issues to voluntary victims only. - J.Z., 2.5.97. - DIS.

INFLATION IS A MATTER OF TOO MUCH MONEY CHASING TOO FEW GOODS. - Popular opinion. - It would be more correct to say that the coercive and exclusive money issues of others than the owners of goods, labour and services, tend to wrongly chase the goods, services and labour, upon which they are not and cannot be rightly based and that they do prevent the owners of goods, and providers of services and labour to issue just as many money token, based upon their goods, services and labour, as are needed to sell all of them easily, all the time, at market prices, as long as they are wanted. If one does not make these distinctions between different forms of money, i.e., especially the money of monetary despotism and the money of monetary freedom then one will never understand the cause of and cure for inflation. - Honest money doesn't have to chase goods and services: it represents them. Exclusive currency that is supplied by others one has to chase with one's goods and services. Or one has to try to hunt for it - and is not always sufficiently successful in such attempts, for there are all too many other such "hunters" around and the game is relatively scarce, compared with the number of hunters and their guns. The money of monetary freedom one can issue oneself, based upon one's goods and services and accepts it for one's goods and services. No chasing is involved. The goods and services are simply its fundamental cover and redemption fund, its issue and reflux guaranty. The goods and service side is automatically kept in balance with the money side, by the owners and traders of goods and services themselves. E.g. by a local shop association, acting as its own note-issuing banker, issuing its own local shop-foundation money, consisting in goods warrants, service certificates etc. in monetary denominations and using for them and for their prices a self-chosen value standard. That would be an example of monetary emancipation from monetary despotism. Honest money has no other convertibility or value or reflux option or foundation than that of being useful in payment for the assortment of goods, services and labour upon which it is based, in any private or cooperative payment community. But it can also be used to purchase gold, silver and platinum on the markets for these rare metals. Owners of these rare metal commodities could also issue certificates based upon and redeemable in these products. But they should not imagine that their issues could suffice to provide a substitute for all the monies that could and should be issued based upon and redeemable in all other daily and frequently wanted goods and services. - Monetary troubles arise only when honest monies are not allowed to "chase" bad monies out of circulation, by refusing or discounting them. In other words, when wanted goods, services and labour cannot be turned into an optional and market rated local currency by their owners and providers. - J.Z., 28.3.97, 30.8.02, 2.7.11. - DIS.

INFLATION PSYCHOLOGY: The most important need is to check the development of an inflation psychology, of a tendency for people to express a growing distrust for money by accelerated spending and by a chronic process of industrial turbulence in search of wage increases to offset the dollar's falling value. This would be a self-reinforcing process: industrial turbulence and wage hosts promote the deterioration of money's value, which provokes the wage demands. - The psychological type is the third and worst form of inflationary pressure, the other two forces in the spiral being the cost-push and the demand-pull types. - T. M. Fitzgerald, THE AUSTRALIAN, 22.1.71. - In other words, he wants to prevent people from engaging in the only defensive measures that are left to them against monetary despotism and he slanders it as a mere "inflation psychology". Any inflating government has really earned any degree of distrust against its monetary policy. A monetary revolution against it would be morally and economically justified. Here, too, the defensive measures are accused of being aggressive or inflationary by themselves. He did not demand a stop to the note printing presses, the abolition of the privileges of the Reserve Bank and of legal tender for its exclusive currency and of the monopoly for the issue of notes. - J. Z., 2.4.97. - Unfortunately, only such "experts" find it easy to get their flawed and misleading views expressed in most of the mass media, even when no formal censorship has been introduced. Their ignorance and prejudices, backed up by those of the public, prevent monetary and financial enlightenment even more so than a formal governmental censorship would. - J.Z., 2.9.02. - Obviously, just like among there professional psychologists, priests and preachers, and various other social "scientists", there only very few who have any sound ideas and opinions on genuine economics. - All the more we should appreciate these few. - J.Z., 3.7.11. - DIS., PSYCHOLOGICAL MOTIVES?

INFLATION PSYCHOSIS & CENTRAL BANKING CONTROLS: Tighter and more painful central banking controls are required to eradicate a nation's inflation psychosis." - Pop or even "expert" opinion. - That "psychosis" is the all too well founded distrust against any government forced and exclusive paper currency over the last all too many decades. Without that monetary despotism and its catastrophic results, crippling whole economies and impoverishing all their people, it would not exist. More of the same does not offer a way out but merely one into further troubles. Monetary freedom instead of monetary despotism! - J. Z., 23.3.97. - DIS.

INFLATION TARGET: Inflation, with 1.3%, is at the lower end of the Reserve Bank's target of 2-3%. - Radio news 24.4.97. - Who says Keynesianism is dead after it has been repeatedly and thoroughly refuted? Here it even frankly admits that it aims not at currency stability but currency instability, at inflation or currency depreciation, instead and pretends that it has reasons to be proud of having achieved a lower inflation rate, rather than stopping inflation altogether, something that it could do immediately, merely by ending its monopoly and legal tender powers, letting its paper money find its true market value and leaving all prices and wages to be marked out in sound alternative value standards, unchanged by its despotic legislation. The law usually ascribes the role as a defender of the currency to the central bank. In reality, it becomes its depreciator in the vain pursuit of full employment through a gradual and managed inflation of the monopolised and forced currency. The figures given are, naturally for government institutions, not the truly representative ones for the facts but politically influenced ones. See: CPI or Consumer Price Index. This is also a monopolistically determined figure that leans away from the fact to please the politicians and deceive their voting cattle. Controlled prices are included to measure inflation and almost no economists protests, at least not in public. - J. Z., 24.4.97, 3.7.11. - One might as well speak of targets for robberies, thefts, fraud, rapes and child molestation. - Often our supposed experts condemn themselves by their own utterances, at least in the minds or moral and intelligent people. - J.Z., 3.7.11. - DIS.

INFLATION THEORIES: They are so numerous that all should be listed - and confronted with the facts and contrary theories as far as is possible, in order to enable the patient truth searchers to finally sort the wheat from the chaff. - J. Z., 19.3.97, 3.7.11.

INFLATION, A LESSER EVIL? - Inflation is the lesser evil compared with deflation, depression and mass unemployment and mass bankruptcies. - Should we argue at length which is the greatest evil among cancer, heart disease, AIDS and tuberculosis? Or should we try to resist or prevent all of them? Inflation is not the opposite of deflation, since it also has deflationary effects and can be mixed with deflation and unemployment in stagflations. Deflations and mass unemployment can also, under monetary despotism, be used as excuses for permanent inflations. - J. Z., 2. 4. 97, 3.7.11. - DIS., DEFLATION, DEPRESSIONS, UNEMPLOYMENT, BANKRUPTCIES, CRISES

INFLATION, A NEBULOUS ECONOMIC MECHANISM? - In reality it is a quite simple mechanism but this is hidden in a dense fog of errors, wrong premises, myths, fallacies, prejudices, misleading terms, wrong conclusions, false observations etc. - I would rather say that it is an over-issue of money that is made possible through legal tender and the issue monopoly - beyond the quantity of money that would be readily accepted on a free market, and this at par with its nominal value, expressed in a sound value standard, if the issue monopoly and legal tender in general circulation (apart from the natural, economical and moral one towards its issuer) were absent. - That is my version of Ulrich von Beckerath's definition. - J.Z., 2.4.97. - DIS.

INFLATION, CAN IT BE PREVENTED? - It is impossible to prevent inflation altogether. One can only fight some of its consequences. It is like an earthquake or other natural catastrophe. - Popular opinion. - So the real culprits of this result of monetary despotism would have us believe. They do not want to be blamed for their flawed and despotic payment and value measurement system and their actions within it. At most they are prepared to "reform" their system of monetary despotism, somewhat, but never to abolish it. - Without legal tender and the issue monopoly one cannot inflate a currency, not even with the worst intentions. For then anyone is free to discount an inflated currency or to reject it altogether while going on to reckon and account all one's prices, wages, salaries, fees and contracts in sound alternative value standards. - If inflation is like a natural catastrophe, and, as such, inevitable, then how come there were some prolonged periods of stable currency, e.g. in Prussia, from the Napoleonic wars to WW II? - J.Z., n.d. & 3.4.97. However, mot of the time governments have dishonestly depreciated their "value standards" and forced their depreciated currency upon their victims, as if it were still a sound one. - J.Z., 3.7.11. - OR IS IT A NATURAL CATASTROPHE? DIS.

INFLATION, CAUSE OR GUILT? Who is to blame for inflation? - This or that group of claimants, with their inflationary demands? This or that group of conspirators, financiers, speculators, unionists, shopkeepers etc.? - Popular opinion offers many such "explanations". Basically, the question should not be "who?" but "what?" - While the few, those in territorial power, can, with their laws and institutions of monetary despotism, initiate the process and do have wrongful motives to do so, their motives, these are the causes which make their inflations possible. I may have a motive to cause an inflation but I do not have the power to do so. Neither have you. I possess neither an issue monopoly for my notes, nor do they have legal tender power, like those of the central bank. Nor does any private bank or financial institution, subordinated to monetary legislation and to the central bank, has any such power. One should not try to assign blame without referring at all to monetary legislation and legalized institutions and their "principles" and motives of operation. - J.Z., 7.4.97, 3.7.11. - Free people can only oblige themselves to accept their own notes in payment for their goods, services or debts owed to them, they cannot oblige others, who are not their debtors, to accept these notes at all or to accept them at par with their nominal value. Thus they cannot cause an inflation of all prices, wages, salaries, fees, etc. that are reckoned and priced in sound value standards and paid in sound exchange media or clearing certificates or account credits using such standards. - J. Z., 4.9.02. 3.7.11. - WHO OR WHAT IS TO BLAME? CAUSE & CURE, DIS.

INFLATION, COMPETITION & LOWER PRICES: Increased competition could curb inflation, e.g. by legislation against restrictive trade practices and by lowering some high tariff barriers. - Popular opinion. - This would not deal with monetary inflation but merely with price increases due to goods shortages, in these cases artificially caused goods shortages. The correct name for high prices causes by the goods side is "dearness", not inflation. - J.Z., n.d., 28.3.97, 3.7.11.

INFLATION, DEPRESSIONS, UNEMPLOYMENT, CRISES: Judging by their own utterances and actions, the few who now can legally cause inflations and deflations as well as stagflations and their involuntary mass unemployment, do not know that they cause them and how they do so and, consequently, do not know how to stop the consequences of their own decisions and actions. They have often enough admitted their ignorance in this respect - and their inability to cope with the problems they have created is rather obvious, too. Required is the repeal of their relevant laws and powers and they are not even aware of how wrongful and harmful these are. - J.Z., 14.1.02, 27.8.02, 4.7.11. - & MONOPOLIZED DECISION-MAKING ON MONETARY MATTERS, COMBINED WITH GREAT ECONOMIC IGNORANCE & NUMEROUS WRONGFUL PREMISES, MYTHS & PREJUDICES, CENTRAL BANKING, MONETARY DESPOTISM, MONETARY POWERS, MONETARY MISMANAGEMENT, CENTRAL BANKING, MONEY MONOPOLY, LEGAL TENDER, ISSUE MONOPOLY

INFLATION, EXCESSIVE: Some people speak of acceptable and excessive degrees of inflation as if not every manipulation of the standard of value would be excessive. A small sum stolen does still amount to a 100% theft and when a robber only gains a few dollars by openly violating the property rights and physical security of others, then it still amounts to a complete act of robbery. - One should also take into consideration what effect a small percentage of annual inflation has upon all long term investments and claims, like e.g. those to old age pensions, payable in depreciated legal tender. 40 years of a 2% annual inflation, can destroy about 80% of the nominal value of a pension payable in paper dollars. Moreover, inflation rates are not always made up in full, if at all, by correspondingly increased interest rates. Sometimes at least some interest rates are reduced by inflation to negative interest rates. Thus, instead of premiums building up an old age security capital, the value of that capital may be diminished; quite apart from the taxation robberies committed against old age security funds. - J.Z., n. d., & 2.4.97. - DIS.

INFLATION, GERMAN INFLATION OF 1914-23: By November 1923 notes denominated 100 Billion Reichsmarks, was, apparently, the biggest denomination note issued, according to the guides for collectors that I have seen. One mentioned that this note was then worth about 7 UK pounds. - "Workers were paid twice daily and given time to go shopping, before the value was eroded by inflation." Not only the Reichsbank issued large denominations. The money shortage, in relation to the inflated prices, which were, by law, expressed in the inflated money, anticipating further inflation, was so large that numerous others issued emergency currencies, also, mostly in Reichsmark ­denominations, thus participating in the inflation of the Reichsmark while trying to reduce its deflationary effects. But some, like the Reichsbahn and Farbenwerke Hoechst, did, later, issue emergency monies on a stable value basis. (I micro-fiched a booklet they published about their issues.) This development and secessionist aspirations were two of the factors that finally forced the Reichsbank to discontinue its paper money inflation. - J.Z., 25.4.97, 4.7.11. - Initially many of the emergency money issues were only for small change, that was in short supply by the Reichsbank. However, since they, too, in most cases, used the inflated Reichsmark as their "value standard", But soon these issues followed the depreciation of the paper Reichsmark and thus they were also issued in large denominations, although, probably, not in as large ones as those which the Reichsbank got finally printed for itself and forced upon the public. - J.Z., 8.9.02, 4.7.11.

INFLATION, GOVERNMENT MOTIVATIONS, GOVERNMENT SPENDING, CAUSE OF INFLATION: The CAUSE of inflation is not that governments have a MOTIVE to inflate it but that their legislation gives them or their central banks the wrongful power of the money issue monopoly and of legal tender for its paper money, so that the national economies, depending upon monetary exchanges, have no other option, as long as this monetary despotism can be enforced, than to use this monopoly and forced currency, no matter how much it has already been over-issued and depreciated, because its reflux via taxation, forced loans and subscriptions to government insecurities (investment in tax-slaves, mostly not safeguarded against inflation) is not strong enough. Its victims are not free to refuse it or to discount it. They are not free to price out their goods and services and labours in sound value standards, instead and accept, if at all, the government's paper money only at its discounted value. They are not free to use only their own or freely chosen sound exchange media and value standards instead. They are disfranchised in this respect. They are deprived of their consumer sovereignty of free pricing and free choice and freedom to refuse to buy the currency of the government at all - with their goods and services. Instead, their only remaining option, until price controls, quotas, rationing and forced labour are imposed upon them as well, is to increase the nominal prices for their goods, services and labours, paid in the depreciating, inflated and thus price-inflating government paper money. - Without these coercive and monopolistic, even despotic or totalitarian monetary powers, the government's motivation would be irrelevant. It could not force an excess of its notes or insecurities upon an unwilling market. Then it could not do any wrong or harm in this way. -J. Z., 9.3.89, 15.5.97, 4.7.11. - DEFICIT SPENDING, BUDGETS, MONETARY DESPOTISM, LEGAL TENDER, ISSUE MONOPOLY

INFLATION, MONETARY DESPOTISM & THE THREAT OF WAR: That subject deserves a special section, perhaps a whole book. Just ask yourself: How many of the wars of the last century were financed without inflation? - J.Z., 4.7.11.

INFLATION, PRICES: Inflation is a measure of the greed of those in the community who are in a position to set their own prices for the goods or services they provide. - Popular opinion. - Even world corporations shave not market power to raise their price in the face of a slackening demand for their products or of growing competition. The law of diminishing returns applies even to monopolists. We buy less and less of their overpriced products and services and more and more of substitute goods and services at lower prices. Trades, by their very nature, are not deals or bargains in which one side is at liberty to set all the conditions and gather all the advantages to itself, even though, sometimes, a particular market may be more a seller's market than a buyer's market or more a buyer's market than a seller's market. - J. Z., n.d. & 3.4.97. - Employees tend to blame the employers and employers large blame the employees. Neither are, as a rule, sufficiently aware of the real causes and culprits that make this abuse possible, namely the legislators of monetary despotism, with its monopolistic note-issuing central bank and legal tender power for its paper "money" and its paper "value standard". - J.Z., 4.7.11. - PRICE MAKERS, PRICE SETTERS & GREED, GREED, ANTI-CAPITALIST MENTALITY, STATE SOCIALISM, COMMUNISM

INFLATION, PROGRESSIVE INFLATION: An inflation is not necessarily progressive and runs the full course towards almost complete depreciation. It can be kept within certain bounds. - In spite of strong political pressures to continue an inflation, once it has begun and to dispense and take larger and larger doses of this "drug", to achieve the same effect and in spite of the remaining deflationary pressures demanding relief by further money issues, not all inflations have run the full course. Many have been stopped before that. For instance, in Germany, after 3 inflations in this century, the 4th inflation, since 1948, has been kept mostly to low annual percentages and, for some years even, no further inflation took place. Too many remembered the past experiences with large scale inflations during and after WW I, that by the Nazis and that by the occupation forces, from 1945 - 1948. Alas, all too often inflations have only been stopped or reduced at the price of a deflation, with mass unemployment. The soft option, stopping it without causing even temporary mass unemployment, is still held to be impossible, even by most libertarians who are interested in at least aspects of monetary freedom. I have shortly described that option in PEACE PLANS 19B: The Soft Option: Monetary Freedom to Stop Inflation without Causing Unemployment, 1976, 16 pp. (I offer it digitized as an email attachment. It is also reproduced on some websites. This is one of the numerous topics still insufficiently discussed among libertarians, in spite of their significance. -J. Z., 3.4.97. - GALLOPING INFLATION, LIMITED INFLATION, CONTROL OF INFLATION

INFLATION, RATE OF INFLATION, TOLERABLE RATES? Inflation at an annual rate of between 7 & 8% is simply politically intolerable. - Pop opinion. - It might be, IF people had been used to currency stability for a long time. Not otherwise. Politicians know better under present conditions, where they themselves and their voters and those who voted against them, are not yet monetarily emancipated and have no right to vote in this sphere. Thus they do go on inflating beyond these already catastrophic inflation rates - and remain safely in office, nevertheless, and can even expect to be praised for their nominally higher and higher" spending" of what does not rightfully belong to them and has not been voluntarily and individually entrusted to them. - It all depends on how much the politicians have hoodwinked those they are supposed to represent. A fool and his money are soon parted. The money of people who monetarily remain fools will soon be depreciated by those who have the legal monopoly and power to do so and tend to do so in their own short term interest. When someone objects then, with Keynes, they might reply: "In the long run all of us are dead", or: "Let posterity take care of itself", or like Louis XIV: The great flood may come after us. I don't care! (Aprés nois la deluge!) During the 1914-23 great inflation in Germany it came to a DAILY inflation rate of 100%, i.e., from day to day the purchasing power of this paper money was halved. Inflation rates of 30-100 % p.a. were quite common for years to decades in South America, Indonesia and Vietnam and the reduction e.g. of a 70% inflation to a "mere" 30% inflation was celebrated as an economic and political achievement already indicative of "political stability". I really wonder whether a proper survey of the may be 200 "independent nations" now in existence, would not indicate as high inflation rates among most or all too many of them. Alas, the mass media do not even publish regularly and reliably the current inflation rate and that of past years and past decades in the own country, e.g. by a tabulation of the note and coin circulation year by year, together with the rise of the wage and price levels, the exchange rates, unemployment rates, rates of bankruptcies, and of taxes, as well as of “rare metal prices expressed in paper currency "standards" and of the official and unofficial CPI's. The rate of strikes, revolutions, civil wars and international wars, as well as terrorist acts, that accompany or follow monetary despotism, should also be tabulated, not only for one country but for all of them. Such surveys would daily induce more questions, doubts, demands and resistance against monetary despotism and its obvious effects. Alas, the most important facts, ideas and abuses are rarely discussed by the mass media and when at all then usually quite insufficiently, spreading more confusion and prejudices regarding them rather than light. - In the long run even the smallest degree of inflation undermines political stability and promotes revolutionary or dictatorial conditions. - J.Z., n.d. &5.4.97. - Even on Facebook most participants are more inclined to discuss trivial or personal matters rather than important economic, political and social questions. - 4.7.11.

INFLATION, RATE OF INFLATION: So long as we were not inflating as fast as the rest of the world we had no real cause of alarm. - John Hallows, THE AUSTRALIAN, 12.2.72. - Assume that all the rest of the world would be inflating at 1000% and we "only" at 100%. Would this be no cause of alarm? - Do I exaggerate? "Retail prices skyrocketed 20,000 % between 1945 &1965". - NEWSWEEK, 5.8.68, on Indonesia. It continued: "The budget has been balanced and inflation has been slowed down from a gallop to a canter of about 100% per year." - Isn't it surprising how propagandist choice of words can minimise the impact of facts upon man's "thinking" or opinions? - J.Z., 4.4.97. - STABILITY OF CURRENCY, DIS.

INFLATION, RATE OF INFLATION: The economy is comparatively stable if price rises do not exceed 4 % in any year. - Popular opinion. - It may be relatively stable, when compared with rapid or galloping inflations taking place elsewhere but it does not stabilise long term credit and debt relationships at all. Imagine the disturbance in the market if length, weight and volume measurements were reduced annually by 4%. Even a 1% inflation could already destroy all too much of one's old age insurance claim. This kind of "currency policy" is no more honest that the stance of a thief who steals from many people but only something of little value every time, arguing that they won't notice it or will not mind it. Those who watered down milk or fruit juice could argue similarly: We do little harm. Also many polluters would argue likewise. Especially those who disperse radioactive substances and increase the radiation hazards or add poisonous substances to our foods. - J. Z., 5.3.97. - Here at least the ALDI chain has recently done away with artificial colouring in its food offers. - J.Z., 4.7.11. SLOW INFLATION, STABILITY OF CURRENCY, DIS., BUDGET, GOVERNMENT SPENDING.

INFLATION, SLOW INFLATION TO ACHIEVE FULL EMPLOYMENT? A slow inflation is necessary to provide full employment. - Popular & "expert" opinion. - That has been tried, under monetary despotism, for decades and has led only to many fast inflations and a permanent degree of unemployment and sometimes massive unemployment rates - presently totalling 1 billion unemployed and underemployed. - You really want more of the same for the next few decades? - J.Z., 6.4.97. - DIS.

INFLATION, UNEMPLOYMENT: Inflation can be countered by creating substantial unemployment through various repressive measures that would restrain wages and salaries. - Popular to "expert" opinion. - Only one repression is needed, that of the monopoly for the issue of paper money and the legal tender privilege for it. Other people, who do not possess such wrongful powers, should not be blamed, penalised or restricted for the disastrous effects of these wrongful powers. Unionised workers might demand a million dollars as a normal weekly wage. Unless the central bank inflates the currency to that extent, they will not get it. If you demanded as much tomorrow, from your employer, then he would have to give you "the sack" or you would have to resign. The same applies to e.g. a baker who demanded $ 10,000 for a loaf of bread from you. He would have to do without your custom and he would be out of business very fast, having priced himself out of his market. Instead of trying to back up monetary despotism by further despotic measures - we should simply abolish it. - J.Z., 6.4.97, 4.8.11. - Compare my 16pp brochure in PEACE PLANS 19B, entitled: The Soft Option: Monetary Freedom to Stop Inflation without Causing Unemployment, 1976. - FB floppy 1.doc - www.docstoc.com/docs/74468304/FB-floppy-1doc - & WAGE CONTROL, THE HARD OPTION, DIS.

INFLATION, WORST INFLATION? On July 31, 1946, the forint superseded the pengo, victim of the postwar hyperinflation. The official exchange rate of the new currency was 11.74 fortings to the US dollar, as compared with 115.5 octillion (+26 zeros!) pengo, probably the highest exchange ratio in the history of money. – From the article on Hungary, section money and finance, p. 914, in vol. 11 of the Encyclopaedia Britannica, 1958. - What are the figures on the recent inflation in Zimbabwe? – J.Z., 18.9.10. - Many relevant pictures, figures and dates are provide at: A Thousand Pictures Is Worth One Word: Worthless | ZeroHedge- www.zerohedge.com - HUNGARY, GREAT INFLATION, ZIMBABWE

INFLATION, ZIMBABWE: Reported inflation rate in Zimbabwe in October 2009: 231 million per cent; date the $Z100 trillion note was introduced: January 16, 2009. – Jon B. Croucher, Professor of Statistics, Macquarie University, in GOOD WEEKEND, Jan. 16, 2010, page 9.

INFLATION: According to Ulrich von Beckerath, inflation is that excess of circulating money which is forced into circulation through legal tender and the issue monopoly beyond that amount of its total possible circulation at which, in the absence of legal tender and the issue monopoly, it would not have been accepted at all or not at par with its nominal value. All other attempts to prevent or end inflation than by the removal of this monopoly and coercion are in vain. In the presence of this monetary despotism it is even impossible to measure accurately and fast enough the point at which the saturation point for exchange media is reached and beyond which monetary inflation sets in. - J.Z., 14.4.97.

INFLATION: All lasting inflations of the general price level in a whole country do occur and can occur only under the communist, collectivist and despotic system of an exclusive currency with forced acceptance and forced value (legal tender power), against which the sellers of goods, services and labour have no other defence left than to increase their prices, charges and wages or salaries. Alas, those depending on fixed incomes, only nominally accounted and paid for in the depreciated currency, are, as a rule, not given such an option. At most they can avoid making such investments, in the future, if they still have some earnings that they could so invest. - J.Z., 9.10.93, 1.5.97, 4.7.11, 4.8.11.

INFLATION: DEMAND-PULL & COST PUSH INFLATION: If you permit demand-pull inflation to rage for three years, then it will follow, as the night follows the day, that the subsequent periods will become subject to cost-push inflation. ... In cost-push inflation, we witness a rise in wage rates arrived at by collective bargaining. Cost push, or 'seller's inflation', to distinguish it from demander's inflation, is more than a matter of intransigent union leaders or impatient rank-and-file strikers. It comes also from the side of rises in 'administered prices' by large corporations in their desire to protect their profit margins or even to improve upon them. - Econ-babble by Dr. Paul A. Samuelson, THE NATIONAL TIMES, 26/4/71. - To call the issue of exclusive and forced currency by a government, leading to an enforced over-issue or monetary inflation, a "demand-push" inflation, is as misleading as calling the "payments" of governments "spending". It is assumed that a genuine "demand" or "spending" is involved. One might as well say that the issue of currency forged by private forgers is a genuine demand - instead of a fraudulent transfer of purchasing power from honest people to dishonest people or that the "spending" of a bank-robber is the equivalent of the honest spending of his victims. - The fancy terms "demand-push" and "cost-pull" - inflation are used to cover up what really happens, frequently, with forced and exclusive currencies, particularly when they are world-wide used currencies like the U.S. dollar and are not as much depreciated as most other currencies are, so that they become a currency hoarding option for other victims of monetary despotism. Inflation means the over-issue of notes whose acceptance and value is enforced beyond the quantity that would be accepted at par and quite voluntarily if they were not legal tender and monopoly money. An equivalent rise of all prices to the total issue of US dollars does not take place today, or not yet, because many to most of the notes are internally or externally hoarded. Sometimes by internal authorities, sometimes by internal criminals, to some extent by foreign banks and foreign criminals, to some extent by honest citizens overseas, who trust the U.S. dollar more than they trust the paper money of their own government. - Once part of this overhead of over-issued and hoarded dollars is let loose upon the internal U.S. market, then this previously issued excess of notes will tend to drive up prices and wages, to the extent that it streams back to the U.S. and is there used for consumer purchases. - However, inflation takes not place evenly all over the economy but unevenly. Some prices and wages rise later than others, especially when they are somewhat fixed for a period, by contracts or government controls. - All types of monetary inflations are characteristic for the monies of monetary despotism, not those of monetary freedom. - J.Z., 28.3.97. - Without legal tender and the issue monopoly one cannot inflate a currency, not even with the worst intentions. The supposed gold-inflations, that are ascribed to periods of great gold discoveries, are mostly imagined. The total stock of gold accumulated over thousands of years was not very significantly increased and certainly not quite out of proportion with the increased population and the increase in produce, products and services. If we had prohibited the sale of goods, labour and services for any other means of exchange than rare metal coins, then the somewhat free economies could not have grown as far as they did. Luckily, the clearing options went far beyond the available rare metal stocks even before the great gold discoveries in modern times, so that we were never completely dependent upon the supply of rare metals that was coined out. Alas, for wage and salary payments we were, largely, for all too long, just like we are now dependent upon government monopoly money, for them, even when they are not paid in such cash put only accounts of this monopoly money. - J.Z., 30.8.02, 4.7.11. - DIS.

INFLATION: Fully freed competition against central banks is the only way to rapidly stop and prevent further inflation, stagflation, depressions, credit restrictions and involuntary mass unemployment. - J.Z., 31.10.01, 26.8.02, 3.7.11. - CENTRAL BANKING, FREE BANKING & MONETARY FREEDOM

INFLATION: Hyperinflation.net - Essays - www.hyperinflation.net/essays/englund7.html - Cached - In fact, the opposite is true in that a central bank is an institution that usurps a free-market's money supply (such as gold and silver), and destabilizes ...  - INFLATION, CENTRAL BANKING, MONOPOLY MONEY, LEGAL TENDER, FIAT MONEY

INFLATION: Inflation is a consequence of government legislation establishing a note issue monopoly and legal tender for its notes. Without such despotic powers no one could inflate. However, all or almost all governments possess this kind of legislation and they do inflate their national currency, most of the time, whenever they do not use this legalized but wrongful monetary powers to cause deflations, depressions, mass unemployment or a stagflation (which combines the evils of inflation and deflation). - Possibly no other economic fact is better established and none is more widely ignored. - J. Z., 26.3.93, 27.5.97, 4.7.11.

INFLATION: Inflation is like sin: every government denounces it and every government practices it. – Frederick Leith-Ross, quoted in THE OBSERVER. - JOKES, SIN, GOVERNMENTS, CENTRAL BANKING

INFLATION: Inflation is the over issue of exclusive and forced "legal tender" and monopoly currency by the government or its central bank - beyond the quantity that a free market and competitive note issues, clearing arrangements and value standard conditions would be prepared to accept at par value with their nominal value under free market rating for such a currency, clearing certificate or account or at par with alternative value standards, if the paper-standard of the government is not suitable for marking out prices, wages and other debt contracts. For instance, in Israel, at least a few years ago, wages were frequently settled by an index standard and most prices in the shops were marked out not in the official Shekel standard but, rather, in U.S. dollars. Without legal tender and the issue monopoly refusals and discounting of any inflated currency would be wide-spread to overwhelming. - J.Z., 3/97.

INFLATION: Inflation is the product of centralised control of your money. - Peter A. Wright: Australian Campaign Against Centralism. - Rather, it is the product of centralised control of THEIR money, which is FORCED UPON YOU as an exclusive currency. -­J. Z., 20.3.97. - DIS.

INFLATION: Inflation, … is a condition in monetary transactions where paper money is accepted without limits and at a prescribed value only because legal tender prevails: a coercion which makes it legally impossible to account for depreciation by discounts or refusals. - Ulrich von ­Beckerath, 25.1.52.

INFLATION: Lenin is said to have declared that the best way to destroy the Capitalist System was to debauch the currency. By a continuing process of inflation, governments can confiscate secretly and unobserved an important part of the wealth of their citizens … Lenin was certainly right. There is no subtler, no surer means of overturning the existing basis of society than to debauch the currency. The process engages all the hidden forces of economic law on the side of destruction and does it in a manner which not one man in a million is able to diagnose.” – Maynard Keynes, The Economic Consequences of the Peace. Quoted by: Paul Bakewell, Jr., What Are We Using For Money. D. Van Nostrand Co., Toronto, New York, London, 1952, p.201. - A few years later he advocated a systematic slow inflation as a cure-all. – Should we assume that he did so as a Communist? The central banks of all States do still practise this Communist suggestion, even if, otherwise, they proclaim to be anti-communists. – J.Z., 29.7.10.

INFLATION: Like with the common cold there is no guaranteed cure for inflation. - Mr. McMahon, quoted in THE SYDNEY MORNING HERALD, 12.6.l71. - McMahon was once federal treasurer and even prime minister for Australia - and well represented the wide-spread ignorance, myths and prejudices in this sphere. One should rather say that, as for the common cold and among orthodox doctors, there is no cure for commonness or monetary prejudices among treasurers and prime ministers. On the contrary, to worst of all men, like scum, tend to rise to the top. Only extremely ignorant and prejudiced voters would consider such people as if they were financial wizards and great leaders. - There is a guaranteed cure: Repeal or effectively ignore legal tender and the issue monopoly of the central bank and thus let good money drive out the bad. Emancipate all people monetarily, who can be and wish to be so emancipated. Then at least their exchanges will not longer be distorted or rendered difficult to impossible by inflations, deflations and stagflations. - Only one thing is right about the above remark: Within a system of financial despotism no cure is possible for its evils. Landsberg, in Germany, after the great 1913-23 inflation, proposed once a "gallows currency", under which the finance minister and the director of the central bank would be sent to the gallows as soon as the currency entrusted to them would be depreciated by a certain percentage, let us say 5%. But that is no more helpful than saying that rulers should fight it out among themselves, in duels, rather than conscripting and victimising millions of their subjects. Those, whom the victims leave in power over them, will continue to abuse these powers - with the sanction of the victims. - This kind of monetary ignorance and prejudice is still so prevalent that politicians do at most promise to reduce inflation - within years to decades - and not to abolish it and its preconditions, immediately. - J. Z., n.d., 29.3.97. - They even manage to speak openly of "inflation-targets" and are not instantly recalled, as they should be, in the same way as they should be if they talked e.g. about "mass murder targets" and "torture targets" and "robbery targets". The latter they usually call "budget estimates" and the former "Nuclear defence". - J. Z., 31.8.02, 3.7.11. - CURE OF INFLATION, DIS., TERRITORIALISM, STATISM, GOVERNMENTS

INFLATION: Monetary prudence is nipping inflation in the bud." - I found that remark somewhere, I did not note down where. Nor did the remark detail what monetary prudence would really require. I hold, e.g.: competitive note issues, market rating against a sound value standard, full publicity for all issues, absence of legal tender and of the issue monopoly, freedom to refuse or discount the exchange media and value standards of others. - J. Z., 22.12.94, 17.4.97. - DIS.

INFLATION: Money became so worthless that instead of being prized it was shunned. Not how to save it but how to spend it was the problem. – Roy L. Garis, Principles of Money, Credit and Banking, New York, The MacMillan Co., 1934, p.105.

INFLATION: No clearing of deposits acts inflationary. It cannot do so any more than barter can inflate prices. It just does what barter does (namely exchange goods and services), but unlike barter, not as slowly and inefficiently, but much faster, easier, more effectively, more widely, multilaterally and anonymously. Thus no clearing medium or method ought to be outlawed or made difficult or more or less monopolised or qualified and restricted. The debtors and creditors, whose debts and credits are somewhere and soon settled in a free clearing system, in several stages, may never come to meet or even hear of each other. During clearing debts and assets are mutually cancelled - in enormous amounts, daily. They do not grow indefinitely and cannot be made to grow, indefinitely and unilaterally. They are based on and depending upon the underlying sales and purchases of goods, services and labour. Mere paper profits and paper capital illusions may grow, even for prolonged periods, if there is no truly free market - in the monetary sphere as well. But, sooner or later they collapse down to the reality behind them. - J.Z., 3/97. - However, if all clearing, current accounts and deposit accounts are forced to use the single and depreciated paper "value standard" of a government's monopoly money, then they, too participate in its inflation. But they do not cause it, no more so than the increased prices and wages, coercively expressed in the depreciated government currency, do cause its inflation. - J.Z., 4.7.11.

INFLATION: Once you become aware that you can only inflate the general price and wage level with monopoly money, which has also been given legal tender power (compulsory acceptance and force value), you will no longer insist on paper monies being redeemable by their issuers in gold coins but at most being accepted by them at their nominal gold weight value, as determined in a free gold market, in all payments due to them or upon gold weight value clearing, using any exchange medium or clearing certificate at its market rate against gold, while pricing goods, services, wages etc. in gold value weight units. Ready acceptance by their issuers as if they were gold coins, can make them at least in this sphere as valuable as gold coins – and also much more easily available as exchange media. – Such exchange media would directly offer what most consumers do w or need, namely their the kinds of goods and services. They would keep this supply in balance with the exchange media competitively offered for local circulation by the retailers of these goods and services, alone or in suitable associations. – Their free market rating in general circulation would clearly indicate under-issues and over-issues. – All issue and reflux details should be fully publicized and not be treated as business secrets or as falling under privacy claims. - J.Z., 27.4.05, 4.10.10. - LEGAL TENDER, GOLD STANDARD, FREE CHOICE OF VALUE STANDARDS, EXCHANGE MEDIA & CLEARING OPTIONS, READINESS TO ACCEPT FOUNDATION, SHOP FOUNDATION, GOLD VALUE RECKONING, PRICING, ACCOUNTING & CLEARING

INFLATION: One ought to distinguish between the depreciation of one or even of several among competing currencies and the depreciation of an exclusive and forced currency. Under monetary competition some might not only provide unsound exchange media (e.g. based on land or shares, likely to depreciate fast) but also unsound value standards. Then they will have their exchanges expressed in their unsound currency issues and thus e.g. in their prices and wages. Then their exchange media would depreciate, either against any sound value standard which others are using. Then the own prices, expressed and paid in the own currency would be driven up but not the prices of others, expressed in sound value standards and paid for with sound exchange media. The inflated currency would be discounted and lastly refused in general circulation. At the same time, all other and quite sound currencies might circulate at par and their prices, expressed in their sound value standards, will remain, unchanged by the fact that some currencies have depreciated and some value standards have shown to be unreliable. The responsibility for over-issues is rapidly driven home to the one who caused it and his supporters. They alone will have to bear the damages they caused. They cannot spread them to others or over the whole country. Moreover, inflations under these conditions will be rare and limited, through the informed self-interest of issuers and acceptors - or refusers. - It is very different under monetary despotism. Then there is only one medium of exchange permitted and it has legal tender and all prices have to be expressed in it, as long as its legal tender power can be effectively enforced. All blocks against over-issues are removed: Free market rating, sound value standards, right to refuse acceptance, competing currencies, note exchanges and clearing house returns, good business reputation, value preserving clauses, publicity on issues and reflux, limited circulation period and area, limited commitments to single borrowers, discounting only of real bills or their present equivalents, a free gold and silver market, a sound and short term reflux of all exchange media issued. Moreover, in the absence of prescribed convertibility by the issuer, upon demand by the note-holders, misplaced confidence will not hide over-issues for all too long. Redemption of all competing currencies takes place in full, hourly, daily, etc., in goods, services and labour at par. The par value of competing currencies against their value standard, e.g., grams of gold, is also checked continuously on a free gold market. To that extent competing currencies are under "intensive care", but without any extra effort or high technology equipment, just by a continuous and automated as well as self-interested scrutiny by numerous people and institutions. Their strength is not run down, unnoticed, over prolonged periods, leading to a sudden discovery of its flaws and a collapse. They do not depend upon unreliable and belated statistics, on political motivations and career ambitions of a few powerful administrators of a central bank. They are not the footballs of political and military ambitions. - Note to a volume by POOR, on money, p.57. - J.Z., 1.6.85, 9.5.97, 13.9.02, 4.7.11.

INFLATION: Only government can take perfectly good paper, cover it with perfectly good ink and make the combination worthless. - Milton Friedman - My bad memory ascribes this quote to Ludwig von Mises. I read recently that when Mises once passed with a friend one of the noisy government presses during the great inflation, while they were discussing how to stop inflation, Mises said: Stop that noise! At the end of the great French Revolution its paper money had become so despised, that the government felt compelled to burn its note printing presses quite publicly. - J.Z., 8.8.11.

INFLATION: PROVISION OF A HANDBOOK OF POPULAR FALLACIES ON INFLATION & THEIR BEST REFUTATIONS SO FAR FOUND OR FORMULATED: Such a handbook is long overdue. An individual can hardly provide it because he or she would not have the time to sufficiently peruse all the nonsense written on this subject and to extract it for this purpose. The Internet could be used for this purpose and I would also like those, who might be interested to engage in this project among them, to provide me with their digitized files on this subject. It should be accompanied by a popularly written article on how to stop inflation's main cause: monetary despotism (the issue monopoly combined with legal tender: forced acceptance and forced value) and prevent it for the future by the introduction of full monetary freedom. - Collaborators for this project are wanted now. I really wonder whether the false notions on this subject are numbered merely in the hundreds or in the thousands, if not ten-thousands. Only extensive collaboration can determine that. - Notes towards an INTRODUCTION for such a handbook, written many years ago: Seeing the inflation of garbage articles on inflation and the difficulty to sift the welter of conflicting viewpoints, it is about time that an encyclopaedic approach is undertaken. Without sufficient publicity, showing the real market rate of flawed or false opinions on inflation, the bad views will flood and overpower the sound ones. Among a crowd of idiots, shouting at the top of their voices, a wise man will presently not be heard. The remnant of enlightened economists and students of money would get their chance via such a handbook. The wrong views, although numerous, would be cancelled out. Truthful or so far unrefuted statements on inflation could be specially marked. Other markings would indicate all the popular views that have long been refuted as such. But they would be reproduced in full - and with all their best refutations. - Government or central bank propaganda on money is often comparable (given the statist mentality) to giving a forced currency to flawed or false views on inflation (bad "money") and thus drive out the scarce truths advanced by a few (the good "money") through numerous untruths, advanced by the many at most occasions, especially in the mass media. Something like the popular version of Gresham's Law is here involved. Thus we ought to get a sufficiently informed free market and market rating on inflation views into operation, one that would systematically and permanently operate to publicly wipe out the errors, lies, wrong premises, dogmas and myths in this sphere: A breach for the truths on inflation to invade the citadel of monetary despotism. The handbook should enable every lover of liberty to hold his own in any public discussion with any advocate of monetary despotism, at least as far as inflation is concerned. Extended, into a general handbook on monetary freedom, it might similarly deal with other monetary freedom aspects, opinions, arguments ideas and proposals and with all relevant and provable facts. - EDITORIAL NOTE & PUBLISHING SUGGESTIONS: The first draft for such a manuscript, provided perhaps by a single person or a few, could become tested and perfected in public debates, like Beta Testing on the Internet for new software. In this way hundreds, even thousands could participate with their bits of truths they are able to contribute to this debate. Everybody is a victim of inflation. Everybody who can,should, therefore, try to contribute towards such a handbook. Develop new and better arguments, collect more relevant facts and submit them to a central compilation and editing office. It does not matter if the same ideas are expressed repeatedly in different words. The sorting out and cutting down of the length of the text could come later and even for this the readership of each version of improved drafts could be invited to add its comments and evaluations. Towards the end, when the draft is already sufficiently advanced and edited, and to the extent that it is wanted in expensive printed copies, advance subscriptions could be invited. For cheap editions, by now CDs, DVDs, online and on external large HD's, no advance subscriptions would be needed. They could be produced upon orders, i.e. upon demand. Almost everyone would be able to afford them. Short and popular versions of the handbook and pamphlet and leaflets indicating its essence, should also be drafted and published, by anyone game to try. Bets might be offered on certain views of inflation, on whether they could be publicly either proven or disproved. If anyone could prove to me that in essence my own views on inflation are quite wrong, I would gladly pay him or her A $ 100 - but I doubt that anyone would be able to make me lose that bet. However, the avalanche of wrong opinions on the subject is so large that I do not feel confident enough that I would be able, on my own, to optimally or thoroughly enough refute all of them for any particular individual, i.e., I would not be prepared to bet even $ 10 that I could convince a single individual of them, i.e. clear out the Augean Stables in his mind (on this subject) first and effectively and then implant successfully in his minds a new and clean foundation for his general acceptance of monetary freedom views. At present, the power of monetary errors and prejudices, to refuse to accept or to discount genuine truths in this sphere, is still too large. The wrong and flawed views on money have almost a legal tender power through public opinion, custom and traditions, just like most religious views. Widespread positive results in this sphere can only be guaranteed by a large and combined educational effort - like e.g. the cooperation required to compile this kind of handbook. Are there enough moral and rational dissenters among the freedom lovers to independently collaborate in the provision of such an encyclopaedia? Will they be prepared to forego any copyrights claims on their contributions? Any rightful resistance against monetary despotism must first be preceded by a period of sufficient enlightenment. Knowledge must precede actions - otherwise the same mistakes will be repeated over and over again. - J.Z., n.d. & 24.3.97. - Wouldn't it be nice if bets on the correctness or incorrectness of certain monetary ideas or arguments could become as popular as the betting on horse and dog races, which do not decide any questions of considerable importance to mankind? - J.Z., 30.8.02. - For the beginnings of such a digitized databank see e.g. www.monetary-freedom.net/

INFLATION: Salvation Through Inflation - www.entrewave.com/freebooks/docs/2166_47e.htm - Cached - 2 May 1996 – Since 1917, defenders of this reform scheme have offered arguments against free market money, private banking, and gold. ...

INFLATION: That rise in prices expressed in the value standard of legal tender money which results because stable value reckoning is outlawed by the legal tender clauses, and thus the depreciated and monopolized paper money cannot be discounted against sound value standards in case of over-issues. Due to this and the note issue monopoly almost any excessive quantity of the exclusive and forced exchange medium can be pushed permanently into circulation and it must be accepted at par with its nominal value in all payments. Thus the only option left to all acceptors is to increase their prices and wages, etc., expressed in that forced and exclusive currency - or to participate in underground transactions that are somewhat freely paid in alternative currencies to the extent that these, usually more stable other currencies, become available to them, often under great risk of prosecution if uncovered and caught and convicted. Thus the inflated paper value standard "prices" do not indicate really increased prices, rather, but the decreased value of the forced and exclusive currency. - Unfortunately, popular language use does not make this distinction or even the distinction between price increases due to shortages, or dearness, and price increases due to an over-issue of forced currency. - J. Z., 3.7.91 & 12.4.97, 4.7.11.

INFLATION: The cases where the government money was not inflated, in spite of its monopoly status and legal tender powers, for years, decades or even centuries, are rather exceptions than the rule. The rule is that such a currency provides an almost irresistible temptation and opportunity for any territorial government to abuse these powers - and depreciate its governmental monopoly paper money and thereby cause inflations. Once this is, sometimes, partly realized, then in panic and with quite inappropriate responses and measures, the opposite is achieved: deflations, depressions and their mass unemployment or stagflations.  But it is only rarely that governments attempt to slow down their inflations. Then, and under monetary despotism, they see no better way to do this than to cause the seeming opposite, a deflation, with mass unemployment. Once in that situation it does not know how to get out of it without causing inflation. Not being market-based, issued, accepted, refused or discounted and returned to the issuer, not being freely valued and rated, not being under competition and the full spotlight of publicity, its exclusive and forced currency is without the natural or market limitations and indicators and can thus only be more or less mismanaged, using poor substitutes for the natural indicators. It is almost as if we put a dancer or a runner into chains and then expected him or her to perform at their best. - It is a riddle to me how people can expect to reap the full benefits of the division of labour, free enterprise, free trade and free exchange without freedom in the supply of exchange media and how they can expect a sufficient stability of value standards under legal tender, i.e., under the suppression of free choice of value standards. That's like expecting to find out and being able to spread truths by suppressing freedom of expression and information. - We have already spread exterritorial autonomy for volunteers in so many other spheres of our lives and have taken it for granted there. When will we finally, completely and consistently, apply it, experimental freedom, freedom of action and individual to volunteer group decision-making, in the last few spheres where it is still suppressed e.g. by territorial States and their central banks of issue and all their other despotic laws and institutions, despotic because they are territorially imposed upon dissenters? - J. Z., 16.9.92, 1.5.97, 12.9.02, 4.8.11. - DEPRESSIONS, CENTRAL BANKING, MONEY MONOPOLY, CURRENCY STABILITY, MONETARY POLICY, EURO-CURRENCY, DIS., TERRITORIALISM, EXPERIMENTAL FREEDOM, VOLUNTARISM, PANARCHISM, EXTERRITORIAL AUTONOMY

INFLATION: The Catastrophic Effects of Inflation - www.shtfplan.com/.../the-catastrophic-effects-of-inflation_0713201... - Cached - 13 Jul 2010 – 2) Free Market Money develops (gold and silver) 3) Government becomes involved in Free Market Process 4) Government monopolizes money and ... - GOLD, SILVER

INFLATION: "The surest way to overthrow an existing social order is to debauch the currency." – Lenin. Quoted by Paul Bakewell, Jr., What Are We Using For Money. D. Van Nostrand Co., Toronto, New York, London, 1952, p.145. – Yes, that is possible under monetary and financial despotism. When the monetary and financial freedom options are not known to and practised by the people, then it is also a means for an opposition group, to gain power, even if it constitutes only a radical minority of 5 to 7%. The totalitarian communists developed that technique and applied it successfully, all too often and for all too long. Afterwards, in spite of continuing inflation, they could maintain their rule, via terror, for decades, against people ignorant of their monetary, financial and other freedom alternatives, which offer rightful and relatively easy revolution and liberation options. One of the first actions of Lenin’s October 1917 counter-revolution was to occupy the Russian central bank in Petersburg. Since his opponents were ignorant of their monetary freedom alternatives (most of them still are!) he was then the only one able to pay his way. – As Ulrich von Beckerath used to say: His opponents, to the extent that he had not yet got them murdered, had to come to him for a loan to pay their secretary! – J.Z., 29.7.10. - COMMUNISM, MARX

INFLATION: There can be no large-scale inflation of any currency or any inflation of the general price level in all currencies, from the monetary side, without legal tender and the money issue monopoly. No inflation is possible under freedom for note issues and free choice of value standards and free clearing, using sound alternative value standards, and freedom to price one's goods, services, labour and contracts in them. - J. Z., 20.11.91, 26.4.97, 4.7.11. - Merely by observing how cheaply people with foreign and relatively stable currencies can buy goods, labour and services in countries with a galloping inflation, economists should have rapidly come to the conclusion that the essential difference between the foreign currencies with high purchasing power and the low purchasing power of the own national currency was due to the fact that the own currency was pushed into circulation by the issue monopoly and legal tender, while the foreign currency, in the inflating country, had no monopoly position and no legal tender and thus did not participate in the inflation and could not make it worse. On the contrary, it made at least some sound exchanges still possible. It had preserved its own value standard and it was voluntarily accepted at its purchasing power. - J. Z., 8.9.02.

INFLATION: There exists an all too popular but false notion that the private deposit and credit system can act itself in an inflationary way and that it could do so, on its own. (Price increases on the goods side or due to temporary speculation and hoarding attempts for goods are not permanent but temporary. They soon lead to corresponding price falls - reckoned in honest value standards. They indicate dearness from the goods-side but not inflation from the monetary side.) - Wherever, as long and to the extent that clearing occurs, which is using a sound value standard, no inflationary effect does occur or can occur. That applies to any payments carried on in books, bank-passports, bank accounts, or bank computers, too. But forcing all people to use a governmental and legal tender paper standard, one frequently or almost constantly depreciated by the government, involves all private transactions in the depreciation of this paper standard, too. But the private non-cash or clearing transactions themselves do not depreciate this depreciating standard further. I would not depreciate the government's paper currency when I cleared e.g., a value of $ 10 of my apples against a value of $ 10 of your potatoes. Naturally, the government - as the one and only culprit for every inflation - tends to blame everyone and everything - except itself. However, if all managed to settle all their transactions by clearing or private optional note issues and if all used in these transactions a more reliable value standard than most governments are able or willing to supply, then the government's "value standard" and its paper money would become worthless. They would be ignored or refused, i.e. their inherent worthlessness would be revealed. Government's inflationary paper money issues, like other forms of government spending, based on taxation or forced loans or "investments" in future tax slaves, are entirely parasitical. That is its own flaw. It cannot rightly blame the depreciation or worthlessness of its paper money on others. - J.Z., 3/97, 4.7.11, 7.7.11. - DIS.

INFLATION: When we price goods, commodities and stock-markets in terms of gold, we do not observe inflation.- Michael Trifunovic, THE SYDNEY MORNING HERALD, April 13, 11, BUSINESS DAY, p.8. - GOLD

INFLATION: Who cares about long term depreciation by slow inflation? In the long run we are all dead! - A flippant opinion ascribed to Maynard Keynes. - This point overlooks e.g. the effect a slow and steady (if it remains steady and slow!) inflation has e.g. upon old age pension claims. We cannot simply assume that after their retirement everybody will simply die off, uncomplaining and unaffected by inflation. Only after his death will he finally not care any longer. But in the meantime, often for years to decades, he is wrongly impoverished by inflation. He suffers this rightly only to the extent that he never cared about such questions at all and never worked towards monetary freedom to replace the monetary despotism that placed him into poverty. - If he were made aware how rich he could be, in his old age, after a normal working life, if bearable premiums were paid, untaxed, productively invested, credit insured, preserved by value-preserving clauses, not subject to forced loans or interest rate restrictions, in an economy neither impoverished and misled by inflations, deflations and stagflations, - that then he could, at least in his old age, be even a multi-millionaire in assets, then we would finally come close to a monetary revolution. For who would readily consent to being prevented from honestly becoming a multimillionaire by his own efforts, insurance, savings and investment arrangements (or by those who would act as his agents and trustees), instead of being continuously robbed or cheated by the governments, as happens now? Presently, there is probably not one voter in a million who is so enlightened. All governmental publicity avenues as well as popular avenues are rather closed to such ideas. Thus flippant apologists for monetary despotism, like M. Keynes, got away with it for decades and the central banking system that he favours has still got us in its claws and has invaded and occupied most minds. - J. Z., 14.4.97, 6.9.02, 4.7.11. - DIS. - WEALTH, OLD AGE INSURANCE UNDER MONETARY FREEDOM, PENSIONS

INFLATION: Without legal tender and the note issue monopoly, i.e., under free market rating for competing and optional currencies and their freely chosen value standards, no inflation is possible. A systematic historical research would soon provide enough evidence for this precondition for inflations. So many more or less silly or trivial researches are officially financed. This kind is not. I have recently challenged my State MP to initiate it through the Liberal Party's research department. But I do doubt that this will happen. The best way to convince someone else is not to try to convince him against his will by raining facts and arguments down upon him but, rather, to challenge him into­ convincing himself and to appeal to his self-interest for doing so. - J. Z., 19.3.97. - Alas, my own letter, to the Australian Liberal Party's research department, through the local MP, trying to follow this advice, received no response at all. One cannot effectively appeal to the knowledge and reason of politicians, not even to their self-interest, outside of their usual channels of "thought", "ideas" and "interests". However, unlike a Stalin, Hitler or Mao, they did not order my imprisonment or execution. - J.Z., 28.8.02.

INFLATIONARY DEPRESSIONS OR STAGFLATIONS: When a forced and exclusive currency depreciates considerably, during a galloping inflation, from day to day, week to week, etc., and as an investor the creditor could only be certain that, if at all, then he would only be repaid in depreciated money, then he would be a fool if he continued saving and investing. To that extent all production that depends upon further investments comes then to a stop, causing a corresponding depression and unemployment, not a boom economy and full employment. Furthermore, once prices race ahead of the note printing presses, inflations will at the same time become deflations or stagflations. Within a system of monetary despotism there are only hard and costly options of ending inflation. The moderate steps merely prolong the stagflation. The soft options of free markets in this sphere, offered by monetary freedom, are not possible under monetary despotism. Thus inflations are often continued, although not desired, out of fear of sharply increased mass unemployment, which would be politically even less acceptable. If the victimisers of this system are not prepared to give up their wrongful powers, then the victims of it should at least consider no longer granting them these powers. - J. Z., 28.4.97.

INFORMATION & MONEY. IS MONEY PURE INFORMATION? If that were true then pure scholars would be very attractive parties on the marriage market and they would have no money worries. As it is, information, particularly on innovations in the social and legislative or custom-ridden sphere and invention knowledge or any knowledge not corresponding to accepted and authority-supported beliefs or models, is among the hardest items to sell. One of the main reasons for this is that no ready and specialised and world-wide market exists for ideas and innovators. Patent offices, venture capital firms, novelty shops, catalogues of novelties offered, broadcasted inventor shows and inventors' exhibitions can only satisfy a fraction of this market requirement. An ideal market would bring all existing supplies of ideas - and of special talents - together with all existing demand for them and with all future demand for them. The Global Ideas Bank of the London Institute for Social Inventions, established on the Internet, is a good step in this direction. - As it is, money may often buy some kind of information but not all relevant information. All the relevant information is not ready cash and cannot always "buy" or become exchanged for ready cash. Money and information are not identical, even while much information can already be turned into cash and while cash can buy much information. - While exclusive information has some special value, knowledge, wide-spread, is not depreciated or less useful by becoming even more widely spread and used. (Only the rarity value of knowledgeable people can become reduced.) While knowledge is providing some kind of standard, it is often expanded and discredits former theories, convictions and assumptions. It is thus hardly useful as a standard of value. It is too changeable for that. At a time when information has been said to be exploding, it hardly makes sense to equate it with money, far less sound money. This is true in spite of the fact that money, too, expresses some relevant information and does that in some useful and round figures and some useful and widely accepted standards. The main information it expresses is that of prices, fees, charges, costs, profits and potential earnings and opportunities. - Like all vast generalizations, this is wrong in too many particular cases. It would be more correct to say that money represents an agreement on payment and debt settlement or an agreement on a particular way of mutually clearing one's debts in a very convenient way. But it is far from true to say that all information is like ready cash and coinable by its holder into notes or coins for local circulation. This in spite of the fact that every day knowledge and skills and capabilities and abilities are sold for cash - or clearing certificates. That still does not make them identical. - However, it is true that knowledge or information, combined with skills, abilities and resources are behind all goods, services, labours and capital values offered for sale, which, in their turn, can be used to issue currencies or capital securities upon. Even assuming that almost all consumer goods and capital goods were suddenly destroyed and only enough remained to allow people to survive at a minimum level, knowledge would permit people to restore to rather fast restore their former wealth, unless natural catastrophes would prevent them from doing so. The notion that information equals money or is money is no more sound than the notion that a labour standard of value would be ideal. Millions of involuntary unemployed prove that their information, skills and labour potential is far from having a ready cash value for them, under conditions of monetary despotism. Under monetary freedom, their readiness to accept their own IOUs in payment, whenever anyone buys their knowledge, skills or labour, could, indeed, to the extent that they would get such IOUs accepted, provide them with some exchange media and, finally, with paid jobs, in which these IOU's would be included in their pay packets. They would be paid with these IOU's, having anticipated their payment already when they issued their IOU's in their spending for consumer goods and services. In short, issue freedom and clearing freedom and knowledge of the sound technique for both and the practice of this knowledge and the ability to practise it, in spite of legal suppression attempts and condemnation by experts of such self-help measures, are required to turn information or ability and capacity and willingness to work or serve (labour or professional skills and services) into some form of ready cash. - But just try to coin your knowledge and information and skills now, into your own paper money and see whether people will readily accept it. Only if they know that you have some money or payment coming to you - will some accept your personal scrip or IOU and see to it that they are presented to you, in payment, as soon as possible. - J. Z., 27.4.89, 16.5.97, 4.7.11, 4.8.11. - See: IDEAS ARCHIVE & ITG: IDEAS, TALENT & GENIUS CENTRE, INDIVIDUAL ISSUERS, CLEARING FOR INDIVIDUALS, POTENTIAL ISSUERS, DIS.

INFORMATION BASED ECONOMY? As we move from an economy based on money and ownership to one based on information, the way we interpret information becomes a key issue. - Jeremy Horey, THE AUSTRALIAN. (Some text and the date was lost here.) - We can't survive merely by lecturing each other and supplying each other with literature. Try to eat the screened or printed out words from your computer - or use them as a shelter again rain, wind and snow. Is an economy based on "money" or upon production, in division of labour, tools, machines (capital) and on free exchange of products and services, in whatever form that is done, with or without money tokens? While knowledge, skills and ideas, tools and machines, as well as better communications, can increase production and facilitate exchange, we cannot live on them directly. An economy needs information, e.g. that of the free pricing system, but we cannot live by reading classified advertisements or the share prices published by the stock exchange. And how long could we survive without private property and self-ownership? How many Internet users managed so far to make their living from it? And even then they can ultimately do so only via distributing goods or services through it. (Those committing fraud through it do still live at the expense of the production of goods by others.) Some intellectuals fancy that they provide the only really required services. At least these would be over-paid, I believe, even if they received only a minimum wage. Let them live from and within their intellectual structures, with no one forced to listen to them or to read them. Their economic knowledge and interest is often all too negative and then they make such absurd statements. - The assertion that we live in an information age and that our whole economy is based upon it, is very popular. But you cannot eat information or readily exchange it for edibles in the local supermarket. Just try to do so. If you are a sufficiently skilled or strong bio-robot they might use you as a packer or stacker. If you are better educated, then you might be employed as a cashier or even as a supervisor. But, try to sell other information there! Or anywhere! An Ideas Archive and Talent Centre or Genius Employment Agency does not yet exist. The wisest men do not rule and are not used as advisors of those that do. Information to prevent war, poverty, unemployment, inflation, deflation, stagflation, despotism, or to end them, does exist - but just try to publicise it or sell it to someone. I offer lots of freedom, peace and justice information on 1779 microfiche - but there is hardly any demand for it. - Naturally, one has to distinguish between information that is popular or fashionable or amusing or part of a game or bet, and misinformation that amounts to prejudices, errors, false dogmas etc., but that may still be very popular. So far, the new information sources have not promoted all the old and new truths sufficiently nor refuted all the old and new errors sufficiently. Instead, they have added more errors and prejudices and left them unquestioned, too and even very popular or predominant, like this one, regardless of its truthfulness, merit or lack of it. - See: SYMBOLIC MONEY, ELECTRONIC MONEY. - What is transferred with these is not just information but the information that consists in claims or rights to ownership. And it is these claims that constitute a form of money. - J.Z., 29.4.97, 4.7.11.

INFORMATION REVOLUTION & MONETARY & FINANCIAL FREEDOM: Under "monetary freedom" and "free banking" Google offers numerous short hints - but no individual has the time and energy to peruse all of them for worthwhile writings, ideas, arguments, programs and platforms. That would require much division of labour among many sufficiently interested people. - J.Z., 4.7.11.

INFORMEDTRADES, Austrian Economics - InformedTrades - www.informedtrades.com/f201/ - Doug French: Interest Rates and Unemployment Gold Walter Block: Gold as Free Market Money · Timothy Terrell: Currency Failures from Argentina to Zimbabwe ...

INTEGRITY: Monetary despotism can claim its form of "integrity" only when applied among volunteers only. - J.Z., 11.5.97. - To every fool their own foolish system! That's penalty enough for them and would keep them out of our hair! - J.Z., 4.7.11. - MONETARY TOLERANCE, MONETARY FREEDOM, PANARCHISM

INTENTIONAL COMMUNITIES & MONETARY FREEDOM EXPERIMENTS: I would love to see an objective survey of all of them. - J.Z.

INTEREST & MONETARY FREEDOM: Monetary Freedom would abolish hight capital interest at most in all turnover credits - apart from a small service and insurance charge. Even this might be absorbed by the issuers, if they are a cooperative shop associations, which are more interested in assuring and increasing their sales than in recovering all the costs of their issue department. Thus it might include these small costs in its prices as it does its advertising costs. - J.Z., 20.3.97. - Actually, through the issue of their own shop currencies they would save much in advertising costs, since their own shop currency notes would, inevitably, stream back to them to pay for whatever goods and services they have to offer. - J.Z., 5.7.11.

INTEREST IN MONETARY FREEDOM OPTIONS IS STILL ONLY MINIMAL: Years ago I tested this interest with my small photocopied MONETARY FREEDOM NEWSLETTERS, which I offered for subscription together with an entitlement to a choice from my monetary freedom microfiche. This small newsletter, plus microfiche, did not even reach a dozen subscribers for its total of 4 issues over several years. Later I put out a fifth issue as an obituary for it and then digitized these 5 issues. So far probably not even one person in a million is seriously interested in monetary freedom options - and how can one reach these? (That is not even easy after the use of the Internet became popular. I still try to build up an email and website list for people with this interest. - J.Z., 5.7.11.) These few have also many other involvements that prevent them from advancing the cause of monetary freedom as much as they could or should, at least in my opinion. And with most of the few their interest is not even deep enough to let them overcome the small barrier posed by most such writings presently being only available on microfiche through my LMP - PEACE PLANS series. - (I similar lack of interest is still revealed by the fact that, to my knowledge, no one has as yet attempted to offer all such titles on a CD, DVD or external HD. - J.Z., 5.7.11.) - believe that Siegfried Schwenke had also only a few dozen subscribers to his Monetary Freedom Network Newsletter. Various projects for quarterlies came to nothing and the DURRELL JOURNAL rapidly deviated from the its initial monetary freedom path, especially after a change in management. - Financially, a newsletter on free­ banking etc, produced only on a floppy disc, CD, a website or distributed by e-mail attachments would be no problem at all. But who is interested? - J. Z., 9.4.97. - At least the number of articles on this subject that is offered on some websites is slowly increasing. Compare the websites listed at the beginning of the Free Banking A to Z compilation. The larger collections of digitized libertarian titles do, probably, contain also some of this kind, which I am not yet aware of. I mentioned some of them and some titles in my bibliography of digitized libertarian titles, on www.panarchy.org/zube/money.index.html. But it is still only an incomplete and flawed compilation, which I cannot complete and correct on my own. - J.Z., 5.7.11.

INTEREST MONOPOLY? Anyone could easily break that supposed monopoly, e.g. by lending me a million dollars for 100 years interest-free. Or I could break it, if I wanted to and you were to agree, by lending you $1000 for 1 year at 1000%. - Apart from the money issue monopoly and its associated legal tender power, the "interest monopoly" is, largely, only a figment of the imagination. - Recently, even the U.S. government has itself broken this supposed monopoly, by lending, to major corporations, millions to billions in US paper dollars, most of them, probably, freshly printed, at only nominal interest rates, close to zero, although these corporations may lend out this paper money to private borrowers at a much higher rate. - What is really meant with the term is, probably, that some people do have capital to lend and others don't. Those who have it are then considered as monopolist. But on a free market there is a severe competition between millions of these capitalists, including the managers of the small savings of average people. Moreover, each employee is also a capitalist, who lends his employer his work, as his working capital, until pay day - and he does so interest-free. - Both terms, interest and monopoly, are largely misunderstood and abused. - J.Z., 13.7.11, 19.7.11. - DIS.

INTEREST RATE POLICY AGAINST INFLATION? - Could any other policy be more absurd in situations wherever and when the government's note printing presses continue to churn out legal tender paper money? An artificially increased interest rate would then merely mean that all economic activities not favoured and subsidised by a government are restrained through lack of affordable credit, while the bureaucratically mismanaged public sectors, e.g. public works, national defence and welfare State actions continue to be expanded via the note printing presses. I remember periods as a public servant when I was still paid in cash and the notes I received were fresh from the printing presses and still in consecutive numbers. Such attempts to restrain inflation through irrelevant "measures" or to "balance" coercive over-supplies in one sphere through coercive under-supplies in other spheres, remind me of the hypothetical case of a Mafia gang pretending to fight crime. It certainly fights crimes committed by its competitors. And it does seem to fight crime when, unofficially, it favours even more severe "wars against drugs", which may harm or eliminate many of the small drug producers and distributors but boost the profits of the large drug entrepreneurs. The government "measures" against inflation leave its own criminal (but legalized) inflationary steps and its taxation robberies and redistribution of the loot policies untouched but do intervene with free production and free exchanges, instead, via credit, price- and wage controls etc. - Inflation presumes an exclusive and forced value standard, one that is elastic and can be manipulated like a rubber band. One that is not even properly defined but is just given an abstract name. Only when this "standard" is imposed upon a whole country can the exchange medium using it, the government's monopolistic paper money and currency, be imposed upon all transactions, i.e., can it inflate or deflate all transactions. Giving them a monopoly status means that they cannot be refused by anyone depending upon monetary exchanges. Giving them legal tender status means that their compulsory acceptance at an enforced and fictitious value, at par only with their paper standard, even though this standard is continuously manipulated and, usually inflated. ­Such a forced currency can be forced into the market beyond its requirements. It can force up all prices, wages & fees etc., which have to be marked-out in it. This is the only avoidance option left to those to be paid immediately or very soon. Those under medium and long-term contracts, when they were not foresighted enough or allowed to include value-preserving clauses, have no such escape option. They can be "paid off" ultimately in mere scrap paper. Even share prices and their dividend and interest rates are not upwardly mobile enough to make up for all the degrees of inflation that can occur during a rapid inflation, as was experienced e.g. in the last stages of the Great Inflation in Germany, which ended in 1923. - Without the issue monopoly and legal tender laws for its currency, competing exchange media would be issued, in accordance with the requirements of the market. These could not be over-issued as a whole and drive up all prices expressed in sound and competing and freely chosen value standards. Thus not too many exchange media could come to chase too few goods. On the other hand, any under-supply of exchange media could be then be countered by new and sound issues, competitively provided and fully covered by wanted the goods, services, debts and labour with which their issuers would cover and redeem them at any time. Only such currencies can remain stable enough to promote free exchanges and this under permanent boom conditions. Without them the law of supply and demand is not completely realized but monetarily distorted. Sound alternative exchange media and value standards are not impossible but just outlawed. We have so far put up with this, mostly even without protesting. I have never seen e.g. a demonstration against legal tender and the issue monopoly. Against their consequences, unrealised as such by most people, there were and are demonstrations aplenty. - J. Z., 19.12.89, 29.4.97, 7.7.11. - DIS., INFLATION, LEGAL TENDER, MONOPOLY MONEY, ENFORCED UNSOUND VALUE STANDARDS VS. FREE CHOICE OF VALUE STANDARDS

INTEREST RATE RETURNS OF BANKS AS REGULATORS FOR CURRENCY ISSUES? - The free market rating of notes against their own standards will regulate issues and acceptances, i.e. circulation, much more regularly, rapidly and reliably than interest rate fluctuations or manipulations among note-issuing banks would. - J.Z., 3.7.91 & 12.4.97. - See:  DISCOUNT RATE, DISCOUNT POLICY, INTEREST, TANDY, Voluntary Socialism, p.122.

INTEREST RATES & CLEARING MONEY: See: APHORISMS ON THE MONEY PROBLEM.

INTEREST RATES ARE PRICES: Interest rates are just prices, indicating, under full freedom, like all other prices, the existing supply and demand conditions. Presently, they are determined e.g. for short-term turn-over credits by monopolies like the note issue monopoly of the central bank and the degrees of its abuses of its monetary powers and for medium and long term credits for conditions on the capital market. And these, in their turn, are influenced by taxation, regulations, protectionism etc. and also by monetary conditions like deflation, inflation and stagflation, i.e., symptoms generally associated with monetary despotism, which greatly influence the availability of capital and the ability of debtors to repay, as well as the interest rates. Monetary despotism, legislative interventions, protectionism, taxation, regulations, prohibitions and their degrees and risks do all too much influence profit- dividend and interest rates, wages, salaries, prices, rents, business activity, employment rates, sales and the readiness to accumulate and make available or to seek and accept capital investments. Obviously, no capital investments can be regularly profitable if the sale of the services, goods or information that they supply is not assured because of the absence of monetary freedom. Since the arbitrary nature, i.e., the non-market nature of interventionism cannot always be sufficiently calculated or estimated, it certainly increases the risk factor part of all interest rates. An unqualified opposition to all interest rates or their regulation just indicates economic blindness and is as absurd as are price-, wage- and rent controls. Once markets and contracts are all set free then we would only get competitive free market rates (prices) in all spheres and these, by their nature, will be optimal for all traders and exchangers, as are free prices in all other spheres. For competitive note issues or turn-over credits granted via clearing or non-cash payments, the interest rates could come close to the administrative costs only, like with the issuance of tickets for the attendance to various performances. In spheres with high returns for capital investments (especially when capital is no longer subjected to regulations, prohibitions and tributes) they might rise as justified shares in the additional productivity and profits achieved through an investment. (Correspondingly fluctuating interest rates would have fewer difficulties for both, debtors and creditors than fixed interest rates for long periods. - J.Z., 7.7.11.) Those who want to assure the supply of exchange media by the artificial acceleration of the circulation of the existing and monopolized exchange media, do only think in terms of monetary despotism, with its limited, exclusive and forced exchange media and value standard, of monopoly money that is usually centrally mismanaged by the central bank, according to its dogmas and wrong assumptions. Thus they remain blind to the free note issue options and possibilities, blind to sound alternative value standards, blind to free market rating and voluntary acceptance for both, blind to the sound tax foundation options for "fiat" money and to the right of free choice of value standards and the right of banking, including the issue of banknotes and clearing house certificates. The wrong definitions and notions about "capitalism", "profit" and "interest" go on and on. All economic systems are capitalistic, from the stone hammer to automatic factories. All of them do require capital, at least that of living and all-purpose as well as conscious and self-determining robots, existing in self-ownership and constituting, in somewhat developed countries, over a normal working-life, a very large productive capital. They are all the less capitalistic the more they are monopolized, regulated and legislated about, away from free contracts, free exchanges, property rights and free market and free trade conditions. The only rightful actions for dissenters are tolerant and free experiments among them, practising their beliefs among themselves, at their own expense and risk. Even when such experiments are successful, they should not be adopted and imposed by any territorial State against those who still disagree with them. - J.Z., 21.8.02, 7.7.11, 7.7.11. - DIS., SILVIO GESELL, MONETARY DESPOTISM, DIS.

INTEREST RATES The easy availability of credit and the ease in achieving sales of labour, other services and goods, are probably more important to achieve a boom condition and to maintain it than low interest rates are. Likewise, a stable enough currency or stable enough currencies are more important for prosperity than low interest rates. During inflations even a negative interest rate, with the nominal interest rate below the inflation rate, cannot boost an economy sufficiently. - J. Z., 6.11.96. - ARE LOW INTEREST RATES A PRIMARY CONDITION FOR AN ECONOMIC BOOM? - DIS.

INTEREST RATES, DISCOUNT RATES & INFLATION: Interest rates should be raised to fight inflation. - Popular opinion. - They would have to be somehow increased, anyhow, just to somewhat make up for the degree of depreciation of the capital and interest paid, due to inflation. Alas, one cannot increase interest as easily and to the same extent that one can multiply a forced currency through the printing press. When the value of a currency is e.g. halved from day to day, then even 500% p.a. interest cannot make up for it and I believe it never rose above that rate during the Great German Inflation of 1913-1923. During 1923 even a 500% interest rate was rightly considered as very moderate by borrowers. Moreover and rather obviously, no rate of interest increase does automatically stop the government's note printing presses and legal tender powers and the effects of its note issue monopoly for all depending upon monetary exchanges. - Moreover, it is wrong to arbitrarily increase or decrease the interest rate for all transactions. They should all be variable prices for variable services. - J.Z., 2.4.97. - "Increasing interest rates or tightening money supply can actually do more harm than good if all it achieves (as was the case with last year's measures) is a period of stagnation in some areas, followed by even greater inflation. Last year is was the home buyers who were hurt by the drying-up of funds." (J.Z.: Credits for daily turnovers of goods and services for consumers should never be artificially restricted, just because excessive credits were granted before - for speculations or take-over bids, that led to cash shortages or illiquidity - unless one wants to create mass unemployment in one's cover-up attempt for a careless loan policy. Sound loans should not be restricted to make up for unsound loans.) "... In any case, it can be very harmful to increase all interest rates, or staunch the flow of money in essential projects. While it might be highly desirable to curtail high-rise office developments in Sydney and Melbourne, it is most undesirable to restrain the flow of capital to mining operations and developments or to the establishment of industry in country areas. A squeeze here would really handicap growth ..." - Colin Chapman, THE BULLETIN, 13.2.71. - While high interest rates reduce the incentive to borrow, this does not matter much when much more inflation is expected. - A government might even be inclined to lend more of its forced and exclusive currency, straight from the printing press and earn more interest thereby - if and to the extent that it can find more borrowers. And the borrowers may be ready to pay the high interest because they expect to be able to repay the capital and the interest with depreciated money from much higher earnings expressed in the further depreciated governmental monopoly money. - Moreover, a higher interest rate might induce more potential savers to save, thus increasing e.g. bank term deposits and the sale of securities, and the higher savings will lend to higher lending by the banks so that at least the capital market will not be squeezed but rather expanded. - However, all interference with the market or any of its prices, including the interest rates, has also undesirable effects and usually effects contrary to associated hopes and expectations. I do not know of any government policy that is 100% effective and non-destructive at all or preventative for many productive or creative actions. - J. Z., n.d. & 2.4.97.

INTEREST UNDER MONETARY DESPOTISM & UNDER MONETARY FREEDOM: Under as different conditions, the interest rates are, naturally, also very different. Under monetary despotism they do largely express the results of its wrongful interventions. Under free market conditions they represent the conditions of free markets in every one of their spheres. Free market actions and their natural consequences are much easier to predict than despotic interventions. However, the consequences of despotic interventions with the economy are also relatively easy to predict, especially since we have such an enormous accumulation of experiences with such interventions. - I gladly leave it to someone else to point out all the differences. - J.Z., 7.7.11.

INTEREST, ENEMIES OF: Enemies of charging interest should secede- and do their own things among themselves and to themselves - like any other sectarians and true believers. - J.Z., n.d. & 29.4.97.

INTEREST, FIXED INTEREST RATES: It is wrong to imposed centrally fixed interest rates under changing and different business conditions upon a whole community. They should be adapted and haggled out between free debtors and free creditors in every case, in accordance with the business risks and expectations and should only be somewhat guided by average interest rates of the general free market but allow every required deviation from them for special cases. It is quite wrong and wrong and misguided to impose interest rates as a means to counteract some of the results of monetary despotism, like inflation, deflation and stagflation. It is wrong to artificially raise or lower interest rates, e.g., through inflation or through deflation. Interest rates should be freely determined on a quite free market, not through the various despotic policies of monetary and financial despotism or their effects. Indeed, inflation can raise interest rates somewhat and can also somewhat lower them, in certain situations or as a result of certain policies. (At a 3% inflation rate an interest rate of 6% becomes effectively an interest rate of 3% only.) (In recent stagflationary times we have even seen vast "stimulus" credits granted via the note printing presses at rates as low as 1% or even interest-free and non repayable ones. - Any foolish and wrongful action can be expected from almost any territorial government under some excuse of false pretence or the other. - J.Z., 7.7.11.) The same applies to deflation. A rational and just allocation of scarce resources and rewards to those who, supply them and use them, thus becomes close to impossible in all too many cases. It is even more wrong and absurd to impose fixed interest rates upon farmers and graziers than upon industrial debtors, since the agricultural returns, much more so than industrial returns from production, are variable with the weather. Instead, here and in most other cases, interest should become - a freely agreed upon - percentage share in the additional productivity achieved through an investment, with capital, perhaps, being considered as pre-done labour, that is also entitled to its just rewards for the values it added, once it is properly employed. Thus interest returns should be high when profits are high and low when profits are low and nil when there were zero profits. (To the extent that this can be practised without penalising efficient debtors while letting off inefficient ones. - J.Z., 8.9.02.) The best way to achieve this would be via shares, bonds or partnerships, with fluctuating dividends, dependent upon productivity - provided they are run really democratically, in the interests of all the shareholders, not only that of the managing directors, whose authoritarian position now allows them all kinds of perks and the abuse of their position, to reinvest too much of annual company earnings in their own kind of empire building, profitable mainly only to themselves, rather than to their shareholders, now often almost as helpless as the political voter is towards his political "representatives". - J.Z., 2.12.94, 25.4.97, 7.7.11. - Thus not only wide-spread shareholding should be considered and extensive shareholding by employees in their own companies but all kinds of other self-management organizational forms, e.g. partnerships and cooperatives, as well as autonomous work groups. - J.Z., 8.9.02.

INTEREST: Even now many retailers offer many expensive goods on long terms, without deposits and even interest-free for years. But I doubt that many people would be prepared to invest their savings on medium or long terms, interest free, and without any value-preserving clauses and without any kind of effective credit insurance. Those who wish to should, naturally, be free to do so. They might almost be overrun by honest as well as dishonest debtors. If savings are productively invested, why should the debtor alone benefit from the extra productivity due to these investments? Should not the creditors be entitled to their fair share? – J.Z., 5.10.10.

INTEREST: Even under degrees of monopolism and regulations for productive capital and their capital issues, interest arrangements for them do rather help than hinder making more capital available for production. Not only the capitalists profit but all their employees and all consumers. But the system would work with much less friction and often much cheaper without any legal monopolies and regulatory interventions and "safeguards", "guaranties", subsidies, prohibitions, compulsory licensing, officially imposed controls and supervisions, and interest-rate regulations, at its optimal capacity when fully free pricing and free contracts are introduced in this sphere as well. That would also require the abolition of all compulsory taxes, which simply confiscate earnings, profits or capital from their victims. Moreover, capital securities of governments (or, rather, seeing the inflation risk, their capital insecurities) should also be done away with, because they are part of the compulsory tribute system and amount merely to investments in tax slaves. - J.Z., 1.2.90, 29.4.97, 9.9.02, 7.7.11. - CAPITAL MARKET, SECURITIES MARKET, FINANCIAL FREEDOM, ISSUE OF­ SECURITIES, OWNERSHIP OF CAPITAL SECURITIES, TRANSFERABILITY, RIGHT TO ISSUE SECURITIES.

INTEREST: Even with regard to interest rates "the trees can't grow far into the sky". - J.Z., 24.9.89. - Enemies of interest have often calculated how much a cent, invested for 2,000 years, would have grown as money capital through an interest of, e.g. 5%. But does it correspond to human experience that heirs will forever leave their heritage untouched or that governments and private criminals will? Almost all investments have time limits and investors sooner or later want to enjoy somewhat the benefits from their investments, even if only by establishing a new benevolent foundation. - J. Z., 26.4.97. - DIS.

INTEREST: If the enemies of interest paying and taking took themselves serious, instead of merely thinking like authoritarians, then they would establish an interest-free savings and loan association for themselves, at their own expense and risk. Alas, just like communists, they want to share the property and earnings of others - without paying for them. Most of the opponents of "usury" and interest have also not made any distinction of the interest rates for turnover credits and that for capital investments. The former can be reduced to the administrative costs and the small risk cover costs involved. The latter have to cover the time differential and to reward investors for their pre-done labours, embodied in the capital they lent out. Pre-done labour is also entitled to just rewards. Fixed interest rates do not sufficiently adjust to the additional productivity of pre-done labour nor do they sufficiently account for the possibility of losses. Via partnership or other contract arrangements the fixed rates could and should be replaced by fluctuating rates, corresponding to the returns, unless the borrowers act dishonestly, stupidly or negligently. Then the losses should all go at their expense. - J. Z.,13.4.93, 11.7.11. - USURY.

INTEREST: Interest rates are simply prices for very diverse and important, needed and wanted market services. They should always be freely agreed upon and never monopolistically or coercively set, controlled or regulated. Then they will function best and in the common interest. Any monetary or financial monopoly or interventionism that drives up interest rates artificially, should be blamed and abolished, rather their symptom, the correspondingly increased interest rates. There is even a very good case for high interest rates for very productive investments, whose high returns would make a cheap an plentiful old age security system possible. In this way we could even become seriously rich at least in our old age as a result of quite bearable contributions made during our working lives, safely and productively invested, untaxed and safe from inflations. – J.Z., 24.4.09, 22.9.10.

INTEREST: Interest under the money monopoly should be distinguished from interest under full monetary and financial freedom. Only once money supply monopolists can no longer extort monopoly interest rates for their exclusive and forced currencies - and in the absence of all wrongful regulations of the financial affairs of others: financial despotism, can real market interest rates freely develop and fulfil their pricing functions, just like any other freely haggled-out prices. - J. Z., 30.3.95, 11.7.11.

INTEREST: since the discovery of America and the development of trade and the influx of gold accepted as the general money standard, money tribute has become, with the intensification of government power, the chief method of enslaving people, and on it all the economic relations of man are based. - Leo Tolstoy, What the Must we Do? Aylmer Maude translation, OUP, 1925, p. 125. The main value standard, for a long time, was silver, rather than gold. Here he does not even clearly state whether he attacks interest or compulsory taxation. The monetary freedom options and their liberating effects are also ignored, only metallic and exclusive currencies are considered. – J.Z., 19.10.10. - MONETARY FREEDOM VS. MONETARY DESPOTISM

• INTEREST: The interest (effective interest) is not too high. At 1% per month and 18 equal instalments, payable post-numerando, each instalment, including the amortization amount of 6,098%. [Spitzer’s tables.] For a DM 1,300 cash loan that would amount for each instalment to DM 78.27. Thus one can also say that, in practice, the interest upon the at any time remaining rest of the debt amounts to 1% per month. How to proceed in earlier repayments is not accurately indicated, in spite of the information in section 2. Generally, the bank’s debtor is worse off in all methods that deviate from the mathematical one. - - - The financial institutions rather employ unjust but seemingly easier to understand methods when they can save a few Marks for the acquisition of a Spitzer table or, in case that is no longer available, for a corresponding American work. - - - Moreover, the loan institutes know that the figures of Spitzer are calculated according to mathematical formulas. Therefore they say: "therefore nonsense and useless for the 'practice'.”. - What is called interest in Spitzer should, indeed, be rather called: Contribution for risk and recovery of administration costs. Upon hearing the term “interest” everybody is provoked and thinks of “usury”, meanness, exploitation! On the terms “risk” and “administration costs” the average man spends not thought. - - - With the clause on page 4, according to which the Savings Bank can, at any time, give notice for the credit, without having to state any reasons for this action, it would be unsuccessful before Berlin courts. – Ulrich von Beckerath, 8.6.59, in a note to a 4 page leaflet: Conditions for Small Credits (Bedingungen für Kleinkredite), Sparkasse der Stadt Berlin West. – Altogether, he left, probably, tens of thousands of such notes, of which I possess quite a few and of these I have already microfiched many. Altogether, properly ordered, they would have constituted an interesting handbook. – J.Z., 27.8.10. The German original follows: [Der Zins (“Effektivzins”) ist nicht zu hoch. Bei 1% monatlich und 18 post-numerando zahlbaren, gleichen Raten, betrüge jede Rate einschl. Tilgungsbeitrag 6,098%. (Spitzer) Bei 1300 DM Bardarlehen ergäbe das für jede Rate DM 79.27. Man kann also sagen, dass praktisch der Zins auf die jeweils unbezahlte Restschuld 1% monatlich beträgt." - - “Wie bei vorzeitiger Rückzahlung verfahren wird ist trotz der Angabe in Absatz 2 nicht genau zu ersehen. Im allgemeinen steht sich der Schuldner bei allen Methoden, die von der mathematischen abweichen, schlechter. - - Die Geldinstitute wenden lieber ungerechte, aber scheinbar verständlichere Methoden an, wenn sie die paar Mark für die Anschaffung eines Spitzer oder (falls vergriffen) für ein entsprechendes, amerikanisches Werk, sparen können. - - - - Ausserdem wissen die Geldinstitute, dass die Zahlen by Spitzer nach mathematischen Formeln berechnet sind. Deshalb sprechen sie: Also Quatsch und für die “Praxis” nicht brauchbar. - - Was bei Spitzer Zins genannt ist, sollte man allerdings lieber nennen: Vergütung für Risiko und Verwaltungskosten. Bei dem Wort “Zins”geht alles gleich hoch und denkt sich “Wucher”, Gemeinheit, Ausbeutung! Bei den Worten “Risiko” und “Verwaltungskosten” denkt sich der Durchschnittsmensch überhaupt nichts. - - Mit der Klausel auf Seite 4, wonach die Sparkasse den Kredit zu jeder Zeit ohne Angabe von Gründen kündigen kann, würde die Sparkasse bei Berliner Gerichten nicht durchkommen. - Bth. 8.6.59.” – I will not reproduce the leaflet here, which was for loans in the range from DM 300 to 2,000. – J.Z. - CALCULATIONS BY BANKS, BY TABLE’S LIKE SPITZER & VIA ELECTRONIC CALCULATORS OR COMPUTERS

INTEREST-FREE CLEARING: See: APHORISMS ON THE MONEY PROBLEM.

INTEREST-FREE MONEY: Whoever thinks that he is able to provide "interest-free" should be free to try to establish such a service, at the own risk and expense and that of voluntary followers. But it should certainly not be a compulsory service for those, who disagree. The same applies to all proposals for "debt-free" money. I hold that the provision of exchange media and of clearing certificates, as well as of short-, medium- and long-term capital is a service worth its price and one that earns its price, as a rule or in the average. Also, that every exchange involves mutual debts and insofar no monetary exchange can be "debt-free". However, if with "debt-free" is meant that capital values or capital asset certificates should not be turned into money in form of currency, then I do agree. For such money does not assure its immediate or rapid-enough redemption in wanted or needed consumer goods or services. Interest dividend coupons have, sometimes, been used as money towards those, who were under obligation to redeem them, soon. Likewise, tax anticipation certificates had tax foundation for due or soon due taxes. Thus their sound reflux and thereby their value preservation against a sound value standard was assured. Capital assets not immediately or soon enough due do not have a sufficient reflux to preserve the value of any monies issued upon them. Only barter transactions can be interest free. But to match-up people for such transactions can be rather laborious and thus costly, at leat in time and energy, unless the process is computerized. Thus there are, inevitably, transaction costs involved, or fees for such services involved. - J.Z., 25.4.11. - DEBT FREE MONEY? BARTER, DIS.

INTERLIBERTARIANS: Luca Fusari changed the group description to "Interlibertarians is an international political organization made up by world libertarian cultural associations and political parties-movements for a freedom perspective. Interlibertarians promotes the following fundamental goals: 1. defence of private property from attacks by ruling statalism run by both right- and left-wing constructivists; - 2. defence of freedom of entrepreneurship against over-regulations which imprison human talents; - 3. defence of free trade and free markets against protectionism, custom tarriffs and duties; 4. defence of tax competition in favour of a future society, once and for all free from taxes, founded on the grounds of subsidiarity, the voluntary sector, free associationism, responsibility and civic concord; - 5. defence of the value of saving with sound money against the monopolizers of money; - 6. defence of freedom of education as to make our children free from institutional serfdom inculcated by state school; - 7. defence of freedom of insurance as to repeal the state provision of health care, unemployment, accidents insurance and pensions; - - Interlibertarians organize in Lugano (Switzerland) an annual international conference for a serious debate about real problems that affecting the world today in a libertarian freedom perspective. Explain the initiatives undertaken in their respective own countries with the promotion of libertarian philosophy and free market proposals for the achievement of the above mentioned fundamental goals. Meet and exchange experiences with others libertarians, create a platform for exchange and communication between libertarians and free market organizations in the world.  Discuss and agree the implementation of practical common actions, on worldwide level for the creation of a network for the communication of libertarians ideas and non-violent actions. E-mail: interlibertarians@ticino.com - Official website: http://www.interlibertarians.org/ - Official main page on facebook: http://www.facebook.com/interlibertarians - Interlibertarians on YouTube: http://www.youtube.com/user/Interlibertarians - Interlibertarians on Twitter: http://twitter.com/IntLibertarians - Interlibertarians on Friendfeed: http://friendfeed.com/intlibertarians". - 22 June at 03:08 - Red stress inserted by me. - J.Z., 29.6.11.

INTERNAL MIGRATION & MONETARY FREEDOM: E.g. the Fort Collins project. - Compare the Free Country movement and the various Atlantic or Ocean Freedom projects. Mostly they do include at least financial freedom ideas, if not also monetary freedom proposals. - J.Z., 11.7.11.

INTERNATIONAL MONETARY FUND: What is the IMF or International Monetary Fund - Wealth Cycles Blog - wealthcycles.com/.../what-is-the-imf-or-international-monetary-fund - Cached - 16 May 2011 – Hopefully, the world takes this opportunity to learn a little bit about the IMF and its corruption of free market money and free market ...

INTERNATIONAL MONETARY FUND: What the Heck is the International Monetary Fund? |- propertytoolbox.com.au/property-update/?p=1007 - Cached - 17 May 2011 – Hopefully, the world takes this opportunity to learn a little bit about the IMF, and its corruption of free market money and free market ...

INTERNATIONAL TRADE: On the unfounded and even irrational fear that we might and could, persistently, import more than we export: Somehow most people seem to think that national accounts, budgets, credits and debts would be something entirely different, in principle, from those of individuals or family households. Most individuals and families can manage to pay their way, through their own productive efforts, without government assistance and protectionist policies, as long as they are not hindered or exploited by governments. Looking at the imports and exports of individuals: Would it not be nice if other people were ready to supply you with what you want, for your whole life, and you would not have to give them as much in return, through your exports, as they gave you, through your imports? Would you have any reason to complain? - What we export are our surplus items. We sell them at surplus and wholesale prices, i.e., rather cheaply, overseas, because we cannot sell them internally. Thus, what we receive for them, as statistically measured at the border posts, amounts, nominally, to less than normal internal retail prices for the same goods. At the same time, what we import, are largely items we are short of. Therefore, for these, we are willing to pay relatively high prices. (For the others, they are their surplus items. There is at least a tendency in this direction. It is, naturally, mitigated by bargains, we can achieve through large overseas purchases. And most imports are large and at bargain - wholesale prices.) But let us forget about these for a moment and think rather of the expensive luxury items: perfumes, liqueurs, expensive watches, fashions, wines, flashy cars etc. Thus, likewise, measured through the prices at the borders, what we import seems rather expensive. This basic flaw in the calculation of the trade balance is then interpreted as a trade deficit: We seem to pay altogether more for imports than we make from our exports. - If that really were the case, the exchange rate would fall, against our currency, and under the new exchange rate, the parity between total exports and imports would be achieved again, apart from the temporary movements of capital, profits and interest and dividends and apart from permanent investments which foreigners make with us and the capital assets which our citizens are prepared to sell them for fair market prices, as is their basic right. - In the long run imports and exports are always in balance. They pay for each other. The same applies to the payment balance, nicely balanced out through freely floating exchange rates. - This is to be expected. Neither goods nor service nor foreign exchange traders are in business to lose nor do they lose in the average. On the contrary: On both sides they win from the exchange, benefit their customers and make a profit. On balance, in all free trades, we have always a win-win situation, even if the official statistics do not show it. - Obviously, they do neither show the value of smuggled items nor that of the smuggled currencies. - Moreover, to evade custom duties, the values of imported goods are often understated or overstated when subsidies are paid, e.g. for exports. I never forget one experience with custom officers in Berlin. I had looked up the law on custom duties on foreign coins. Legally, a duty was payable on them. I had a few small coins and declared them to be subject to duty. The custom officer was not aware of that duty and did not charge me anything but waved me on. There is also a lot of bribery involved, whenever it comes to valuable items. Once, with my car under repair in Sydney, I got a lift back to Berrima in a beautiful new Porsche. The owner was a customs officer in NSW and he frankly confessed to me, in conversation, after he had discovered that I was a radical free trader, that he had financed this expensive car entirely with bribes received for letting items go through customs. Now, how correctly were his contributions towards Free Trade registered in the international trade statistics? He made once exception, he asserted: He never took bribes to let drugs through customs. I have long forgotten his name and never saw him again. Well, some of his colleagues had, probably a different kind of conscience regarding large bribes for letting drugs pass through. - I think that we can safely ignore the official statistics on international trading. Instead, if we wanted to, we should rather compare not the prices for goods at the border but the prices for the imported and exported goods when sold to their consumers. Then, when added up, and compared through the exchange rate, they would tend to balance, as one could easily predict simply from the basic observation of what trade means to two trading partners. To speak in the most general terms of all trading: All debts are as high as all credits. They cancel each other. National borders do not make a difference. Nor do different currencies. But government intervention with free trade does. It prevents much trading, makes goods and services more expensive and wrongly transfers earnings from some to others, wasting much in the process and sending wrong price signals to all concerned. - Now imagine a monetary freedom system where either a single national clearing house (or a federation of free clearinghouses, cooperating with each other) were to exist and negotiate international trade in international clearing certificates backed up by all the goods and services (including information and labour) that we have ready for exports. These would be clearing house certificates issued by our exporters, based on their export goods and sold by them to our importers. The prices of these export goods and the values of these clearing certificates would e.g., be expressed in gold ounces. They would thus tend to be accepted and used by our importers and accepted by the foreign exporters like their amounts in gold weight values, as if these paper certificates were metallic gold ounces of the total value involved in any such deal. Like a shop currency with shop foundation, the international clearing certificates would tend to become issued by our exporters, with ready for sale export goods, bought from out exporters by our importers and then used by our importers to pay foreign exporters for our imports. Assume further, that our importers would use only these certificates in payments for all our imports. Moreover that, to assure a rapid reflux of the clearing certificates thus spent for our imports, the clearing certificates would be given only a limited circulation period, say 3 to 12 months. All would be expressly and quite freely transferable and free of all protective duties. (Let us assume that small financial duties would still be levied and leave these out of consideration here.) Then and quite naturally and inevitably, exports and imports, so mediated or paid for, would automatically balance. Unless, of course, foreign exporters would be so foolish as to throw away or burn the clearing certificates received in payment from us or the foreign government would buy them from these exporters, at the expense of the taxpayers, to destroy them or keep them unused until they have expired and thus become valueless. In these cases we would have received imports without having to pay for them with our exports. To the extent that non-perishable goods were involved, and that those certificates, that were not returned, would have expired, we could then issue clearing certificates upon them again, and use them to pay for imports. - In many ways the present government paper monies, likewise having no legal tender value or monopoly status overseas, would act like the above hinted at clearing certificates used for international trading. - Apart from foreign central banks being foolish enough to hoard our paper money as foreign exchange, as a currency "reserve" (perhaps because it is aware that it is less inflated than the own paper currency is, also apart from foreign citizens doing the same because they have reasons not to trust the paper currency of their governments) our own paper money in foreign countries, having been used to pay for imports, would act like the above described private clearing certificates, too. It would have to return to us, directly or indirectly, to pay for our exports. But there are differences: Our paper money has not a limited period of circulation and it is not merely a clearing certificate acceptable in payment for our exports only, nor is it one that uses a stable value standard and one that is market-rated and accepted at par with its value standard, as if it were legal tender, only by our exporters, who issued it. Our State paper money is also not issued by providers of goods and services. Another difference might occur in practice: Since such clearing certificates are so obviously useful to balance exports with imports, they might be exempted from all foreign exchange restrictions. - The job of exporting would then be facilitated by selling the clearing certificates to importers, using them as means of payment, all over the world and then letting them find, with the help of an international clearing house or network, those foreign importers who could use them to pay for our exports to them. These certificates (or corresponding accounts) would be our, fast and efficient "trade representatives". Further trade negotiations and treaties would not be required. Their holders would induce their governments to let them use these clearing certificates quite freely - as means of payment against us. - Thus, instead of appearing on the world market first as sellers, seeking payment in a more or less scarce currency, we would appear on it first as buyers, with our own clearing means of exchange, optional and free market rated against a sound and agreed-upon value standard, and backed by our goods and services ready for export. Buyers are more welcome than sellers are overseas, under present conditions. Moreover, foreign central banks are less likely to hoard these short term and merely privately issued clearing certificates. - In this whole international exchange process, the law of comparative advantage, a lower tax burden upon our production and minimal to no regulations, freedom of issue and clearing, freedom from government interventions, subsidies and guarantees, free choice of value standards, the absence of coercive unionism and of other legally established monopolies, in the absence of all compulsory licensing and of quotas upon foreign trade and under at most merely some financial import duties (minimal to maximise turnovers and total receipts from them, rather than high, prohibitive and hardly covering the costs of raising them) would all serve to give us an advantage in freely trading with the world, even if that trade were only unilaterally free, from our side. - Seemingly, we would still be at a disadvantage: The world has so much to offer to us and we have to offer so relatively little to the world. Would that lead to overspending upon imports and difficulties in paying for our imports through our exports? Precisely in order to overcome these and other imagined difficulties, Prof. Edgard Milhaud, in several books, advanced the idea of international clearing certificates. - To seek out whatever trades are to mutual advantage, cannot be decided by outside observers, writers and thinkers, politicians and bureaucrats, not even by trained economists as advisors. It is the job of professionals, who have made it their life-long study. Let them do the job: namely, the exporters and importers. Between them they will arrange all the mutually beneficial trades that are possible, benefiting themselves and us. We should simply not interfere with them in anyway. Their Free Trade exchanges, combined with Monetary Freedom, can and will do the job for us, much better than any coercive and monopolistic authorities could. - There will be, as usual, some more or less sudden shifts in employment and in the use of resources. - Even if foreign exporters received subsidies and "dumped" their goods upon us, we should not protest against this and try to prevent it. Instead, we should rather welcome such discounts as gifts to us from foreign taxpayers. Under full monetary and financial freedom the adaptation to these changes will be rapid and complete. (I have intentionally avoided here dealing with trades in drugs, weapons and other hazardous goods but believe that territorial governments cause most of the problems associated with them in the first place.) - J. Z., 5/97, 14.9.02, 11.7.11.4.8.11. - FREE TRADE & PROTECTIONISM, EXPORTS & IMPORTS, BALANCE OF TRADE, BALANCE OF PAYMENT, INTERNATIONAL TRADE & PAYMENT DEFICITS, FOREIGN EXCHANGE CONTROL, FREELY FLOATING INTERNATIONAL EXCHANGE RATES, INTERNATIONAL CLEARING, Prof. Edgard Milhaud, DIS.

INTERNET DISCUSSIONS ON MONETARY FREEDOM: A surprisingly large number of search results are offered by Google when searching for e.g. "monetary freedom", "free banking" and "financial freedom". These hints are so numerous that an individual could not cope with all of them. Only a collaborative and large network of like-minded researchers could systematically tackle as much information and extract the pearls from the mud and then offer them, as cheaply as can be done with electronic files, to anyone, who is interested in them. - This is one of the numerous libertarian projects still to be listed in a common libertarian projects list, to attract enough collaborators. - J.Z., 11.7.11.

INVENTIVENESS: One size fits all is no more apt here than it is in other spheres. We need no more a single standardized and uniform means of exchange and value standard for all than we need a single and standardized kind of tooth brush, tennis racket, head cover or pair of shoes. On the contrary, the supply of needed and wanted exchange media and value standards, their acceptance as well as the refusal of unnecessary, doubtful, flawed or unwanted exchange media and value standards, should be as free as possible. Money is much too important to be left to the ignorance, prejudices and vested interests of territorial politicians, bureaucrats and their "expert" advisors. History has supplied more than enough proofs for that. Neither money, nor peace nor the provision of capital, of roads, research, education, health services, postal services, defence forces, liberation or revolution or the defeat of terrorism can be confidently left to the all too limited knowledge, ideas and abilities of territorial governments. Even in their best forms they do have severe limitations, just like absolute monarchs have. Indeed, there is nothing that territorial governments have proven to be able and efficient to supply as cheaply and well as possible under free competition, by free enterprise, private initiative, freedom of contract and voluntary association, i.e. in fully freed competition or genuine laissez fare, which tend to mobilize the creative energies of almost everyone, while diminishing the destructive and obstructive potential and incentives for most people. - J.Z., 27.8.02, 11.7.11. - Compare e.g. www.reinventingmoney.com - REFORMS, INITIATIVE, CREATIVENESS, HONESTY, FREEDOM OF CONTRACT & SELF-OBLIGATION SHOULD NOT BE OUTLAWED, RESTRICTED OR REGULATED IN THE SPHERES OF ALTERNATIVE MONEY ISSUES, REFLUX, ACCEPTANCE, MARKET RATING, REFUSALS, USAGE & VALUE STANDARDS, FINANCE, CLEARING, INSURANCE & GUARANTEES, EITHER.

INVESTMENT SPENDING: At the moment investment spending, not consumer spending, is the major factor in the present inflationary crisis on the expenditure side. - Retail sales are only growing at an annual rate of 8 % at the moment, compared with about 20% for investment ... - THE AUSTRALIAN, 11.2.71. - Neither can grow, out of nothing, under monetary despotism, without the central bank making more of its legal tender available. - Inflationary effects are always uneven upon different parts of the economy. Those spheres whose prices or wages grow fastest do not cause an inflation but merely show its effects earlier. The other sectors follow, sooner or later, sometimes a year or even two later. The fever symptoms do not cause the fever. The price rises due to the inflation of the money supply do not cause the inflation. They do not even make inflation worse but are merely part adaptations to it. - J. Z., 2.4.97. - Price rises, expressed in sound value standards and cause by shortages in the goods or service supplies do have nothing to do with monetary inflations. The terms "dearness" or shortages express their kind much more discriminatingly. - J.Z., 11.7.11. - CONSUMER SPENDING & INFLATION, DIS.

IOU'S OR ASSIGNMENTS UPON ONESELF: Free banking means freedom to issue, refuse, accept, discount exchange and trade privately or cooperatively issued assignments, IOUs, certificates, notes, tokens, etc., in as convenient forms as possible, i.e. in standardised monetary denominations, but otherwise distinct from all other monies, which makes them suitable for at least a local circulation. Each may thus freely offer, in transferable symbols, in private coins, notes or electronic messages, all his ready for sale goods, services and labour and he may also make a business out of facilitating private and cooperative issues for others and to thus help achieve and to manage them. To so assign one's ready for sale properties and services, including labour, and to do so in suitable associations with others, is a basic right and liberty, part of the total freedom to own property, make contracts, trade and exchange freely. It is also closely associated with the right and duty to as far as possible support oneself by one's own efforts and property. It is obvious that such a freedom is inherently rightful and harmless and that at least potentially it can be very beneficial if fully realized. It is also quite obvious that this monetary freedom is quite the opposite of the "fiat-money" "creation" of monetary despotism, although the under-informed do keep mixing up the two. Merely to replace the State's fiat paper money or forced and exclusive currency by a State's or privately issued rare metal currency, partly and temporarily replaced by redeemable rare metal certificates, does not go far enough in the direction of full monetary freedom. While it would prevent inflation, it would continue to institutionalize the shortage of exchange media and thus perpetuate deflation. Only whatever could pass through this artificial bottleneck could then be exchanged of the ever increasing total of all goods and services and this, in all too many instances, only at emergency sales prices. It is wrong to assume that all prices, wages etc. would always immediately or fast enough and completely adjust to the new relationships between such money and all goods, services, labour and capital assets. - Nevertheless, this errors is still dogmatically believed in by the "gold bugs", who wrongly assume that any money issues beyond their own would be inherently and inevitably inflationary. It is anther instance of the flaw in the single hypothesis approach as compared with the multiple hypothesis approach, which does take other factors into consideration. - J.Z., 11.1.96, 20.3.97, 11.7.11. - FORCED & EXCLUSIVE CURRENCIES, FIAT MONEY, GOLD BUGS, REDEMPTIONISM

IOUs: All producers and service providers could freely exchange all their products and services via IOUs freely issued by them and then cleared against each other. - J.Z., 16.5.96. - To facilitate the issues and that clearing process and make that clearing appear much more obviously in a monetary way, the IOUs should become standardised in form and appear in numbered and certified money denominations, using any value standard attractive to the issuers and the users of these clearing certificates. - MONEY SUPPLY & CLEARING, CLEARING HOUSE CERTIFICATES, CLEARING, DIS. - J. Z., 19.3.97.

IOU's: First draft of a text: I ……. owe to the holder the value of xyz grams of fine gold, but only in form of the goods, services and labour that I do have to offer, also priced in grams of gold. /// Here are some hints as to their kind: ………………/// I will supply them immediately or as soon as possible upon presentation of this IOU or clearing certificate. Currently a total value of abc grams of gold has been issued by me in this form. /// My normal charges for basic labour are … grams of gold per 8 hours, and … grams of gold for special services in the form of …… Some typical prices for the goods or produce I offer are: …. /// - The total number of such certificates already issued by me and returned to me in payment comes to … certificates and …. grams gold. The number of those already issued and still outstanding is …. and their value is: …. - - Serial number: …. Date: ……. Full name: ……..Postal Address: ………………. Business Address: ……………. Other contact options: Tel.: ……, Fax: ….. Further details on Website: …., email: …..Shop address or market stall (time and place): …………/// Hours for the redemption in goods offered at home address: ……….. /// - Currently, I am committed to labour or provide my special services for the next (1-3) weeks. - - Ponder: Who could rightfully prohibit me from thus exchanging what I have to offer? It is merely a kind of barter or clearing! Could these free exchanges be rightfully taxed by anyone by any government? Should I be free to combine my offers of this kind with several other such offers? Could our combined offers become so attractive that it could be turned into a local currency? Could all such offers more effectively cleared through a common clearing centre? E.g. a local shop association bank could discount all such IOUs of individuals with its own shop currency. - ……………. (Signature). - - Guarantors, if any: ………………. - J.Z., 24.4.11. - FREE BANKING, MONETARY FREEDOM, INDIVIDUAL ISSUERS, TEXT DRAFT, PRIVATE IOU's, IN MONEY DENOMINATIONS, FREEDOM TO ISSUE NOTES, IOUs & CLEARING CERTIFICATES, OBLIGING ONESELF TO REDEEM THEM WITH WHAT ONE HAS TO OFFER. SELF-OBLIGATIONS, READINESS TO ACCEPT.

ISRAEL'S INFLATION & ALTERNATIVE CURRENCIES: During Israel's inflations, the Shekel was often subject to official index standard adjustments but, in practice, to a large extent, the U.S. dollar was used as a value standard and the Shekels only accepted at their current market value against the US dollar. I got multiple hints on this but did not see a detailed report on this development. Perhaps it is offered, somewhere, online. I leave it to others to search and compile such information and offer more hints to it here. - Israel's "currency policy" is evidence that the anti-Semitic conspiracy theory of Jews as the "masters of money" is as nonsensical as their many other false assumptions regarding Jews. - Parallel currencies are flawed as long as one among them is a monopoly money with at least some legal tender power. - Then even numerous black market transactions cannot make up for the remaining flaws of such monetary despotism. - If Jews in Israel had really mastered money issue and reflux as well as value standards, i.e., had introduced full freedom in this sphere, the world would already be a much better place. Instead, most of them adopted the errors and prejudices of monetary despotism and still uphold them, regardless of the numerous economic, political and military difficulties this has caused them in the past and in the present. - Dr. Walter Zander was once influential on behalf of Israel, although unofficially only as a representative of the University of Jerusalem. But as such he was, according to Ulrich von Beckerath, almost an unofficial ambassador. However, monetary despotism was so prevailing in his Jewish and other contacts, that he saw never any opportunity to spread his monetary freedom views, now represented e.g. on www.reinventingmoney.com - Alas, in spite of his long friendship with Ulrich von Beckerath, the latter was not able to convey his panarchistic views to Dr. Zander. - (Instead, he concentrated "only" on spreading the ideas of religious, cultural and racial tolerance.) Maybe, if he had been so influenced by U. v. Beckerath, then Dr. Zander might have influenced the politics of Israel from its territorialism in the exterritorialist direction. (This job, however, might have been as difficult as converting territorialist Nazis to exterritorialist and thus tolerant Nazis.) Judging from several texts that I have read, the Israeli armed forces managed to mobilize good ideas from all its ranks and this very fast, even in emergency situations. Obviously, the Israeli territorial government has, otherwise, not mentioned to mobilize the best or all good ideas of its subjects, but, instead, showed the usual flaws of all territorial governments. - J.Z., 11.7.11.

ISSUE OF MONEY: If everyone were free to issue banknotes then everyone could cause an inflation, i.e., inflation would be inevitable. Thus money issue must be monopolised and centrally regulated by a sound monetary policy. - Dogma of the popular religion on money. - If you could issue your IOUs only at 10% discount and would have to accept them, immediately, from anyone, at 100%, would you then issue many more of them? Moreover, I would no more be likely to accept your IOUs at all than you would be likely to accept mine at all. Both our IOUs or notes or certificates would not have legal tender. If everyone could issue legal tender notes then and only then could everyone cause an inflation. Our cheques are not legal tender. Thus neither of us can cause an inflation with them. Apart from the regulations of the Securities Exchange Commission, everyone of us could issue shares, even in small denomination, 10 cents to $ 1 each. Their issue and even over-issue could only depreciate these shares, not the shares of others. Our depreciated shares, if we tried to use them as money, could be freely refused or discounted. They could not drive up the prices of any consumer goods when they are expressed in a sound value standard. The same applies to any competitively issued currencies. What made inflations possible, likely and frequent is precisely the issue monopoly and the legal tender privilege. They must be repealed or become effectively ignored. This requires a monetary revolution. Only towards the issuer must legal tender still be applied. Then over-issuers may dirty their own nest, to a limited extent, but will not be given a chance to dirty the nests of others. Self-help and self-responsibility are needed in monetary matters, too. - J. Z., 2.4.97, 11.7.11. - MONEY MONOPOLY, MONETARY PREROGATIVE, FREE BANKING & INFLATION, DIS.

ISSUE PRINCIPLE & FREEDOM: Under monetary freedom any owner of wanted goods and services can issue his kind of money based upon them. Such an issuer issues his competitive money to buy goods or services from someone else. That someone else could have issued his own money. He might insist in being paid rather with his own money. Both monies could be fully covered by goods and services. - If they really want to trade, they will come to an agreement. Which of the two monies will be found more acceptable or at least partly acceptable? That is a subjective and individual evaluation and decision. When many local people decide in favour of only one local currency or of "only, let's say, half a dozen different local alternative means of payment, then that is that for them. No one can rightly prescribe to them that they should have made another choice. At most another potential issuer, disagreeing with them, can try to establish a local circulation for his own issue, too, in addition to that of the others or, perhaps, replacing one of the others. The common principle for all issuers and acceptors is: Between us we will drive out the bad and not good enough currencies and replace them by the better ones. One could predict that e.g. the private currency of a single local baker or shoemaker or butcher would, on its own, have a hard stand against the shop currency of a local shop association or department store or supermarket. Thus they ought to join the "gang", becoming a member of the local shop association bank of issue, or get their own short term IOUs discounted by it, or be satisfied with a much reduced trade, or simply accept the currency provided by the others, to the extent that others buy from them with it, and use it for the own expenditures, too. Most will come to declare, by big signs in their shop windows and at their cashiers, which other currencies they will readily accept, for the time being, at par, because they do stand, presently, at par on the local markets. - Since acceptance is voluntary, except for the issuers and, by contract, for his debtors, no locality will accept more different exchange media than it finds sound and convenient enough to use. Nobody has to plan and direct the local circulation. Under full monetary freedom it is self-regulating. - J.Z., 5/97, 11.7.11.

ISSUE PRINCIPLE IN THE MONETARY SPHERE & IN THE CAPITAL MARKET: The right to issue and its principles can be applied not only in the monetary sphere but also in the capital market. There it can finance e.g. a libertarian take-over of a bureaucratic democracy, a libertarian revolution in a dictatorship, or one only regarding e.g. education, innovation and research, desert irrigation, even space exploration. Its monetary as well as its financial applications are essential for the financing of a rightful defensive war and of a rightful revolution. - J. Z., 77 & 97, 11.7.11.

ISSUE PRINCIPLE, DIFFERENCES BETWEEN THE MONETARY & THE FINANCIAL ISSUE PRINCIPLE: (Still to be clearly enough described here. My knowledge and experience are much to limited to fill out all the blanks here and in numerous other spheres. After all, a new science of full monetary and financial freedom is involved and it requires input from many. - Obviously, I can fill in the A to Z compilation only as far as I can. - J.Z., 11.7.11.)

ISSUE PRINCIPLE: Allow the producers and owners of goods and the providers of services to also produce and offer vouchers, warrants, purchasing- and clearing certificates (in convenient money denominations but distinct from other monies) - BASED UPON THEIR READINESS FOR SALE OFFERS. Such notes would only oblige THEM to accept them at any time from anyone at par with their nominal value, in payments. A huge daily demand or reflux for such notes can thus be achieved, quite freely and honestly, naturally and beneficially, for the issuers and acceptors. The balance between all the goods and services offered for sale and the purchasing power to sell and buy them, could thus be achieved quite easily, almost as part of the process of production and as a result of the readiness to sell. By rights no one but the producers and owners of goods and providers of services (including labour) have the RIGHT to issue money tokens to purchase them with. - J.Z., 20.9.91. In this way not only the problem of production could become freed from its major and quite wrongful restraints but also the process of distribution. - J.Z., 11.7.11. - DISTRIBUTION, TRADE, EXCHANGE, CRISES, SALES, ISSUE & REFLUX PRINCIPLE, READINESS TO ACCEPT FOUNDATION, COVER & REDEMPTION BY WANTED CONSUMER GOODS & SERVICES

ISSUE PRINCIPLE: Assets like consumer goods and services ( Also other debts very soon due!) can be "coined" or printed into at least locally somewhat acceptable means of payment: e.g. petrol money, ticket money, railway money, shop foundation money, canteen money, electricity money. Capital assets like buildings, machines, real estate can be used for issues, too, but only for issues of capital securities, not currencies. These capital securities and their capital assets are interchangeable, like currencies are with the goods and services they are based upon. When an attempt is made to turn capital assets into currency, then the current cover of such a currency in daily wanted consumer goods and services is missing. No one is obliged to so redeem it. Thus such "currency" is not current and will depreciate. Legal tender for it may seem to give it a value - but only an artificial one, as long as the legal tender lasts and at the expense of the providers of the goods and services and of their right to issue their own currencies instead. The least suitable "assets" to issue any currency upon are government securities or insecurities, i.e. investments in tax slaves, and quite at their expense. - All assets become more easily transferable through standardised certificates (or accounts) based upon their values. Issues upon consumer goods and services and issues upon capital assets do have that much in common. - Comparisons between turnover-credit or clearing certificates or banknotes and "asset currencies" have at least one value: They can help judge the dangers and risks of imparting any legal tender power and any exclusive status to a currency, which is intended to promote the sales of goods and services and to be safe from abuse and mismanagement. One can, as a thought example, apply the exclusive status and legal tender to one form of shares, bonds or mortgages or the other. Obviously, if one issuer of capital securities were given a monopoly for the issue of capital securities in a whole country and if, moreover, his securities were given legal tender power, then he could over-issue and cause an inflation with his shares, bonds or mortgages. Moreover, with them he could lay a claim to all the real capital assets in a country, as legal tender currency does now to all its consumer goods and services. Moreover, by under-issuing his securities, needed for financial transactions in this system of financial despotism, he could cause a deflation in capital securities. And if they were to be used as well as exclusive and forced exchange media, then, with his powers and in the absence of all natural limits and pricing and evaluation of his asset currency he could, by his measures, bring about inflation, deflation and stagflation. In the absence of legal tender and an exclusive currency status or issue monopoly, he could not do so. - What he also could not do, in spite of his great power and privilege is to supply all capital owners with just right number of sound securities to make all their capital assets optimally transferable. However, with his powers he could expropriate all of them. By analogy, by this application of monetary despotism to the issue of capital securities, one can learn about the effect of monetary despotism upon currencies, which are basically intended mainly to promote the daily sale of consumer goods and services and of labour. Such analogies are the greatest service that any "asset currency" theory can supply. They can teach us what not to do to and with our exchange media. - J.Z., 7.12.92, 29.4.97, 11.7.11.

ISSUE PRINCIPLE: No issue without clear, sound, honest, immediate and well enough expressed and publicised reflux arrangements to the issuer and legal tender power towards him. - J.Z., 13.11.93, 1.5.97.

ISSUE PRINCIPLE: Only readiness to sell and willingness to buy can form the sound basis for a corresponding quantity of alternative private or cooperative exchange media and this only for as long and to the extent that these conditions persist. But the offered and wanted goods must be exclusively or predominantly daily wanted consumer goods and services. Only these can act as the ultimate and most important and immediate redemption and convertibility fund. Beyond this no other is required to maintain the value of an alternative currency at par (with its sound value standard), at least locally, around the centre of issue. All such assets not only could but should be monetised, not by a central bank, which has no right to issue and impose a monopoly currency, but, instead, by their owners, but only up to the limits set by the their par acceptance of such currency. The actual total backing by consumer goods and services is likely to be much higher than the amount of "shop currency" that can be issued at any time at par. Stores stock goods not only for immediate sales but also for the sales in the near and intermediate future. Moreover, these items and services ready for sale are constantly replenished by current production. The fact that most of these goods and services offered can be rapidly replenished, would open at least the theoretical possibility of keeping at par a larger volume of store currency than could at once be covered by all the ready for sale goods and services, if all consumers were to spend all their shop currency immediately. So, where is the limit for such issues? The time factor involved, combined with free market rating for these media will determine it, rightfully, a central bank could not. It's knowledge, understanding and foresight are as limited as is that of an individual or a committee. Under freedom the issues and their value standards are determined by the self-interest of the issuers and sellers as well as that of the acceptors and buyers. - Failure to monetise such assets up to the limits of one's supply ability for goods and services in any short term period, and up to the limits set by the free market rating, acceptances and refusals of such alternative currencies, does in effect deprive other exchange spheres of some of their exchange media, which they have issued for themselves, for their turn-overs. Here, too, each should cover, serve or clothe himself with his own "clothing" or tissues rather than robbing the clothing or private currencies of others. Just like each should feed himself rather than steal or beg his food. Each should become, as far as is humanly possible and convenient, become self-reliant in this sphere, too. There is no rightful and sound substitute for self-responsibility in this sphere, either. The territorial State - and its centralized monopoly bank, with its legalized coercive powers, are the worst possible substitute for the assumption of a self-responsibility for all traders, producers and consumers in this sphere. - J. Z., 23.9.93, 24.4.97, 8.9.02, 11.7.11. - REDEEMABILITY, CONVERTIBILITY, COVER, FOUNDATION, BACKING, REFLUX, READINESS TO ACCEPT FOUNDATION, SHOP CURRENCY

ISSUE PRINCIPLE: The issue of sound exchange media by the providers of daily wanted consumer goods and services, ought to be done in accordance with sound banking principles, to productive debtors only, who can shortly expect to be paid for what they have already produced and sold but are, until then, in liquidity difficulties. Each may already have been "paid". but so far only with a short term promises to pay, as was the traditional for a long time, i.e. with a sound commercial bill. With that they could, indeed, pay their suppliers e.g. of raw materials, but hardly their wage, salary and tax bill. For that purpose, under the soundest form of the "banking principle", they have simply to get this large bill "cut up" or temporarily replaced by small bills or notes in standardized money denominations, all with sufficient shop foundation. This a note-issuing bank or shop association can do, by either buying the commercial bill or lending its bank notes upon it as a security. When the short term security falls due, it can then be redeemed with the notes issued. To that extent it acts as a vacuum cleaner for them, achieving their reflux or exerting a demand for them, one which is corresponding to the quantity of bank notes that was issued for the bill (including the commission of the bank, expressed in the bill discount, which the bank will spend for its expenditures and profit in its own bills). The issue principle is balanced by the reflux principle, the inherent cover, security and redemption in the banking principle practice. It does not require rare metal redemption by the issuer. Redeemability on the free gold market would be even better but only shop foundation i.e. goods and service redeemability would be essential. All money is used to pay debts and to that extent it can be and should be based on a debt foundation or obligation foundation or readiness to accept or shop foundation or tax foundation. Whatever is acceptable in a payment community as a means of payment or clearing or settlement is suitable for it as at least one form of its kind of money. As such it can be issued by suitable members of that community of their association or by an outside agency hired for this purpose. - J.Z., 27.8.02. The limits for such issues are indicated by their optionality and their free market rates. Ticket-money is not a bad term for such issues and it does indicate their limits more clearly. - J.Z., 11.7.11.

ISSUERS, POTENTIAL ONES: Any money that is, in practice, and in most cases, to be redeemable by its holder in consumer goods and services, can be issued in the first place by the providers of these goods and services, i.e. by retail traders, their associations or agents. This can be done even when there is not a single gold or silver coin or bullion bar left in a country. These issues do then merely facilitate clearing or an indirect, multilateral and anonymous barter exchange, almost with the ease of monetary transactions and, sometimes, make payments even easier. Compare the rapidity with which cash payments can be done to the cashier when the customers has already the right cash amount in his hands. These payments go faster than those mediated through a digitized payment. This kind of "commodity money" does not require any other kinds of "redemption" or "convertibility", "cover", "reserve" or "guaranty fund" or "securities" or "backing" or "capital". (However, when they issued in short term loans, e.g. for wage payments, then these turnover credit loans, as opposed to capital loans, require suitable short term securities, arising from the sale of goods already produced, sold and on the road to the retailers. In these cases the notes do have a double cover: shop foundation plus the bill of exchange foundation or that of the other short-term turnover security that is involved and had been "monetized. - J.Z., 5.9.02.) (At least some of the digitized circulation charts that I offer as an email attachment do show, graphically, how all the mutual debts are settled or cleared in the process without the need for any rare metal cover or redemption, even while rare metal weight units are used as value standards. - J.Z., 11.7.11.) Apart from legal restrictions, this kind of local currency could always be made rapidly available where there are wanted goods and services whose sale might otherwise be difficult or incomplete, although the local community is not oversupplied with them. - J.Z., 8.4.97. - With the help of instant printing machines such sound alternative means of exchange could be produced and used within hours, thus overcoming any local shortage of means and exchange, with its inherent unemployment and sales difficulties. If you live in a somewhat developed country and wander through one of its shopping centres, then you can easily visualize the potential for the issue and acceptance of sound shop currency, quite independent of any "currency" policy by any governmental central bank. - Self-help is possible within hours or days at most but so far outlawed and prevented by great ignorance and numerous popular errors prejudices. Under certain conditions even the outlawry could be rapidly overcome. To overcome the ignorance, errors, prejudices and lack of interest that are involved is much more difficult and time-consuming. - J.Z., 11.7.11. - AND THEIR REDEMPTION OR READINESS TO ACCEPT FOUNDATION

ISSUERS, POTENTIAL: Any centre that receives many payments and has many payments to make, can act as a centre for the issue of bank notes and clearing certificates. - J.Z., 20.3.97. - A remark that merely translates a frequent statement by Ulrich von Beckerath, 1882-1969. He explored the monetary freedom options at least from 1908 onwards and at least some of his writings have been preserved and are online, most of them still only in German. Some of his correspondence are in the possession of Eckard Duewal, who runs a large Antiquariat in Berlin-Charlottenburg, but is very possessive about it, although he has, to my knowledge, made no attempt so far to publish it. He was, like myself, a follower of U. v. Bth and inherited his library and papers. But at least he let me photocopy much of it, a few years later and most of that material, together with some other, was microfilmed by me in my PEACE PLANS series. Only a fraction of this material appeared online at www.reinventingmoney.com and a much smaller fraction of his shorter writings have been translated so far into English. His three classical monetary freedom books, in German, English and in French, can be also be found on that website. If anyone knows of any still better monetary freedom writings - please, do let me know of them. At least from my own and somewhat biased view, since he was my mentor, much more than my father was, most of the modern monetary freedom writings are still behind those of Ulrich von Beckerath, on many important points. However, decide for yourself, simply by reading some of his texts, among those already online. - J.Z., 11.7.11.

ISSUING CENTRES FOR COMPETITIVE & OPTIONAL CURRENCIES: Any payment centre, where regularly many payments are made and received, is, potentially, also an issuing centre for its own notes or clearing certificates, in convenient money denominations, that are subject to voluntary acceptance or rejection and free market rating and also valued by an optional value standard. Whatever IOUs it would issue, would tend to quickly stream back to it. Its notes would have no other value. Its debtors would express a demand for these notes in the local market, by offering their goods, services or labour for them. - J.Z., 28.5.94, free after many remarks, in correspondence and in discussions, by Ulrich von Beckerath. - See: PAYMENT COMMUNITIES.

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JAMES, LOUIS, How to Own Physical and Paper Gold as Trend Continues Towards $1500 - September 8, 2010.- Brian Sylvester Interviews Louis James. - "In this exclusive interview with The Gold Report, Louis offers tips on how to own physical gold and "paper" gold, and even picks some junior gold and silver plays with significant potential." - Roy Halliday, in section on gold.

JEFFERSON, THOMAS, Against the Constitutionality of the Bank of the United States - 1791 - Jefferson. - "To take a single step beyond the boundaries thus specially drawn around the powers of Congress, is to take possession of a boundless field of power, no longer susceptible of any definition. The incorporation of a bank, and the powers assumed by this bill, have not, in my opinion, been delegated to the United States, by the Constitution." - Roy Halliday - CENTRAL BANKING

JOB CREATION: See: FULL EMPLOYMENT, MAKE-WORK SCHEMES, GOVERNMENT SPENDING, UNEMPLOYMENT, PUBLIC WORKS PROJECTS, UNEMPLOYMENT, CRISES

JOB LEVY: All job levy attempts are conceptually wrong. The money levied did already provide jobs, the natural way. These jobs were provided with this money - which the consumers want and entrepreneurs are willing to offer. These jobs are destroyed by the job levy. Moreover, these jobs are productive and self-supporting jobs, in which the employed really earn their way and please voluntary buyers of their goods and services. By taking these funds from these channels, the job levy first destroys job opportunities. Then it provides some jobs, indeed, but often only unproductive bureaucratic jobs and other more or less unproductive or even counter-productive jobs by people mostly unwilling to work hard in them and make them their career. (Even in spite of, or, rather, because of forced labour and centralized controls, minimizing individual incentives, productivity in the Soviet Union was low and thus its standard of living. - J.Z., 11.7.11.) It is another form of pyramid building. In balance more jobs and more productive efforts are destroyed or prevented thereby than are provided. (Nevertheless, that old fallacy is still all too much alive and realized even in most of the democratic and somewhat free countries, under all kinds of fancy new cover names. - J.Z., 11.7.11.) Good intentions and misleading terms are not substitute for rightful and positive actions. It merely expresses the all too wide-spread fallacy that money spent by governments does provide jobs and that the same money, if left in private hands and spent by them, does not. Bureaucrats and politicians do not and cannot "create" productive jobs, not even at your expense. They destroy jobs and severely burden the remaining jobs. But they do manage to get themselves fat cat jobs at your expense - because all too many are still territorial statists and keep voting for such "representatives", most of whom have no clue on essential points of full economic freedom, least of all of full monetary and financial freedom. Thus I would not call that levy or any other tax or tribute, under another name of false pretence, a creative action. - J. Z., 17.12.93. 23.8.95, 25.5.97, 11.7.11. - All that has been said about job levies does also apply to unemployment "insurance". Unemployment, being caused by government intervention, is not an insurable list. Interventionism can rise to almost any degree. Only the abolition of interventionism with peaceful production and exchange can end the unemployment and other troubles that it causes. - J.Z., 17.9.02.

JOB LEVY: Any funds forcefully levied by a government and then distributed by it under the pretence that it would thereby provide extra jobs, tends to provide less jobs and less productive jobs than would have been provided if the funds had remained in the hands who rightfully earned or owned them. Nevertheless, tax and public works proposals are going on and on, mistaking the intention or even the name for the results and ignoring the other side of the coin. - J. Z., 22.11.93. - Bank robbers, spending the money they robbed, could likewise claim to provide jobs! - J.Z., 11.7.11.

JOB LEVY: If $ 3 billion could be taken from the remaining employed, without thereby creating new unemployment, then why not 30 billion or 300 billion? Actually, the tax levy or penalty on the remaining jobs could be made so large that no one could be employed any longer. However, already any tax on employment, no matter how small, tends to destroy jobs or prevent new jobs from coming into existence. Any job levy and any other tax is a penalty upon employment and renders labour to that extent uneconomical. These wrongs and damages are not balanced out by a few more jobs for bureaucrats and other subsidised, i.e. not self-supporting jobs. - J. Z., 14.12.97, 25.5.97, 11.7.11.

JOB LEVY: In Australia, some time ago, a job levy of $ 3 billion was proposed. As usual, at the expense of the tax-payers, or as a result of further public debt, thus at the expense of future tax slaves (or as a result of further inflation of the State paper money of the Reserve bank. (At the expense of the inflation tax.) In all these forms purchasing power and job opportunities would simply be shifted but with the disadvantage that the thus expropriated would, to that extent, not be able to finance with their money wanted and productive jobs but the bureaucrats would, instead, buy with these funds, raised by tributes, less wanted and less productive jobs, in new pyramid building efforts, mere showcases for people to gawk at and builders to boast about but with few comprehending all their costs in lost opportunities or their destructiveness of property rights jobs and liberties. If, instead of this $ 3 billion job levy, the government would have declared that the retailers of Australia and its other service providers would, between them, be set at liberty to, between them, $ 30 billion worth of shop currency, at any time, if only they could manage, by their readiness to accept it, to keep it at par with its stated sound value standard (that would exclude the paper "standard" of the government's Reserve Bank), then it would have no objection. On the contrary, the government should invite the retailers to make short term loans with these notes to all potential employers for the employment of additional employees, paid only in this kind of private or cooperative money, at market rates or, perhaps, even at a slight increase to make them more ready to accept such alternative local currency in wage and salary payments. Assuming that there are 10 million employed in Australia, all at an average weekly wage of A$500, then this would require a weekly wage bill of ca. $ 5 billion. Assuming 1 million unemployed in Australia, their additional wage bill, if employed, would come only to $ 500 million a week. Much more exists in ready for sale goods and services for shop foundation money. But, naturally, no more should be issued than could be spent for ready for sale goods and services, and upon the immediate payment for productive jobs, that would continuously replace goods currently consumed and keep up the supply of currently wanted services. Woolworth department stores on their own have a turnover of ca. $ 10-15 billion p.a., let us say 1 billion per month and for Coles/Meyer the figures are similar. (By 2002 both have turnovers of around A $20 - 25 billion, p.a.) The total turnover of retailers in Australia is very roughly estimated by me to come to somewhere between $ 150 & 250 billion p.a. (By all means, try to compile current and correct figures! - J.Z., 11.7.11.) It may actually be much higher. Moreover, that would only be the basis for shop-foundation currencies, not for all the other monetary freedom options. I am waiting for someone, like a national retailers association, to provide me and all other Australians with more correct figures. But for the time being these hints may have to do. Under easy sales for goods and services the total weekly and annual turnovers could also and soon become much larger. Shop currency issues would not have to be the equivalents to annual turnovers but at most only to the weekly to monthly turnovers. The same amounts, in different note issue series, could be issued over and over again and increased to the extent that the shop foundation - or other foundation - would be increased and that more sound currency would be wanted in circulation - or its equivalents in deposits, cheques, credit card arrangements etc. The government's one-off job levy of $ 3 billion and the spending of this money over a period, would be quite puny, even if it had only positive and no negative effects at all - something that is certainly not the case. - J. Z., n.d. & 24.5.97, 11.7.11. - DIS.

JOB LEVY: Just because a tax, payable in exclusive and forced currency, is called a "job levy" and there may be every honest intention to spend the money so taxed only upon the "creation" of new jobs or their financing, does not mean that its levying and its spending will not destroy existing jobs or prevent them from coming into existence or from being maintained. Essentially only a TRANSFER is involved of potential wage payment means, from one group of workers to another. In balance only the bureaucratic jobs might become further increased in the process, and this only by impoverishing all people working in productive jobs. Make-work schemes rarely support their costs, far less are they profitable, as a rule. They are no substitutes for market supplied and needed jobs, paid for by the exchange media of monetary freedom. - J.Z., 14.12.93, 1.5.97. - Currently, the government, "in its wisdom", can think of nothing better than e.g. a "mining levy" and a "carbon-dioxide" levy, both as wrongful and irrational as the "job levy" proposal was then. - J.Z., 11.7.11. - CAMOUFLAGED STATE SOCIALISM, UNEMPLOYMENT

JOB LEVY: Lift the job levy high enough - and you won't have any jobs left to levy anything on. - J. Z., 28.11.93, 24.5.97.

JOHNSSON, RICHARD C. B., Why Gold? - October 7, 201. - "There are a number of reasons that make gold special and it turns out that most of them are quite natural." - Roy Halliday, in section on gold.

JOKES ON MONEY: Austrian people, after too many inflations used to joke: Governments never go bankrupt - only its creditors do. - While this is true regarding the wrongfulness of its monetary despotism, with its issue monopoly and legal tender power (compulsory acceptance at a forced value), in times of inflation, one should add that governments, via their compulsory taxation and numerous other wrongful interventions, do also drive all too many otherwise sound debtors into bankruptcy. - J.Z., 12.8.11.

JOKES ON MONEY: Why is Poland just like the U.S.? - In the U.S. you can't buy anything for zloties and in Poland you can't, either. In the US you can get whatever you want for dollars, just as you can in Poland." - Source unknown. - Mind you, the zloty has legal tender in Poland but even that does not help it enough at this stage. It does not have only legal tender in the US but at most a low rate of exchange on the foreign exchange market, not accompanied by readiness to accept it at all on the general market. While the U.S. dollar, in spite of all its flaws and even without legal tender power in Poland, is, nevertheless, the preferred currency there to the national one with legal tender. - To that extent such jokes and practice do have something to teach about monetary freedom, even though they do represent only a small fraction of its potential. - J.Z., 14.5.97. - In how many years will the US dollar be treated just like the Pollish zloties were then? - Who will help compile a critical and enlightening collection of jokes on money, on a disc or published online, one that can help to lead people towards the monetary freedom alternatives? - J.Z., 13.7.11.  - PAPER MONEY, INFLATION, USA, POLAND, COMPETING CURRENCIES, CHOICE IN CURRENCIES, MONETARY FREEDOM, VALUE STANDARDS JOKES

JON, Jon's Political Ramblings, on Gary North, Academia's War against Free Market Money, - Jon's Political Ramblings: Academia's War Against Free Market Money - jonspoliticalramblings.blogspot.com/.../academias-war-against-free-... - Cached - 1 Dec 2008 – Academia's War Against Free Market Money. Gary North wrote a beautiful essay on how mainstream economists marginalize followers of Austrian ... - All too many still manage to call a money market that is legally confined to two rare metals a "free market money" market. That is like mixing up territorial States with free societies, representing the choices of sovereign individuals. - J.Z., 27.7.11. - FREE MARKET MONEY, TERRITORIALISM

JUDGE NAPOLITANO: Download Judge Napolitano : Free Market Money Vs. Government ... - www.savevid.com/.../judge-napolitano-free-market-money-vs-gove. - Cached - Download Judge Napolitano : Free Market Money Vs. Government Terrorism! video on savevid.com. Download videos in flv, mp4, avi formats easily on ... Terrorism or monetary despotism. Admittedly, monetary despotism can lead to terrorism. - J.Z., 27.7.11.

JUDGE, PHILIP: The Arrival Of Free Market Money - The Arrival Of Free Market Money by Philip Judge - www.24hgold.com/.../news-gold-silver-the-arrival-of-free-market-money... - 31 May 2007 - 24hGold.com. - Genuine free market money has never as yet fully arrived. - J.Z., 27.7.11.

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KARLSSON, STEFAN, Stefan Karlsson's blog: Austrian Business Cycle Theory And ... - stefanmikarlsson.blogspot.com/.../austrian-business-cycle-theory-an... - Cached - 27 Mar 2008 – In a free market, money is neutral, since it affects prices evenly. That said, a discovery of a large gold deposit is unlikely to cause a ... - The understanding and realization of all monetary freedom options will NOT have a neutral effect. While under it, due to the free use of all kinds of sound value standards no inflation will take place, the increased turnovers and the full employment made possible by it and the increased savings and investments that it will promote, will tend to reduce consumer goods prices while increasing wages and salaries. Capital accumulation will occur faster and might lead to lower interest rates. On the other hand, so many productive opportunities might then arise that interest rates might also rise. - Anyhow, prices never rise quite evenly, as can be seen by any careful and penny-pinching shopper. - J.Z., 27.7.11.

KEMMERER, EDWIN WALTER, What Constitutes a Gold Standard - "The generic gold standard may be briefly defined as a monetary system where the unit of value - in terms of which prices, wages, and debts are customarily expressed and paid - consists of the value of a fixed quantity of gold in a large international market that is substantially free." - Roy Halliday, in section on gold.

KINSELLA, STEPHAN, Fractional-Reserve Banking, Contracts of Deposit, and the Title-Transfer Theory of Contract - August 13, 2009. - "Someone asked me the proper way to view deposit contracts, in the context of a discussion about fractional-reserve banking (FRB)." - Roy Halliday

KIYOSAKI, ROBERT, The “7 Steps” to The Life Cycle of Money! | Robert Kiyosaki Blog - www.richerdaddy.com/the-“7-steps”-to-the-life-cycle-of-money/ - Cached - Next, a Free Market Money emerges. This is a Need due to the fact that ... Due to its lack there of and difficulty to mine, free market money ...

KIYOSAKI, ROBERT: Robert Kiyosaki Rich Dad | Manifest Your Dreams With Curt "CBiz ... - manifestyourdreams.biz/tag/robert-kiyosaki-rich-dad/ - Cached - 19 Oct 2010 – Next, a Free Market Money emerges. This is a Need due to the fact that different quantities of different items have a “different value”. ... Any money supply limited through monetary errors and prejudices should never be called a "free market money". - J.Z., 27.7.11.

KLING, ARNOLD, Break Up the Banks - "Big banks are bad for free markets. Far from being engines of free enterprise, they are conducive to what might be called "crony capitalism," "corporatism," or, in Jonah Goldberg's provocative phrase, "liberal fascism." There is a free-market case for breaking up large financial institutions: that our big banks are the product, not of economics, but of politics." - Roy Halliday, in section on Government-Regulated Banking. - They do not have to be broken up. - Just remove their exclusive governmental licensing, which gave banking "privileges", even of the present all too limited kind, e.g. without the note issue right, only to a few and relatively large banks. - J.Z., 11.8.11.

KNOWLEDGE, COMPLETE & IN SMALL DOSES: Knowledge which is worthless in small quantities becomes immensely valuable in complete form." - Brian Stableford, Rapsody in Blue (SF), p.33. - As a fan of the "Ideas Archive" project, this remark appealed to me and is generalisation seems to me to apply also somewhat to the sphere of monetary freedom. However, even here some distinctions ought to be made: A) Assume almost complete knowledge of monetary freedom options a) under conditions of monetary despotism and b) under conditions of monetary freedom. B) Assume a knowledge in small doses only of monetary freedom options a) under conditions of monetary despotism and b) under conditions of monetary freedom. A) Would be required to overcome monetary despotism for sure, e.g. in a monetary revolution. Under monetary freedom there would be sufficient practitioners of it and a sufficient reference literature would have been built up, so that full knowledge of it in a sufficient number of heads, would be achieved and become self-maintaining. B) Insufficient knowledge of monetary freedom options, under monetary despotism, would lead only to too small, inconsistent and flawed monetary experiments, which would not sufficiently enlighten even the participants and might merely support the prejudices and suppression attempts of their opponents. That is one of the reasons why the hundred-thousands of all too limited and still prejudiced and flawed monetary freedom experiments over the last few hundred years did not develop into full monetary freedom. However, under monetary freedom it would not matter if a few or most people had only a vague notions of most monetary freedom theories and practices, as long as there would be enough enlightened specialists to run the centres of issue. The others have just to be able to distinguish notes that are readily accepted at par, at least in the local shops, from those which are not. And the test for this is as easy, cheap and fast as an enquiry at the nearest shop. And if they remain completely prejudiced against ALL "mere fiat" or "mere paper" money, as, I suppose, Rothbard was, until the died, then they should, naturally, be at liberty to refuse all such payments and only deal with those able and willing to pay them in gold coins or 100% gold covered gold certificates. In other words, they do not have to know much under monetary freedom. They simply have to express their dislikes and preferences, or take their choices. When one surveys, whatever monetary freedom literature one can get access too, to the extent that an individual can do so, over decades, then one will find, I believe, that no comprehensive handbook on all monetary freedom ideas and techniques and experiences has ever been compiled or published as yet. This is somewhat surprising, since, supposedly, most people are more or less "greedy" to get their hands on more and more of almost any kind of money. In practice, however, they considered under "any" money only any money of monetary despotism, at least for most of the last few decades. Before that their thinking on monetary freedom options was mostly quite blinkered by the examples of currencies that consisted mainly only out of rare metal coins or certificates for them, while the understanding of clearing options was, for centuries, rather limited to the practice of bills of exchange, still entangled in notions of their ultimate redemption in coins, even while most of them were already cleared. A close to comprehensive enough understanding of the clearing options for all kinds of monetary exchanges and that even cash is essentially merely a clearing facilitator, is something relatively new, even in the heads of most economists, for the last 200 years. For every insight in this sphere there are, probably, thousands of errors, prejudices and myths, even in the heads of most of the supposed experts and writers or lecturers on this subject. Rittershausen's ultimate theory of money: "Geldtheorie", remained unfinished and unpublished - an unfinished manuscripts. Its essential teaching, when I dare to sum it up in one sentence, is: Money is clearing. - Naturally, he was aware, as a monetary freedom advocate and associate of Ulrich von Beckerath of the value standard function, too but also, more than the vast majority, of the necessity and possibility of separating these functions while uniting them in a rightful, non-fraudulent and non-coercive way in the same paper certificates and other accounting and clearing methods. Their German, but also Swiss and Jewish School of Monetary Freedom aimed clearly at maintaining freedom to issue exchange media, accept them, discount them or refuse to accept them (unless one had issued them oneself) with the right of freedom of choice of value standards for all, even if personally one would favour e .g., a gold weight unit as a value standard in all one's contracts. Outside of my PEACE PLANS series and the old issues of Prof. Edgard Milhaud's ANNALS OF COLLECTIVE AND COOPERATIVE ECONOMY, only very few and more or less obscure references to this kind of monetary freedom thinking can be found in the literature. Neither Rittershausen nor Beckerath ever got around to publish a handbook on all monetary freedom options, although they have provided some monographs and guides to the understanding and techniques of sound competitive paper monies. Their pioneering writings are still largely unknown to or unappreciated by most modern academic advocates of the denationalization of currencies, since Hayek wrote about it. At least some of them are now accessible at www.reinventingmoney.com. Their writings were the product of years, even decades of discussions and can, perhaps, not be fully grasped without a similar effort. Thus I try to alphabetise and sum up some of their basic concepts and proposals as well as I can with my much more limited knowledge and abilities in this sphere, hoping that others will correct and supplement my statements sufficiently to ultimately provide an excellent guide towards all monetary freedom ideas and sound monetary freedom practices. - A journey of a thousand miles begins with a single step. I have had such a book in mind for decades and accumulated thousands of notes towards it. They have all to be gradually keyboarded in here and somewhat revised according to my current thinking on the subject. - J. Z., 15.4.97, 13.7.11. - A digital attempt of this kind is presently undertaken by Klaus Falke, Thomas Greco et al, under www.monetary-freedom.net - I postponed any collaboration with it until I have finally finished updating the FB AZ as far as I can. - J.Z., 13.7.11. - ON MONETARY FREEDOM OPTIONS & THE REALITIES OF MONETARY DESPOTISM, HANDBOOK ON MONETARY FREEDOM & FREE BANKING

KRIEG, Dr. ADRIAN A., The Daily Bell - Adrian H. Krieg - www.thedailybell.com/2169/Adrian-H-Krieg.html  - Cached - Dr. Krieg believes in a free-market money system of gold and silver and has stated that the only way to save the world economy from total collapse is to go ... - Oh, yea of little faith! - The redemptionist gold standard is only ONE of the free market alternatives and rightful only for its voluntary victims. Territorially imposed upon dissenters, it amounts still to a great wrong and an great problem for free exchanges. One might as well demand that the only personal transport permitted should be Rolls Roys or Mercedes cars and buses. - J.Z., 24.7.11.

KROOS, HERMAN E., Documentary History of Banking and Currency in the U.S., ed. by Herman E. Kroos. "The most comprehensive documentary history of American money and banking ever published, containing over 300 key documents spanning nearly three and a half centuries. The set contains all the major federal laws and regulations, excerpts from official government publications etc., and presents revealing events in state legislation, such as New York's Safety Fund and California's Branch Banking Law. Also included are important selections from the writings of such influential thinkers as Benjamin Franklin and John Maynard Keynes. An introductory essay by the Nobel Prize-winning economist Paul A. Samuelson, provides a clear overview of the work as a whole. 1976, 4 volumes, Bowker International Marketing Services, complete catalog, 1980-81, $ 186. - I mention this title here only on the off-chance that it might contain something of interest to monetary freedom advocates and be it only details of monetary despotism. Confinement to official views and those of the two quoted "experts" does not count as a recommendation to me. - J.Z., 30.5.97.

KRUG, STEFFEN: The Euro Crisis and Gold As Free Market Money - Video - www.metacafe.com/.../the_euro_crisis_and_gold_as_free_market_... - Cached - 20 Jun 2011 – Watch the whole 21-minute video at http://www.goldmoney.com/krug-turk-interview - Steffen Krug (http://www.ifaam-institut.de/ ) Also: The euro crisis and gold as free market money - www.goldmoney.com - Gold Research - Cached - talks to James Turk about the euro. They talk about how the ECB is subject to political influence, as witnessed with its buying ... - WHY ONLY gold? - After all, he tries to talk about FREEDOM! - Why only gold as value standard and only gold as means of exchange, instead of competitive free enterprise and consumer sovereignty towards both? - J.Z., 23.7.11

LLLLL

LABOUR AS VALUE STANDARD? While much of labour, except e.g. that of politicians and bureaucrats, is productive, to different degrees, and some labours of some people are very valuable indeed, worth that of many other and ordinary workers, e.g. those of inventors, discoverers, innovators, when they are free to apply their intelligence, judgment and experience in order to greatly increase productivity or to provide a new commodity or service, machine, way of collecting, transforming or storing energy etc., under fully free market conditions ( which would have to include e.g. full monetary and financial freedom, free trade and a fully developed transport and communication system to get the maximum of value out of them), the use of “labour”, even if “measured”, but only by the hour, is, because of the different value of the labour hour of different people - and even of the same people at different hours - just about the worst kind of “value standard” imaginable, apart, naturally, from the fictitious and forced (above its free market value) value standard of government paper monies as soon as they are being fast inflated. Even the minimum wages keep changing upwards, not to speak of the salaries of high executives. Nevertheless, as a primitive notion, it has retained its popularity. To some extent, representing mining labours and also the pre-done labour involved in modern mining equipment, gold weight units do represent labour value. But at measurable and free market evaluated value standard units they are much more reliable value standards than are time periods of ill defined “labour”. –Seeing the vast variety of views on value standards, the only sound, just and rational “policy” in this sphere amounts to free choice of value standards for all, especially for all private payment communities and all private contracts. - J.Z., 11.1.10, 1.11.10.

LABOUR & GOODS EXCHANGES, ISSUING THEIR OWN GOODS WARRANTS, ON A TIME, LABOUR HOUR OR OTHER FLAWED VALUE STANDARD: One of the conceptual mistakes of such experiments - like those by Josiah Warren and Robert Owen - was, that they try to establish new and separate stores that attempt to help the whole local economy by their inevitably limited issue potential, while they bypass the huge stocks of goods, services and labour that are offered by all others in the community, which would provide the necessary shop foundation for an effective local currency alternative. Any local bank of issue should not appear as a competitor to the existing shops and businesses but as a helper to all of them. It should not attempt to concentrate all goods and services and all turnover in a new kind of business, the labour exchange, but, rather, leave them were they are and help to sell them from there, through its issue of labour notes, goods warrants and ticket money or purchasing certificates etc. The experiment should right away aim at establishing a local shop association as an issuing centre, discounting short term notes of local shops, and try thus to monetize or liquidify as far as possible and desirable (with the limits indicated by refusals to accept and the market rating for these tokens against their value standard) all the local ready for sale assets, labour and services, which at present are difficult or at least partly impossible to sell. Thus it could win friends almost everywhere instead of making right away more enemies than it has already naturally, as a radical reform. The issue association might immediately publish its evaluations of all local businesses, their goods stocks and service potential and of all local unemployed and underemployed and state for each of them the limits to which they would be prepared to grant them short term loans if they are prepared to accept the local currency in all payments due to them and to repay these loans after a short period, with the local currency. But the most important targets for short term loans with such shop currencies would be local employers, for their wage bill, for their continued and expanded employment. The greatest obstacle in this effort, apart from the legal obstacles established by monetary despotism, might be to overcome the usual objections of trade unionists to wage and salary payments in other exchange media than the governmental ones. (However, as the great experiment in Sydney, during the final period of the building of the Roselands Shopping Centre, has demonstrated, even this obstacle of the usual trade unionist mentality, can be overcome. The raise, which the trade unionists demanded under the threat of a crippling strike, was paid in shop currency, accepted like cash in many associated stores. The strike was averted and with it a financial crisis for this very large building project. The participants, including John Ducker of the NSW Labour Council, managed somehow - in my opinion, in the real public interest - to hush up the illegality of this procedure, which, after all, did not harm or wrong anybody but served everybody very well. - The sum total of these possible and desirable local short-term turnover loans should also be publicised as the extent and limit for the local economy to help itself - pulling itself up by its own bootstraps: its own potential turnover credit assets. No attempt should be made, initially, to provide for the needs of medium and long term capital, too. But at least studies should be undertaken, to provide them, in the future, on a stable value standard basis, by contracts, also payable and repayable in the local currency and, once the local currency is fully functioning, to accept term deposits and bond purchases in it, to mobilise whatever capital the local community could - in additional savings and investments. But even the long-term loans must only be granted when backed by corresponding willingness to save and invest and they must be paid only and repaid finally, in local currency of short term validity, so that the turnover credit character of the local currency remains preserved, and thereby its liquidity and reflux foundation or debt foundation or clearing function. The local issues should clearly express that they are to be usable only for clearing settlements and short term due debt payments, including especially wage- and salary payments, or purchases from the local members and suppliers. No redemption in legal tender, foreign exchange or rare metals should be promised. - As soon as possible the payability of local rates and fees with the local currency should be aimed at, too, but only at its market rate, not at its face value. Instead, the local government should be induced to issue its own sound tax-foundation currency. Local gas-, water-, electricity- and bus companies should also be induced to issue their own notes, backed by their service capacity. Local tradesmen might be induced as well to issue their own service vouchers in money denominations, with acceptance by all members of their association. Every potential issuer should be asked to fill his niche with his own clearing- and exchange media certificates, to the limits of his ability and of the readiness of the local community to accept them at par. None of these issues is to have legal tender power - except towards the issuer and, by contract, towards his debtors. Only under this condition can it be achieved that all local labour, services and goods, for which there is a local and still unsatisfied need or demand, can be expressed in effective local monetary demand or purchasing power, i.e. can be easily and soon sold, after first having been used to purchase additional labor, services and goods. Once the local turnover has reached its maximum, with optimum ease, additional savings will occur in the local currencies and these can then be saved and invested in the traditional manner, but still using the local currencies in the process, as means of payments and repayments, corresponding to the ability and readiness of the local people to save and invest, using this currency and its by then, hopefully, much improved value standard, instead of the government's all too unreliable and usually depreciating paper standard. - If the experiment is undertaken fast, understood well and publicised well enough, then it will be difficult to impossible for the State- or Federal government to suppress it, especially if it is undertaken shortly before an election and when the numbers of local underemployed, unemployed, bankruptcies and social service recipients have been greatly reduced by it. Then other local communities will demand their right to follow this successful model and will not tolerate its suppression, expressing their sympathies with it on election day. (Thus, optionally, such monetary freedom and self-help or monetary revolution experiments should be undertaken shortly before an election, when local unemployment or inflation are severe.) The newly elected will have to grant an amnesty for all breaches of laws and regulations that were involved and have to legalise these actions a.s.a.p. - J.Z., 18.10.84, 19.3.97, 28.8.02, 13.7.11. - MONETARY EXPERIMENTS

LABOUR EXCHANGE BANKS, See: FULCRAUD-MAZEL, M., & TOPOLOBAMPO, Colony, COSME, PARAGUAY. - See: BRAY, JOHN FRANCIS.

LABOUR MARKET, UNEMPLOYMENT, MONETARY FREEDOM: It is wrong to speak of a free labour market when only the offer of labour is free on the market, not the monetary demand for it. The monetary demand for labour is the other side of the coin of a free labour market, the one that is, usually, overlooked. So far we were not free to turn up that side of the coin - or to produce the kind of coins or notes that would constitute a free, sound, reliable and competitive monetary demand. Instead, we have left the demand for labour to be supplied by the greatest monopolist, who, in the absence of sufficient free market indicators for his forced and exclusive currency, has either over-supplied or under-supplied the national economy with his monopoly product and sometimes has done both, at the same time, in different spheres and channels and managed even to depreciate the forced and exclusive currency so fast that this seemingly extra demand for labour did, in reality, cause involuntary mass-unemployment. Nobody wants to invest any more when he can be legally and juridically repaid in "worthless" scrap. Then production and monetary exchanges come almost to a stop or are greatly reduced. Then the ignorant, prejudiced and helpless politicians try to stop inflation by artificially creating unemployment through credit restrictions and deflations, price or interest rate controls. When they have thus and otherwise established and maintained mass unemployment by their "measures", then they can think of nothing better than heavily taxing the few still employed and in business, in order to subsidise make-work schemes and unprofitable enterprises. Within the framework of monetary despotism no real solution is possible. It is a bottleneck for the monetary demand for labour or prevents much possible and desirable demand for labour from arising at all, because the means for it are outlawed by it. To free the labour market the market must be freed with regard to the supply of sound and honest exchange media and value standards. Nothing less will suffice to overcome all involuntary mass unemployment (apart from e.g., natural catastrophes) when the obvious steps are taken, like free pricing, free enterprise, free trade, free wage determination, freed interest rates, free entry into all jobs, no closed union shops, no punitive and transfer taxes - or, best of all, no taxes at all. Monetary freedom is the most neglected factor of all. Even after Hayek has pointed it out in The Denationalisation of Money, in 1976, many still overlook that factor and can only imagine an exclusive and forced gold coin currency or gold redemption certificate currency as the supposedly only sound demand for labour. They do not comprehend or simply deny the deflationary conditions such a well-meant but quite insufficient "reform" could cause. Nor can most of them imagine that free clearing does not require gold coins as an exclusive exchange medium or any kind of gold cover or reserve at all, that it is quite sufficient, if gold weight units are wanted as value standards, to merely adopt them as such for all their clearing and accounting purposes. For this purpose the participants do not even have to possess even a single gold coin. Nevertheless, with this value standard, they could exchange goods, services and labour to the value of millions to billions of gold coins. They do not have to possess and uses them as exclusive means of exchange, but may use them only as optional ones, when they do possess them and wish to use them as such. But a very wide-spread collective blindness and deafness seems to persist towards this solution. - Free coinage, free note issue, free choice of value standards, free clearing - for all demand for labour, goods and services. Without it you will all too often get 20 or even 200 job applicants for a single open job, payable in monopoly money. - No extra capital is required, just short term turn-over credits with means of exchange suitable for wage and salary payments and with sound goods-supply and service foundation. (The presently existing capital will already suffice for the time being. Its capacity would simply be used to a much higher potential. If necessary, 24 hours a day at full capacity. Once it is so used, new and additional capital can fast be built up.) Allow all the potential issuers to supply this monetary demand - in their own interest, that of the unemployed, under-employed, their families - and of everybody else. For prolonged mass unemployment not only impoverishes a whole country but it has extreme political, revolutionary and military consequences. So have the inflations of monetary despotism. Remember, Hitler made his first putsch in 1923, during the galloping German Inflation and his second one, ten years later, during one of the worst deflations. Monetary despotism could not prevent both crisis and their consequences. On the contrary, it caused both of them. This alone should have sufficed to call it into question, examine it thoroughly and to abolish it. While the Nazis prosecuted dissenters and Jews and others, which they had selected as scapegoats, gypsies, half-breeds etc., other countries closed their borders against political refugees from Germany, because they feared their competition on the labour market. We are almost at the same situation now. Those who have managed to escape despotic or totalitarian regimes, often risking their lives in the process, are hunted by police and military forces, using high tech, then imprisoned and, often to mostly, deported back into the merciless hands of their victimizers and exploiters. The supposedly free countries do no longer welcome refugees with open arms - because they have failed to liberate the monetary demand for labour. If they had, they would even organise the smuggling-in of more refugees (via official people smugglers, official on our side). - Then they or libertarians could help to organise the financing of genuinely liberating military insurrections and revolutions against the remaining despotic regimes. - Since international clashes with despotic regimes can by now lead to holocausts, carried out with small and cheap but high tech mass extermination packages, carried around the world on IBM's, automatically, in minutes and accurately targeted against centers of population as if these were enemies, our very survival is involved. If a billion unemployed and underemployed are not enough to get us to rethink and reform our laws, ideas, opinions, errors and prejudices, institutions, methods, programs and actions in this respect, then our survival instincts should. Alas, it takes understanding and vision to see this threat and its solution. And that is missing here as in all too many other spheres -. See my "An ABC Against Nuclear War", in PP 16-17 (now available at www.butterbach.net/epinfo/abc.htm - J.Z., 8.9.02, 13.7.11.) and my series "On Panarchy", also offered digitized by me but not yet online. - J. Z., 25.4.97, 13.7.11. - MONETARY DESPOTISM AND THE DEMAND FOR LABOUR, IMMIGRATION RESTRICTIONS, HITLER'S RISE, ANTISEMITISM, SCAPEGOATISM, UNEMPLOYMENT, CRISES, FINANCING LIBERATING REVOLUTIONS.

LABOUR MOVEMENT: Few members of the labour-, left-, communist-, socialist, and modern liberal movement have pondered the consequences for labour and the economy in general of letting the supply of the cash demand for labour become monopolised by a central bank. - If the monetary despotism had, instead, insisted that only a church hierarchy would be authorised to issue money tokens and decide upon a standard of value for all contracts, then they would, probably, have rebelled by now. But their statism and continued and misplaced confidence in politicians, bureaucrats and their laws, their parties and reform movements, their central planning and legally, administratively and juridically imposed measures, in short, their statist religion, their popular errors, myths and prejudices, combined with their lack of interest in genuine economics, has prevented them from rebelling against monetary despotism, no matter how much, how many of them and for how long they suffered and still suffer under it. - About one billion unemployed and under-employed exist now in the world. - And some still believe that private charities and enforced transfers of earnings and property can help these victims and their dependants sufficiently. - J. Z., 26.4.97, 13.7.11. - CENTRAL BANKING, FED, MONETARY DESPOTISM

LABOUR NOTES AND LABOUR EXCHANGES: 1.) Such experiments should attempt to leave the goods and services where they are and sell them from there, through their owners. They should not try to replace all of the market through one labour exchange. That will never be successful. - 2.) The easiest approach would be to allow all the owners of goods and services, prepared to offer them in this way, to issue notes, tickets, tokens, IOUs, clearing-certificates etc. upon them. That would correspond to their self-interest and they would be able to manage that, alone or in association with other shops in their shopping centre. - 3.) A more convenient and much easier determined value standard should be chosen than the vague standard of the supposed average number of hours or minutes spent upon the production of each article. - 4.) Neither profits nor interest charges should be frowned upon. - 5.) The goods so offered and the goods warrants should be sufficiently publicised. Signs should be well displayed in every shop about its readiness to accept such alternative means of exchange and clearing. - 6.) One should stress that these tokens are optional, refusable, discountable, in general trading and that only the issuers have to accept them at any time at par. - 7.) A free market for these tokens and for their value standards should be established. - 8.) Employees should be persuaded to accept payment of at least part of their earnings in these private and cooperative local currencies, as long as they are quoted and circulate at par with their nominal value - as a precondition for the security of their jobs, which would thereby become independent of the provision of a monopolised government paper money, which is also often rapidly depreciating or in too short supply. - 9.) Debtors of the issuers should be contractually obliged to accept them at par at least to the extent of their due or soon due debts to the issuing centre. - J. Z., 2.5.96, 20.3.97, 13.7.11.

LAISSEZ FAIRE WITH & WITHOUT MONETARY FREEDOM: Laissez Faire, based on sufficient knowledge on how to make the best use of monetary freedom, has never existed. There never was a genuinely free market for all private exchange media and value standards. Thus free market exchanges were never as free as they could and should have been. - J.Z., n.d.

LAND BANKS OR REAL ESTATE AS COVER FOR MONEY & INFLATION: As long as money is fully covered by real estate or other properties there can be no inflation." - This is one of the oldest fallacies in the history of doctrines on paper money. Many experiments of this kind were made and to my knowledge they all failed. Sometimes, under the pretence of a cover by land, as with the German Rentenmark of 1923, quite different foundations are, actually established. The Rentenmark had tax foundation and it accounted in gold weight values. That permitted it to remain at par, while it had only a limited circulation. I had also no legal tender, at least not initially, and so an excess issue could not be forced into circulation through legal tender while this was the case. Alas, it was still an exclusive currency and this would have permitted over-issues beyond the tax foundation, even in the absence of legal tender. - A cover in land is not enough because people buy land only now and then, or via fractions of their incomes, in instalment rates, gradually repaying credits for the purchase of land. But they do buy needed or wanted consumer goods and services daily, all the time, with most of their incomes. This is what their currencies should allow them to do and what they should be based upon. Any further cover would be irrelevant or unnecessary. When I hold a note "based" on or "covered" by your house, I cannot redeem it in a brick of your house and, mostly, I would not want a brick of it, either, for it. Why should anyone be willing to offer anything else for it or why should he be forced to do so? All issuers of "land-based" notes soon found that their notes depreciated because they had not sufficient current reflux for them and the holders could not buy with them what they wanted most and almost all the time. That motivated the governmental issuers then to introduce legal tender and an issue monopoly, i.e. a privilege at the expense of all others. Their victims should not have granted them the sanction of the victims. - However, e.g. the interest coupons on mortgage bonds could, to a limited extent be used as currency, when they would and could soon be transferred into the hands of those who have pay that interest. Also the produce of agriculture (not the agricultural capital itself!), in the right mixture, assembled e.g. in green grocers and other shops, also as processed food, can well provide a sound basis for competitively issued local currencies. But land, agricultural buildings and machines, as well as future harvests can't be, because they do not constitute immediately available produce or food conserves, which the note holders need or want for their notes. - J.Z., 24.3.97, 30.8.02. - Compare the Assignats of the French Revolution. They were to anticipate the proceeds from the sale of lands of the former monarchy, aristocrats and clergy, that were confiscated and placed on the market, a market already depleted of metallic currency before the revolution and more so through the revolution, which almost always leads to extensive hoarding of cash and to refuge money crossing borders. Turning the Assignats very soon into legally "valid" payment claims upon all goods, services and labour as well as all so "liberated" real estate capital, did not increase the supply of goods, labour and services or provided enough sound and trusted exchange media, to mediate all wanted and possible exchanges, but merely led to the over-issue and rapid depreciation of the Assignats - helped by their forgery through groups of emigrants. Refusals to accept them at par, combined with a few curses against those who tried to force them upon others, were leading to most of the denunciations of "enemies" of the republic and to most of the resulting public executions or murders via a guillotine, as one researcher discovered and recorded. - A hint by Ulrich von Beckerath, whose reference was, probably burnt with his library in Nov., 1943. - J.Z., n.d. & 13.7.11.

LAND BANKS: See: APHORISMS ON THE MONEY PROBLEM.

LAND, SPECULATION IN LAND & INFLATION: Land speculation is inflationary and should be countered by the community's collection of site rent, i.e. of the unearned value of unimproved land. - Some, especially most Georgists, consider this to a and even the most important factor of inflation. - To the extent that increased land prices reflect merely an increased land shortage or, rather, an increased demand for land, due to increased populations, they have nothing to do with monetary inflations. To the extent that increased land prices indicate inflation, they do indicate that inflation has already taken place and driven up land prices accordingly. Moreover, while investments in land, like in rare metals, jewellery and works of art, remain among the few options to safeguard savings from inflation, inflations will drive up their prices more than the prices of other goods and services. People use land ownership as an inflation hedge. Can they be blamed for this? It is absurd to consider this defensive act as inflationary by itself, unless one makes the wrong assumption that any price increase is by itself not only indicating inflation but causally contributing to inflation. The high prices of land during an inflation are effects not causes of inflation. Far less are they the only or the main cause of the inflationary rise of all prices and wages, sooner or later, even when they do, perhaps, indicate inflation earlier than most other price and wage rises do. - That the land monopoly, however dispersed among many monopolists, or, rather, oligopolists, permits the land holders to collect unearned value increases due to their location and due to community expenditures on services - and due to private investments nearby, this has also nothing to do with inflation. Employees do also receive unearned incomes, due to increase in capital investments, technical and scientific progress. They could earn relatively little if they were not aided in their muscle and mind use by tools and machines, as well as by intelligent management. Most of their output is due to these aids. Nevertheless, the employees do usually get 85 -95 % of the total of the firm's profit, if one includes fringe benefits and social service charges on their behalf, after taxes. The tax authorities have become the major exploiters. Should this "profiteering" or "unearned income" also be taxed away? All benefit to some extent from the economic activities of others, e.g. from the division of labour, from scientific management, from technological and scientific progress. Should that individually "unearned benefit" also be taxed away, as belonging to the community, not to the individual producer, as allocated by free market forces? - One better alternative to "single taxes" in a single territorial community, with compulsory membership, would be "proprietary communities", where the proprietor, a private or cooperative company, collects all the value increases due to the own improvements, in form of rent charges. - Another option would be "open cooperatives" as proposed especially by Theodor Hertzka. Many other "solutions" of the "land problem" have been proposed, e.g. the "Community Land Trust". No particular and presumed solution to the "land problem" should be imposed upon any dissenters. All land reform proposals could and should be practised only tolerantly, among their true believers and at their expense and risk. - The single tax is neither the only nor a real solution to the land problem and it is not anti-inflationary but a measure quite irrelevant to monetary inflation. - The only direct connection between land and inflation are the inflationary issues of land banks, which reveal that the supposedly best cover, namely by land, is just not good enough for the issue of stable currencies. (However good this cover is for soundly issued and maintained mortgage letters, in convenient denominations, perhaps reckoning on gold weight values.) The value of agricultural land is, roughly, the equivalent of its earnings power over the next 15 years. That earnings power consists in the value of its produce during the next 15 years. Obviously, if one issued, in form of banknotes the present market price of the land, equivalent to the produce of the next 15 years, then these notes could only buy the current harvests on the current market, not the future harvests expected or hoped for. Thus this kind of money would, inevitably, depreciate. Few are eager to buy land with such notes, too, because they, too, would have difficulties in selling more agricultural products on a market that is frequently flooded by them. Some crops return less than they cost. The whole agricultural sector, in spite of special concessions and subsidies and partly because of them, and because of monetary despotism, is in a crisis. - All over, it is a victim rather than a victimiser and exploiter - at least under present conditions. One might as well accuse newly born babies of causing inflation by the additional demand for consumer goods which they cause. Likewise, if your appetite is strong, then you might be accused of arbitrarily and unilaterally increasing food prices in an inflationary way! - Check what monetary inflation really means and at least try to distinguish it from price rises on the goods side or dearness. - J. Z., n.d. & 2.4.97, 13.7.11. - DIS., PRICES OF LAND, INFLATION, TAXATION, EXPLOITATION, SPECULATION, GEORGEISM, SINGLE TAX

LANDSMAN COMMUNITY: See LETS.

LARA, L. CARLOS & MURPHY, ROBERT P.: A free online book, "How Privatized Banking Really Works" by L. Carlos Lara & Robert P. Murphy is at http://consultingbyrpm.com/uploads/HPBRW.pdf - Hint by George Thomas Kysor, email of 22.7.11. - 4.46 MBs in PDF. - Alas, as with most such books, their monetary freedom views are rather limited, according to us quick glance through it. - If you find anything more than the usual "gold bug" views in it, please, let me know. - The only positive thing that I see about it is that it is another modern book that is at least trying to deal with such problems. - J.Z., 4.8.11.

LAWFUL MONEY: Dr. E. C. Simmons discussed "lawful money" in the JOURNAL OF POLITICAL ECONOMY, 1938, pp.108-18. - I have not yet got a copy of this article but merely a follow-up by IRA B. CROSS. - The term "lawful money" as a substitute for "legal tender" money is even more misleading. Cheques, for instance, are not lawless money and there exists even an all too extensive interventionist legislation about them, which prevents e.g., cheques-for-clearing-only to be issued and freely accepted, issued in money denominations, upon a value standard that issuers and acceptors find quite acceptable for their transactions. The money of monetary despotism is so full of wrongful and misconceived laws that its "lawfulness" contributed to the rise of quite lawless or totalitarian regimes. The "lawful" money of governments caused and causes inflations, deflations and stagflations, with their humanly worst aspects of mass unemployment and wide-spread poverty. - It is almost criminal to cover up or try to defend such an evil with the term "lawful money". - J.Z., 26.4.97, 13.7.11. - See: LEGAL TENDER.

LAWS & REGULATIONS RESTRICTING MONETARY FREEDOM: Here many volumes could or should be added. But why bother? They do, largely, only demonstrate what should not be done. - J.Z., 13.7.11.

LEGAL PLUNDER: Bastiat's classical commentary on government, THE LAW, was published in 1850, a few months before his death. In that short book he explained his concept that plunder is plunder, whether done illegally by a robber who hopes to profit directly, or legally by a group of legislators who profit indirectly by thus maintaining their government jobs. - Dean Russell, Government and Legal Plunder. Bastiat Brought Up to Date, FEE, May 85, ISBN-0-9106614-70-9, 116pp, p.13. - POLITICIANS, REPRESENTATIVES, LAWS, LEGISLATION

LEGAL PLUNDER: What did Bastiat mean when he used the phrase "legal plunder"? Does democracy (mass voting) justify an act by government that is immoral and illegitimate on other grounds? By what logic can a group of persons legally do something that no individual within the group claims a right to do? And so on. - Dean Russell, Government and Legal Plunder. Bastiat Brought Up to Date, FEE, May 85, ISBN-0-9106614-70-9, 116pp, p.11. - TAXATION, VOTING, DEMOCRACY, LEGISLATION, IMMORALITY, RIGHTS, GOVERNMENT, JUSTICE, PLUNDER BUND

LEGAL RESTRICTIONS ON MONETARY FREEDOM: At least some of the worst restrictions, paragraphs and clauses should be compiled. I leave that job to the few legal minds who might be interested in this subject. - J.Z., 13.7.11.

LEGAL TENDER & GOVERNMENT PROMISES: Government promises are like its legal tender: All promise and no fulfilment or only under-fulfilment. - J.Z., 6.7.91, 13.7.11.

LEGAL TENDER & GRESHAM'S LAW: Without legal tender and under the competition of monetary freedom, each exchange medium, being subject to voluntary acceptance, free market rating and the right to refuse it altogether, the good types of exchange media and value standards would soon drive out the bad and inferior ones. The economists of the Swiss, German and Jewish monetary freedom school of the 1930's recognized this truth, long before most of those of the Austrian School of Economics - and other modern economists, did. - However, I would gladly hear about others with the same and even earlier and deeper insights, if there are any of them. - All the views on Gresham's Law, Legal Tender and the other aspects of full monetary freedom, with all their pros and cons, may still have to become properly assembled and evaluated. - A beginning of such an effort can be found e.g. in www.monetary-freedom.net/ - J.Z., 77 & 97, 18.7.11.

LEGAL TENDER & MARKET RATED CURRENCIES: Refusable and discountable currencies can't rule us or exploit us, like the government's or the central bank's legal-tender- and monopolized paper-money can. - J. Z., 11.8.94, 17.4.97, 18.7.ll.

LEGAL TENDER, VARIETIES OF - : In PEACE PLANS No. 19 A I listed what seemed to me to be 19 varieties of legal tender practised in the past or present. There may be more, there may be less. I would like to see this listing corrected or supplemented by YOU! - J.Z., 11.4.97.

LEGAL TENDER: A means of payment without legal tender, one that merely promotes clearing and that reckons in stable value standards, cannot inflate the general price and wage level. This, in itself, is a very simple thought or observation, also one that has always been confirmed by the history of money. Nevertheless, only a few have as yet fully grasped that truth. - Among the critics of modern money most are still mainly concerned with rare metal convertibility and ignore free market rating vs. legal tender and a territorial monopoly for currencies. For them any optional and market rated competing currency, no matter how sound its value standard and its issue and reflux arrangements are, is merely an "inconvertible" or "fiat" paper money, just as bad as any governmental legal tender and monopolized paper money, even if it adopted e.g. a gram of gold as its accounting and clearing value standard and referred all those, who desire convertibility from the small gold or silver stocks of the issuers to the total gold and silver stocks of the world's rare metal markets. Indeed, that greatest redemption fund of all is NOT under the obligation to redeem any notes issued at any time at par, upon demand. But it is prepared to redeem all notes that are so soundly issued that they stand at par with their nominal gold weight value. And its ratings of all other competing currencies, not circulating at par with their nominal value in the general money markets, do recommends to all potential acceptors, unless they are debtors of the issuer, do refuse to accept competing monies that do not use a sound value standard and those which do not stand at par with their nominal sound value standard, at least at and near their centre of issue, as a local currency. - J.Z., 12.10.80 & 9.5.97, 18.7.11. - MEANS OF PAYMENT & INFLATION

LEGAL TENDER: Bad money should be refused - not forced into circulation at par with its legal paper value standard. - J.Z., 19.6.85, 9.5.97. - Legal tender means compulsory acceptance and compulsory value, usually for an exchange medium that is also issued by a monopoly issuer like a central banking system. - J.Z., n.d.

LEGAL TENDER: der fuer das “gesetzliche Zahlungsmittel”charakteristische “Zwangskurs” “nicht etwa den Zweck, ein normal funktionierendes einheitliches Geldwesen zu schaffen oder dessen Entstehung und Ausgestaltung zu foerdern, sondern (unter Preisgebung der Zwecke, denen ein normales Geldwesen dient, zumeist sogar unter Preisgabe der Stabilitaet der Rechtsverhaeltnisse) gewisse pathologisch gewordene Geldsorten zu einem ihren Wert uebersteigenden fiktivenWerte dem Verkehr aufzunoetigen.”- C. Menger, Grundsaetze der Volkswirtschaftlehre, 2. Aufl., Wien, 1923, S. 323.

LEGAL TENDER: E. C. Riegel's VALUN MUTUAL MONEY PLAN « Beyond Money - Legal tender laws obliterate any objective definition of the value measurement unit .... because the criticism of the former is due entirely to financism. ... beyondmoney.net/resource.../e-c-riegels-valun-mutual-money-plan/ - Cached - 1 of about 65,400 results, 4.10.10.

LEGAL TENDER: Fed up: the problems of the Federal Reserve. - Free Online Library - Clinton himself is gingerly with his criticism, for fear of scaring the bond markets. But coming up with a technical definition of neutrality is a lot easier than free of legal tender laws that enforce a single standard. www.thefreelibrary.com/Fed+up%3A+the+problems+of+the+Federal+Reserve-a016075304 - Cached - 1 of about 65,400 results, 4.10.10.

LEGAL TENDER: Governments could not, of course, pursue the practices by which they forced bad money upon the people without the cruellest measures. As one legal treatise on the law of money sums up the history of punishment for merely refusing to accept the legal money: "From Marco Polo we learn that, in the 13th century, Chinese law made the rejection of imperial paper money punishable by death, and twenty years in chains or, in some cases death, was the penalty provided for the refusal to accept French ASSIGNATS. Early English law punished repudiation as LESE-MAJESTY. At the time of the American revolution, non-acceptance of Continental notes was treated as an enemy act and sometimes worked a forfeiture of the debt." - Hayek, Denationalisation of Money, p.28. - DEATH PENALTY FOR THE REFUSAL OF LEGAL TENDER PAPER MONEY.

LEGAL TENDER: HÜLSMAN, GUIDO The Ethics of Money Production - Legal monopolies, legal-tender laws, and the legalized suspension of payments. While virtually no section of society has escaped their scathing criticism, ... To cooperate voluntarily in our definition means to provide mutual ... www.scribd.com › Books › Non-fiction - Cached - Similar – Clicking on Cached I got at least most of the text, in an unattractive format, crammed together, without gaps, but still readable, ca. 700 KBs. – He is still bitten by the gold bug and in denial regarding deflation. (He even wrote a separate book on this, mentioned in one of the Google adv.!) However, he defends monetary freedom in general terms and his bibliography is extensive and, possibly, the best feature, with many titles not yet in my Free Banking bibliography, online at www.panarchy.org . - It even mentions my 1976 brochure against Legal Tender, in PEACE PLANS 19a. Richard C. B. Johnsson was kind enough to convert my digital WORD or RTF version of this brochure to Adobe Acrobat & sent me a copy with yesterday’s email. Alas, G. H. he did not try to formulate, like Ulrich von Beckerath did, all the individual monetary rights and liberties. – The Mises Institute offers a review of Hülsman’s book. - I found the text of both by looking through the first 20 pages of my search for Legal Tender with Google, 65,400 results by clicking on the Cached link. - J.Z., 5.10.10.

LEGAL TENDER: I deny the power of the general government to make paper money, or anything else a legal tender. - Thomas Jefferson. - He should have replaced "power" by "right", for, as monetary history has shown all too often, governments have, indeed, usurped the power to make their paper money legal tender, often with sudden and catastrophic results, including galloping inflations and mass unemployment and their consequences: tyrannies, violent revolutions, terrorism, wars and civil wars, genocides. Even if they inflated only slowly, they largely expropriate all creditors in the long run, including all wage and salary recipients and pensioners, apart from all the other damages their inflations caused. Without legal tender and the note issue monopoly no government could inflate all prices and wages, not even with the worst intentions. People would remain free to accept its currency only at its market value or to refuse it and to trade with each other using sound alternative currencies, value standards and clearing avenues. Legal tender, i.e., compulsory acceptance and compulsory value and, usually, also an exclusive currency, amount to monetary despotism and this leads to other forms of despotism. It expropriates and impoverishes. Only a few benefit from it - at the expense of all others. - This power is based on monetary ignorance, prejudices and lack of interest in monetary matters. The "experts" of legal tender, paper value standards and central banking are the priests of the popular religion on money, as Ulrich von Beckerath used to say. J.Z., n.d. & 24.8.02, 18.7.11. - PAPER MONEY, MONETARY DESPOTISM, CENTRAL BANKING, GOVERNMENT, RIGHTS VS. POWER

LEGAL TENDER: If you continue to insist upon being paid in Legal Tender cash then you do thereby either help to make yourself unemployed or bankrupt or lose much of the money values that are owed to you. - J.Z., 18.1.95, 17.4.97.

LEGAL TENDER: It leaves the monopoly issuer in charge of every monetary transaction in a country, not the actual and potential acceptors of all possible and desired payments. It allows all debtors, first of all the government, to cheat all their creditors. The Austrians had a joke on this: "A government never goes bankrupt. Only its creditors do!" - Legal tender power gives the monopoly issuer a second unfair advantage for his issues and disadvantages all creditors correspondingly. With market rated, optional and competing currencies the situation is quite different. The potential acceptors remain in charge regarding the kind of means of payment and value standards they are accepting and at what value they accept them, when, if and to the extent that they do. They are no longer confined to a monopoly money only, if they want to engage in monetary exchanges. No money that was not issued by themselves, has forced acceptance and forced value for them. The consumer or user or hirer of a kind of money remains sovereign or independent. Monetary freedom turns "single convenience relationships" into "mutual convenience relationships", to use Don Werkheiser's terms. "This money may be freely refused and rated by all but the issuer and those of his debtors who are contractually obliged to accept it" - could be one of the inscriptions on competing private and cooperative currencies. - J. Z., 12.8.94, 18.7.11, 18.7.11.

LEGAL TENDER: It means that - in spite of many demerits of any legal tender currency - you may still legally force it upon (in this respect) helpless creditors, in nominal debt payments; also in paying for goods and services you leave them no other option than to increase their nominal prices more or less in correspondence to the depreciation of the legal tender money. This reaction to the prior depreciation (over-issue, possible only through Legal Tender, which outlaws refusal and market rating) is then called Legal Tender - and all to often one or the other group of its victims are blamed for it, whilst those, who pass the laws of monetary despotism, and who put them into operation, are held blameless and are even considered as leaders and heroes by an ignorant and prejudiced population that knows nothing better than monetary despotism and wants it rather more severely enforced than abolished. - J.Z., 24.1.95, 16.4.97, 18.7.11.

LEGAL TENDER: Legal tender acts of a government do not indicate a government's credit but, rather, a lack of it. Only sound, e.g. gold or silver weight accounted and market-rated tax-foundation money could (apart from the immorality of compulsory taxes) mobilize the existing (and enforced) tax credits of a government and could, to that extent, be a credit money. But even then only the government itself should have to accept it as legal tender, at its face rare metal value, no matter how much of a discount it may have suffered in general circulation. One must accept one's own IOU at par. Everything else would be dishonest or fraudulent. - J.Z., 5.9.92, 16.3.97.

LEGAL TENDER: Legal tender allows bad money to drive good money out of circulation. Without it the creditors are free to refuse or discount bad or inferior money. As a consequence, the worse monies are driven out of circulation by the good monies. - This observation, known for centuries, should on its own have been sufficient to throw out legal tender legislation everywhere. Nevertheless, few are aware of its existence and consequences, even among the professional economists. One can browse through hundreds, even thousands of economic textbooks before one comes across a single one with some awareness of the close relationship between legal tender and inflation and of the exclusive currency aspect of legal tender and deflation. - Monographs on legal tender are also rather rare still, although it has done and still does immense wrongs and damages. It is almost as if medical experts were not bothering to study an almost universal disease, like cancer or tuberculosis, in attempts to find cures for them. - J.Z., 10.11.92. 26.4.97, 18.7.11.

LEGAL TENDER: Legal tender amounts to taxation without consent and representation. - J. Z., 10.8.96, 16.4.97. It amounts to a great infringement of consumer sovereignty, of freedom of contract and of genuine individual monetary rights and liberties. - J.Z., 18.7.11.

LEGAL TENDER: Legal tender and the legalized money-issue monopoly do give governments the opportunity to expropriate their subjects through inflation. They requisition earnings and property of their subject citizens or serfs - to the extent that governments do inflate their exclusive and forced currencies - but not only to their own benefit but the short-term benefit of all debtors. To that extent, like protective duties, not just a one-sidedly levied tribute is involved but also a coercive redistribution of property among their subjects, here especially the property rights of all creditors. (As wage and salary recipients the workers and other employees are among these wronged and harmed creditors. All too often do their pay cheques or cash payments limp behind the inflation rate, even though their nominal amounts seem to be the same, even when they are somewhat increased (via trade union "action"), but only nominally, not be their purchasing power. - J.Z., 12.9.02. - I have only ever heard of one case in which a union demanded salary payments determined by a sound value standard. It was a public service union in the U.S. I have not heard about the outcome of this demand. As a rule the union bosses rather welcome inflation, since it gives them a seeming justification for more and more of their anti-industrial union "actions" and power games. In spite of the huge wrongs and damages thus caused, again and again, monetary despotism has remained part of the popular religion on money and even part of the academic teachings on money - with all too few exceptions. This response should not surprise anyone, who sees the numerous wrongs and evils still occurring in this world and yet at the same time the persistence in the belief in an "almighty and benevolent God." or in a supposedly almighty territorial government, the "Big Brother" or "Welfare State". Facts have little influence upon such unfounded faiths, at least not with most people, so far and in the absence of competition from quite free and much better self-managed free , i.e. exterritorially autonomous societies, all self-chosen by all their members, societies which are not impossible but, so far, merely outlawed and not even seriously considered as yet by those, who still think of themselves as genuine "social scientists". - J. Z., 5.9.92, 1.5.97, 18.7.11. - MONEY MONOPOLY & THE EXPROPRIATION OF CITIZENS BY THEIR GOVERNMENTS - THROUGH INFLATION, PANARCHISM, SOCIAL SCIENTISTS, EDUCATION, ENLIGHTENMENT

LEGAL TENDER: Legal tender is a cover name for a great wrong, even a great crime. It would be more accurately and honestly described as a "legal imposition" or "legal requisitioning" or "legal depreciation of a debt" or as a "part expropriation" or "part annulment of a debt", or as a "part repudiation of a debt", corresponding to the degree to which a currency has been depreciated as a result of the legal tender privilege, combined with the money issue privilege, which increases the legal tender power because we are so dependent upon whatever money is available to us. - J.Z., 2. 4. 97.

LEGAL TENDER: Legal tender is not constitutional, lawful, juridical, moral or fair but outright despotic and criminal. - J. Z., 6.7.91.

LEGAL TENDER: Legal tender is the legal prescription for every recipient of monetary payments to accept inferior paper money or coins at its legally fixed value, regardless of its market value. This forced exchange rate for general means of circulation, prescribed for every citizen, must not be mixed up, as happened in Berlin in the discussion of West & East Marks, with a fixed or controlled exchange rate for foreign exchange. The word "Zwangskurs" (legal tender) is far older than 100 years and was always used in the way here described, in royal Prussian edicts, in imperial Austrian regulations and even by Marx. Another use of it proves only ignorance of the terminology of economics. - Ulrich von Beckerath, 25.1.52.

LEGAL TENDER: Legal tender laws form a strong case against monetary authorities (central banks), parliaments, supreme courts and the territorial political voting, representation and mis-education system. Parliaments were originally intended to prevent, not to legalise financial and monetary despotism and other forms of despotism. At least they were expected to thoroughly discuss it and its alternatives and to throw out any despotic measure, once it had done its job, namely immense wrong and harm to millions of people. Instead, these supposedly representative institutions and methods consider such wrongs and evils as self-evidently justified and necessary and do not even question them at all. If, on the other hand, they knew the consequences of their despotic acts, then they would have to classed among the greatest criminals of all. - J.Z., 5.9.92, 24.4.97, 18.7.11.

LEGAL TENDER: Legal tender only towards the issuer! - J.Z., 26.12.88. - But in his own interest and that of his debtors, he might contractually oblige his debtors to accept his notes, too, at par, at any time, from anyone, if someone buys anything from them, at least as long as these debtors do owe something to the issuer. - J. Z., 15.5.97.

LEGAL TENDER: Legal tender? Yes - but only towards the issuer! - J.Z., MFNL 3/4.

LEGAL TENDER: No government proposal more complicated than "This note is legal tender for all debts, public and private" ever works. Than that doesn't work. - Page 280 of: P. J. O'Rourke, Age and Guile Beat Youth, Innocence, and a Bad Haircut. Twenty-five Years of P. J. O'Rourke, Picador, 1996, 341pp, ISBN 0 330 34740 3. - GOVERNMENT BILLS, LAWS, PROPOSALS, PROGRAMS

LEGAL TENDER: One can inflate a currency even if it is not legal tender. - Popular opinion. - Just name a single example of an inflationary effect upon the general price level of a currency that was not legal tender! - See: GOLD, GOLD STANDARD, GOLD PRICES & GOLD INFLATION.  - Over-issues are indeed possible, as a result of ignorance among voluntary acceptors and mistakes of issuers. But they cannot, under monetary freedom, increase the general price level, expressed in other currencies or in other and stable value units, any more than your own over-drawn cheques could. - J.Z., n.d., & 2.4.97. - DIS., OBJECTIONS

LEGAL TENDER: The dollar was made legal tender in Cuba in 1993 (Cuba operated under a dual-currency ... www.wordiq.com/definition/Cuba  - Cached - To me that is very interesting. So Cuba has two legal tender currencies, side by side. At what exchange rate? – J.Z., 4.10.10. - GOOGLE SEARCH RESULT, DEFINITIONS & CRITICISM

LEGAL TENDER: Some see in legal tender only the honest, juridical and legal possibility of fulfilling debt contracts with the legal tender currency, not the dishonest and coercive and expropriating authority granted to all debtors at the expense of all creditors. It permits them to pay, nominally, in full, while in reality only with a fraction of what they morally still owe. Moreover, legal tender, together with the issue monopoly, prevent sound alternative currencies from coming into existence and justly mediating all the possible and wanted exchanges, which monetary despotism does not and could not mediate justly,. A creditor who would refuse all forms of sound debt settlement offered to him by his debtors would be a rare creditor, indeed. These hypothetical creditors should include a clause in their contracts specifying the payment means or method. The creditors and debtors, to safeguard their interests and rights in such dealings in futures, should insist upon a withdrawal premium in case the debtors cannot provide, at a future date, the particular exchange medium which the creditor insisted upon in the contract. When nothing is agreed upon then the presumption is in favour of a local currency that stands at par with its nominal value. - J.Z., n.d., & 9.5.97, 18.7.11. - Legal tender currencies make not only inflations possible but also deflations, when they are interpreted as or legalized as the only permitted exchange media. - J. Z., 13.9.02, 18.7.11.

LEGAL TENDER: The Continental Congress passed a resolution for legal tender paper money: "Therefore, any person who shall lose all virtue and regard for his country, as to refuse said bills in payment, shall be deemed as an enemy of his country and precluded from all trade or intercourse with the inhabitants of these colonies." - When "honest" Washington dissolved his close to mutinous army, because it had never been paid in time, and fully and honestly and demanded its back-pay, after the War of Independence, he made sure that he ordered its units first into distant regions. There their rightful claims were "paid off", again with fraudulent paper money, with legal tender force, not at the rare metal value of their wage claims. Being thus dispersed and war-weary, too, they did not act, in combination, against the centre of power, demanding payment in full, with paper money accepted - but only at its market value. That was a bad start for the new republic. Washington, although then and thus scheming to cheat his soldiers, and succeeding with his crooked behaviour, had demanded that his own lease-holding peasants pay him in rare metal coins, not in paper money. He knew and appreciated the difference. And Congress did not levy taxes or issue government securities with value preserving clauses, but relied simply on the still more crooked and deceptive taxation via forced State paper money to "finance" this war, never minding the cost of this procedure to the whole economy and that thereby its soldiers were severely short-supplied (Instance: The Valley Forge winter camp) and, probably, the war was this quite unnecessarily prolonged. The English forces did not, as a rule, plunder or "pay" with requisitioning certificates or mere paper promises with a forced "value", but with rare metal coins. That kind of payment difference increased the number of "loyalists" and improved the provisioning of the "loyal" forces and worsened the supply situation for the republicans. - For more such details see especially: G. Holzhauer, Barzahlung in Besetzten Gebieten. (Cash Payments in Occupied Territories.) - J.Z., n.d. & 18.7.11. - ACCORDING TO THE CONTINENTAL CONGRESS DURING THE­ REVOLUTIONARY WAR PERIOD

LEGAL TENDER: The legal tender acts are wrong and harsh, not "tender" at all towards all creditors. Through them the law does no longer even tries to protect but, rather, expropriates property at the rate at which a legal tender currency is inflated. It says, in effect, to all debtors, including all employers, who owe wages to their employees: We not only permit you but order you to loot your creditors, to the same extent as we have inflated the exclusive and forced currency. - In spite of this, most legal and economic commentators treat legal tender only as if it were a necessary convenience for debtors, or a guaranty for creditors, so that they could be certain that they could pay their debts or be paid with the legal tender medium, supposing it to be a stable and honestly administered currency and value standard. - As if creditors would refuse good or the best means of exchange if they had no legal tender power! - Moreover, most of the "expert" writers do not see or do not state the connection between legal tender and inflation: Without legal tender no inflation! Legal tender makes inflation possible! - Check 100 or even 1000 textbooks - and you will be lucky to find one among them that would point out this connection - quite clearly. Most writers, speakers and thinkers on the subject are conditioned to think only in terms of an exclusive and forced currency - and thus become unable to judge it and to see sound alternatives to it and the monetary natural laws that would apply to these alternatives - The opposite to legal tender is free market rating against value standards that are subject to free individual choice and optional and competing exchange media, i.e. media that can be discounted or altogether and refused and that are also competitively or cooperatively produced and offered, including all forms of free clearing, those via clearing certificates, book entries or only digital signals. Only, by natural rights and the nature of promises, an issuer himself cannot refuse to accept or discount his own exchange media whenever they are offered to him or her in payment. Towards their issuers they do have a natural and just legal tender, in the juridical sense, one that does not have to be imposed by legislation in order to function well enough. - If no particular means of payment has been declared in advance in a debt contract then the juridical assumption might be that any local currency that stands at par with its sound value standard could be used by the debtor to settle his debt with it. This was a proposal by Ulrich von Beckerath, 1882-1969, the one who has explored the monetary freedom options much better than anyone else I know about. - J. Z., 2.10.91, 27.4.97, 8.9.02, 18.7.11.

LEGAL TENDER: The U.S. Constitution stated: No STATE may make anything but gold or silver coins legal tender. - This leads, inevitably, to the question: Is or is the U.S.A. federation a State? - When the constitution was written is was, probably, not considered as a State by itself but merely as a federation of sovereign States and only the States it federated were considered as States. - However, it might be worthwhile to start a test case before the Supreme Court on this - but without great hopes that this Court will be just in its decision. It has not been, very often, in its history, particularly in monetary matters and it has not paid much attention to the literal interpretation of the words of this Constitution but, rather, imposed its own meanings and interpretations - to such an extent that even the clear wordings of the bill of rights have been negated by it. Nevertheless, those who have the time, energy and funds, might attempt this approach there. As an individual rights declaration the statement should be different, too: No one and no organization has the right to declare ANYTHING to be legal tender - except towards itself and towards all its voluntary followers, while they have not yet seceded from it. - J.Z., 16.8.94, 17.4.97.

LEGAL TENDER: The very nature of legal tender turns an exchange medium, which has been given legal tender power, from an EXCHANGE medium into a REQUISITIONING certificate. A free and just EXCHANGE can no longer be mediated by it. For in a free and just exchange no side has an unjust advantage through a legalized monopoly and wrongful coercion. Moreover, monies with legal tender power and a nominal value standard, does no longer have a VALUE STANDARD that deserves the term "value standard". Its value does then become non-standardised, fluctuating, manipulated by stop-and- go policies. Would we call the  kg a weight standard when by legal intervention today it might be only 500 grams tomorrow and next month 2 kg? Would a meter be a length measure when, by legal coercion, today it might be declared to be only 50 cm long and in a month 2 meters long? - It is hard to understand how millions of people could allow their governments to thus abolish, fool around or manipulate a value standard that all people in a country are, by legislation, made to depend upon. - J.Z., 27.4.97, 18.7.11, 4.8.11.

LEGAL TENDER: The very passing of legal tender laws is already an admission by governments that they are aware that citizens are not so foolish to indefinitely continue to accept the government's paper money at par with any stable value standard. Thus, from the point of view of governments, they must be forced to do so, the more so, the more rapidly and obviously the government, or its central bank, deteriorates its paper money. In the German Banking Enquete of 1908 it was freely admitted that the government did not expect to be able to finance the next war without legal tender for its paper money. So legal tender was introduced, effectively from 1.1. 1910. It helped to finance two wrongful and extensive wars for two German governments, the German Emperor's and Adolf Hitler's. It also "achieved" the greatest inflation Germany ever had and its greatest depression, each of which cost the German economy about as much as did WW I. Moreover, this monetary despotism and its consequences did lead to the rise of the Nazi regime and to WWII and their consequences. Legal tender leaves the recipients of it only one defensive step, namely to raise the price of his goods, services and labor. Under price and wage controls, combined with force labor and compulsory quota deliveries and rationing, even this defence option is largely abolished. Black market dealings can supply some substitutes but bring their own inherent problems. Illegal or black market monetary actions must also be engaged in, in something like a monetary revolution, using the monetary freedom options, to rapidly and fully overcome monetary despotism. But this requires sufficient interest in and enlightenment on this liberation and security option among the victims of monetary despotism. They are certainly not taught their monetary freedom rights and liberties, and their potentials, in government-run or regulated schools and universities. - J.Z., 1.8.91, 27.8.02, 18.7.11. - INFLATION, UNEMPLOYMENT, DEPRESSIONS, BLACK MARKETS, MONETARY REVOLUTION

LEGAL TENDER: There are so many different false, flawed and correct ideas on aspects of the problem that I do not want to enter into any discussion of them by correspondence. Perhaps they can be gradually and effectively sorted out via digital “argument mapping”, without getting too much lost in the jungle of opinions and writings on the subject. Today I merely loaded down the first 20 pages of 65,400 search results that Google offered and browsed through them, inserting some of these hints here. For the time being, you stick with your definition and I will stick with mine. We have, unfortunately, no effective say on the subject, i.e., cannot change this legislation and jurisdiction for a whole country and cannot even freely exempt ourselves from it, by opting out or seceding. – In the former case, we would try to impose our definition upon a country’s population, which is also wrongful. – We should become exterritorially autonomous only in our own affairs and those we have in common with like-minded people. - J.Z., 4.10.10.

LEGAL TENDER: Through legal tender and motivated by its ever-increasing spending habits and inclinations, territorial governments can force much more of their forced and exclusive paper currencies into circulation than is warranted even by the largest tax-foundations for them. The resistance against taxing the whole economy through inflation is also minimal, much less than against other direct or indirect taxes. Moreover, so far they were always able to wrongfully blame others for the results of their inflations, under the false pretence that they are not the culprits themselves. They even represent their despotic central note-issuing banks as "guardians" for their forced and exclusive currencies. Have there ever been more and worse "guardians" than these institutions? (Compulsory State education or State controlled education did not enlighten its victims in this respect, either. It teaches nothing about monetary freedom but distributes instead publicity releases for the central bank, full of its usual self-serving propaganda. It also wrongly assumes territorialism to be quite rightful, rational and peace-preserving.) Thus they tend to resort to the inflation tax, even more wrongful and destructive than other forms of taxation are and, so far, they got away with it. None of the culprits was so far imprisoned or hanged for his part in inflating, deflating or stag-flating - the national monopolised currency. Citizens are not given class action rights against this abuse, either, and, before government courts they would have little chance in this respect, also before any supreme court whose judges are former government men or government appointees and thus share the usual statist prejudices or readiness to cover up crimes by government officials, under the pretence that this would be "in the public interest" or the "national interest" and that they had thus been committed quite legally. In the U.S., one of the worst inflation taxes was imposed by the "Continentals" currency, given legal tender power and issued to "finance" the War of Independence, while the States and their confederation were unwilling or unable to levy any taxes to give this paper money at least some tax foundation. As a result this war of independence was unnecessarily prolonged and bloody. Thousands of books have been written on it but I know of not even one which considered all the monetary freedom options that could and should have been applied in this as in all other revolutionary or civil war attempts that at least aim at liberation, even when not always practising liberation in every respect. Ulrich von Beckerath produced a manuscript on the proper financing of rightful revolutions. An air raid on Berlin, in November, 1943, destroyed it, together with most of his library. However, some of the ideas of this manuscript were preserved in the book by his friend, Gustav Holzhauer, missing in action in Stalingrad, called: "Barzahlung in besetzten Gebieten." (Cash Payments in Occupied Territories). See PEACE PLANS 532.) - Others can be found in U. v. Beckerath's other writings, those relatively few ones that have been preserved or produced after WW II. Revolutions, too, become unnecessarily prolonged, bitter and bloody when not properly financed and without full monetary and financial freedom this cannot be done. A central banking system would not always be suitable or willing to finance a revolution against a despotic government. But it is often able and willing to finance and indirectly can even cause the establishment of a still more despotic or totalitarian government by a revolution or putsch or temporarily somewhat popular take-over bid against a less despotic or somewhat democratic government. Compare e.g. the rise of Lenin and of Hitler. - Sound tax foundation for tax foundation money (although on the immoral and unsound foundation of compulsory taxes), would limit the issue and circulation of State paper money, reckoning in a sound value standard (not subject to legal tender in general circulation but only towards the tax offices), to the amounts required to facilitate the payment of all taxes. It would distinguish the means of payment from a sound value standard and allow the means of payment to get a discount against its value standard - everywhere except at the tax offices. It would also require that the rate of taxes is expressed in sound value standard units, so that the tax payers, not the government, would benefit by the government issuing notes below par and having to accept them, the next moment, from any tax payer at par. - The money issue monopoly constitutes its own kind of legal tender power. People depending upon monetary exchanges do have to accept the monopoly money even when it is depreciated, for want of anything better being available to them. Thus, under these conditions and due to this fact, governments can issue their legal tender money, a forced and monopolised currency, beyond the amounts required for tax payments. - Once the issue monopoly and the legal tender power are either officially and legally or juridically abolished - or ignored in a monetary revolution, then the government's paper money will be correspondingly depreciated. The government will be less able to unable to collect any more taxes, payable in it and will be unable or less able to force it as the only monetary exchange and value standard option upon a whole country's or population's economy. More and more people would become involved in a tax strike against such a government and would refuse to accept any government paper money at all. Instead, for all their free exchanges they would prefer, instead, whatever sound alternative currencies the market would provide for their exchanges. Only to the extent that a territorial government could still enforce its taxes would they pay it "in its own coin", its depreciated paper money, and would insist that the government would have to accept it at its own and original nominal value, not at the depreciation rate that the government itself has caused. Naturally, the government will then blame the sound new issues for the depreciation of its own paper money. But it had already achieved the depreciation of its paper money by over-issues beyond its sound tax foundation volume before. Now that over-issue would simply become revealed, because the whole economy would no longer be forced to accept it at all and at par and would be liberated to substitute for it the own sound exchange media and value standards. Like other criminals, and their apologists, the government experts, the culprits, here, too, would like to blame "society", i.e., the victims of their crimes, for the crimes committed by the official territorial criminals with involuntary victims. These criminals are likely to assert then that the monies (exchange media) of monetary freedom and their sound and freely chosen value standards, would destroy the government's currency and thus free notes issues and free choice of value standards ought to be suppressed. But what really happens is the removal of a cover-up, of coercion, of a monopoly and of a fiat or forced value. The prior inflation crime and inflationary tribute extraction would become revealed as such. The "emperor" would then be seen as naked, without his forced currency "clothing" or cover. This fraud and deception would finally be ended. The good money would then be free to drive out the bad. Bad luck, but deserved bad luck, for the bad money, without a sufficient sound foundation for it. The sooner all monopolized and legal tender monies are rendered worthless, or totally refused, by all their victims, the better. - However, as exterritorially autonomous panarchists, in their own volunteer communities, the true believers in the monetary despotism of central banking should remain at liberty to choose all the wrongs and mistakes of it for themselves, at their own expense and risk - until they finally wise up sufficiently, individually, and opt out of these messes, too. - J. Z., 4.3.95, 25.4.97, 18.7.11. - Deterrent examples can also be helpful and there are enough utopists and true believers among us so that, among themselves, they will tend to repeat them, at least now and then - for the enlightenment or amusement of other people and, perhaps for their own enlightenment, soon, as well. - J. Z., 8.9.02.

LEGAL TENDER: To force a depreciated paper money upon creditors (e.g. labourers, clerks, pensioners, land lords), at its nominal value, as if it were not depreciated, is an immoral act of legalized expropriation without indemnification. - J.Z., 6.10.85,9.5.97.

LEGAL TENDER: to make that paper currency legal tender for the payment of all debts, both public and private. That would destroy the very basis of freedom and of civilization itself. - Paul Bakewell, Jr., What Are We Using For Money. D. Van Nostrand Co., Toronto, New York, London, 1952, p.196.

LEGAL TENDER: Without legal tender one cannot inflate a currency. - Ulrich von Beckerath, 25.1.52.

LENDING & BORROWING: All becomes different when we change from the money of monetary despotism to the monies of monetary freedom. "When I lend I am a friend, when I ask I am a foe." - ­Proverb, 16th century. - Here, too, no distinction is made between the money of monetary freedom and that of monetary despotism. - Even if the one who lends you money, his own money issue, is your friend, you will, at least at first, consider this kind of money loan offer with great suspicion. He will have to prove to you that it is liquid enough by being fully usable against him and his debtors for things that you want. When it comes to repaying his loan, it will be much easier to repay it to him in his own money than in legal tender money. It would be still easier for you if you could repay it in your own IOUs or clearing certificates, to mutual satisfaction. - J.Z., 18.4.97. - Not all money is good enough, quite good or rightful money. The ability to pay depends on the kind of means of payment that is used. - J.Z., 18.7.11. - CREDITORS & DEBTORS, CREDIT & DEBT, FRIENDS & ENEMIES, ABILITY TO PAY.

LETS: Michael Linton, founder of LETS, made an appearance for a speech and demonstration of his clearing or accounting system, a while ago, here in Bowral, in the Southern Tablelands of NSW., my own neighbourhood (10 min. by car), trying to gather more support for the local LETS group, then still operating without a computer, perhaps still. They strongly objected to my attempt to distribute some leaflets on monetary freedom to the people who attended, arguing that it would merely "distract" them. The LETS secretary finally persuaded me to desist and promised to deliver all my leaflets to the signed up members. Either he has done this or not. The response was zero. I had wasted a day on writing and photocopying them! I paid for and was promised a copy of their former newsletter - and am still waiting for it. About 30 to 50 people were present. He gave a talk and a playful demonstration of his "green dollar" system, in which those present participated, by fictitious spending and earning. I raised some objections to Michael, which he did not respond to. He merely invited me to join. In vain did I point out that none of the members had goods or services to offer which I wanted and that I had none which they wanted. Nevertheless, he merely insisted that I join. Why should I join for the sake of joining? He expressed high and and almost unlimited aspirations and promises and predictions for his kind of computerised "garage sale and baby sitter exchange" (my description), which has spread in Australia as a result of a prolonged depression, leading to more than 1 million unemployed. But one of the most "successful" LETS exchanges, in the Blue Mountains area, N.S.W., Austrlia, with 6,000 asserted members, could only boast of an annual turnover of $ 30,000. That would be much for one person but came only to $ 5 for the average member. He ignored legislation that would prevent him or other participants from issuing wage payment means and currency that would be suitable for general shopping in the local shopping centre. He did, somehow, assume that these spheres would simply pick up his medium and would be free to do so. But it was interesting to find out from him that he had so far been neither bothered by the FED nor by the Reserve Bank of Australia. Only the revenuers troubled some of the members and wrongly equated one of his green dollars in market value with central banking dollars. Thus even if his system could and would be widely enough adopted, people would still be forced to charge, partly, in central banking dollars to enable them to pay their taxes with them, even upon their "green dollar" earnings. If they earned only "green dollars" this tax demand for government paper dollars would drive them into bankruptcy. His knowledge of and interest in monetary freedom theories and practices was rather limited - and that of most of his followers and listeners was still much more so. He showed no interest at all in any of the monetary freedom information that I have to offer. I expect no breakthrough from him and his circles, even if they become more popular than they are already. "There isn't any more terrible sight to behold than ignorance in action!" - said Goethe. - LETS

LETTER EXCHANGES ON MONETARY FREEDOM: Offered e.g. by LMP on microfiche. - Some of these letters are offered at www.reinventingmoney.com

LIBERATION AT WORK: One of the most formidable tasks before us is the re-kindling of the urge for responsibility and autonomy in industry; to put workers' control back on the agenda. … - Editorial, "Moving With the Times … But Not in Step", ANARCHY 3, May 1961, pp.65-72. - Quoted in: Leonard L. Krimerman & Lewis Perry, Patterns of Anarchy, Anchor Books, 1966, p.122. COOPERATIVES, SELF-MANAGEMENT, WORKERS CONTROL, EMPLOYEE SHAREHOLDING, CAPITAL OWNERSHIP, PURCHASE OF ENTERPRISES, EMPLOYER-EMPLOYEE RELATIONSHIP, PROPERTY INCENTIVES, PARTNERSHIPS, EMPLOYEE-SHAREHOLDING, EVERYONE A CAPITALIST, MONETARY & FINANCIAL FREEDOM.

LIBERTARIAN NEWS: Free Market Money | Libertarian News - www.libertariannews.org/2010/10/12/free-market-money/  - Cached - 12 Oct 2010 – I shall begin with the premise that anything which must be rammed down the public's throat at gun point is bad. Things that are good do not ...  - Even gold- and silver coins should not be turned into exclusive currencies. - J.Z., 27.7.11.

LIBERTARIAN PARTY, CALIFORNIA, LPC :: View topic - The Gold Standard - www.libertarians.ca/lpcbb/viewtopic.php?p=5669  - Cached - 15 posts - 4 authors - Last post: 20 Jan 2009. Their argument is that fractional reserve banking is free market money that would emerge in a genuine market. ... - - That seems to be a rather small output for a country which at one stage contained, probably, the largest number of libertarians. - Could they think of nothing still better? - J.Z., 24.7.11.

LIBERTARIANS, FINANCIAL FREEDOM & MONETARY FREEDOM: Most libertarians are only in favour of FINANCIAL FREEDOM, i.e., the right to issue and hold, trade and price financial securities freely, without let or hindrance by governments and without being taxed. Regarding money most favour merely another exclusive or even forced currency, namely a rare metal one, e.g. in form of gold coins and gold certificates based upon gold coin redemptionism, whether fractionally or 100% covered. They do not favour MONETARY FREEDOM, i.e. the right to issue, accept, refuse, discount, hold and use private money tokens, notes, clearing certificates and use clearing accounts, using agreed-upon value standards, keeping these exchange media as stable, honest, useful and acceptable as it is possible and in their own interest and that of their voluntary acceptors and users. - J.Z., 16.10.87.

LIBERTY, RESISTANCE: See RESISTANCE, LIBERATION, REVOLUTION, FINANCING

LIBERTY ASYLUM: Liberty Asylum - www.libertyasylum.com/ - Cached - We need free market money - probably gold and/or silver - run by free market institutions. Government's one role would be to protect private property and ... - Has any territorial government ever been a sufficiently rightful and effective protector of anything? For all too long and quite wrongfully, they have always only preserved their own wrongful powers. - J.Z., 27.7.11.

LIBERTY DOLLAR COIN COMPANY: Free Market Money vs. Government Terrorism. - Free Market Money Vs. Government Terrorism | ChaoticFate.com by qew - www.chaoticfate.com/2011/.../free-market-money-vs-government.h.... - Cached - 11 Apr 2011 –. from ChaoticFate.com by qew. Apr 8, 2011. - 3:06 - ALSO: Free Market Money Vs. Government Terrorism‏ - YouTube - www.youtube.com/watch?v=VFY0X67XcQg - Cached - 11 Apr 2011 – Apr 8, 2011 - Owner of the Liberty dollar coin company who was convicted and accused by the government of economic terrorism for making ... ALSO: Revolutionary Politics::Revolutionary Politics : Free Market Money ... - revolutionarypolitics.tv/.../viewVideo.php?...free-market-money... - Cached - 12 Apr 2011 – Rayzz, Apr 8, 2011.

LIBERTY DOLLAR: The Liberty Dollar is a waste of money. - www.ronpaulforums.com/showthread.php?6084-The-Liberty...  - Cached - 11 posts - 5 authors - Last post: 8 Jul 2007. - The Constitution gets legalized ... gold/silver/commodity becomes nationally accepted, free market money producers get involved ... people ... - Let the voluntary participant decide that, as they should about any other monetary experiment. - Let sovereign individuals also decide which constitution, laws, jurisdiction and protective associations they wish to adopt for their own affairs. Territorial nations and governments are wrongfully imposed fictions. They should not have the exclusive right to determine anything for free and peaceful individuals, who would rather do their own things. - At present all constitutions, laws and jurisdictions are wrongfully, because territorially, imposed upon all too many dissenters, even in the best democracies and republics, not to speak of the other States and their governments. - J.Z., 2.7.11.

LIBRARY OF MONETARY FREEDOM TEXTS: It should at least be aimed at, and should include editions in alternative media, especially CDs, DVDs and external HD's. - J.Z., n.d. & 18.7.11.

LIFE CYCLE OF MONEY: The Life Cycle of Money Many are becoming increasingly alarmed by ... - aheadoftheherd.com/1Articles/.../The-Life-Cycle-of-Money.htm - Cached - After a barter / exchange economy is well-established, a society progress to the concept of free market money and a currency system emerges. ...

LIMITED LIABILITY: No limited liability for the issuers of exchange media, but, instead, full responsibility for all their actions, with all their property assets and future earnings, whenever they would not have provided sufficient short term credits with suitable debtors, who have wanted consumer goods and services ready for sale and whose credit repayments would sufficiently withdraw the issues of the bank of issue. As long as note-issuing banks or clearing houses do only discount short term real bills or their modern equivalent, for wanted goods already produced and sold and on the road to wholesalers and the retailers or already on the sales shelves of the latter, such note issuers or clearing houses should never run into difficulties. Those who run such a bank of issue or clearing centre would not have to possess any capital of their own or have some capital subscribed to by others. That would not be necessary for them at all. All they would need is some office space and equipment and ability to pay their note printer or have a credit with him. Their staff should be paid out of the interest and fees they charge for their transactions. Thus no own capital would exist, of the bank of issue, in favour of the bank's creditors, its holders of notes or certificates, when criminal dishonesty or negligence has led it into unsound issues or investments, which were not discovered in time by the voluntary acceptors or by full publicity for its issues and accounts. (I think that this is a hypothetical case only. - Shop foundation can be tested so easily and fast and note exchanges can be made daily and electronic clearing with other issuers can be done almost instantly, so that over-issues would be discovered fast. Competing issuers would also examine its issue and reflux records frequently, in their own interest. In cooperatively owned or run banks the members would be able to choose their own auditors and the bank's customers might send their own. - In the absence of a government guaranty, a redemption fund, a deposit and credit insurance contract and of capital of the bank, the directors should be held responsible even with their homes, furniture, clothing, jewellery, cars and, naturally, all other assets. I do not think that this ultimate backing, in case of bankruptcy only, would be frequently required, for there are other safety precautions that can and ought to be taken for note-issuing banks and other issue centres. E.g., they would grant short term turnover credits only for enterprises in their vicinity, no more than x km away. None of their loans to any customer should exceed a certain percentage of all their loans, i.e. not more than 5-10% at most. They must also be under obligation to use all other means of payment received to buy up their own and this at par, in the open money market. They should know their local customers and their business well enough to distinguish between a sound commercial or real bill and a financial or accommodation bill, i.e. behind which there is no real exchange or turnover. Anyhow, under full monetary freedom many less people will ever be driven to such desperate resorts for free clearing and freedom to issue would permit them to monetise their own capacity to supply and service to a considerable extent, even if only at a discount, to satisfy all their creditors from previous sound trades. Gambling and speculation debts would be another matter. For banks issuing local currencies such abuses would be rare under the publicity they would be subjected to. Gambling casinos and betting shops as well as stock exchanges etc., would only show a very limited readiness to accept local shop currencies in payment whenever there is the least doubt about them or the one who offers them. - J.Z., 17.4.97.

LIMITING FACTORS FOR PRIVATELY ISSUED EXCHANGE MEDIA: They would be optional currencies, not legal tender. Everyone but the issuer would be free to refuse them or to discount them. They would be measured in their value, against a sound value standard and would tend to be accepted only, in most cases, while maintained a par-value with it. The issuers oblige themselves to deliver goods, services and labour for them, at their nominal values. Over-issues would go beyond their capacity and their long term interest in being able to continue to issue their own sound exchange media. Note exchanges with other issuing centres would occur. In them any excess issues by one or a few of them would become obvious. They would have fewer notes of sound issuing centres to offer in exchange. When the notes are not physically exchanged then the clearing exchanges would also show up balances against them. All details of their issues should become publicised (largely on the notes themselves). Acceptance notices and refusals to accept notices should be displayed in all their goods- services and debt payment redemption" centres. Each could easily check the readiness-to-accept foundation in one of the nearest stores and their gold-weight-value by either paying with them for goods and services or labour priced in gold weight units or by buying gold with them at a local agent of the gold market. Local exchange offices would display tables indicating the value of the local currency in terms of other currencies and its own and other value standards. They are the equivalents to tickets and vouchers and as soundly based as these are and as little over-issued, in the interests of the issuer and due to the refusal right of the potential acceptors. - Limited liability should not apply to them. The issuers should not only have to guaranty them with all their ready-for-sale goods, services and labour but, ultimately, should these run out, in case of over-issues (if these are possible and would actually happen), with all their other possessions and all their future earnings. - J.Z., n.d. & 27.5.97, 18.7.11.

LIMITS FOR THE CIRCULATION OF EXCHANGE MEDIA: So many artificial and legalized limits have been set for their issues while the naturally inherent limits for sound exchange media continue to be widely ignored or remaining quite unknown to most people. The false notion that anyone who could issue his own money could thereby cause an inflation – is still wide-spread. It simply ignores the fact that in the absence of an issue monopoly and of legal tender for its notes, they could simply be discounted or altogether refused, while pricing and payments reckoning in sound value standards and paid in sound means of exchange, standing at par to their nominal value, would go on undisturbed, together with the general price level expressed in these sound monies. Only prices paid in the unsound money would be inflated – by the depreciation of such money against sound value standards used by the acceptors. Alternatively, unsound means of payment would be well publicized and thus widely known and altogether refused. Most people are so conditions to “thinking” only in terms of forced and exclusive currencies, that they do not apply the old saying: “It takes two to dance tango!” in this sphere. Here, one who offers a means of payment and one who accepts or refuses it, and if he accepts it, it is still a question whether he will accept it at par or only at a discount. Only the issuers will be obliged to accept their own notes always at par with their nominal value. – In practice, only those will be potential issuers who do, between them, have enough wanted consumer goods and services or debt payment receipts to offer. The others would be treated as if they offered the play money of the game “Monopoly” in payment for real goods and services. – Full publicity for all details of the total issues, the current reflux and the still outstanding notes would be published daily. Any sudden fall in the exchange rate of any well known alternative currency would be extensively publicized. Limited liability clauses for managers and investors in companies that issue their own currencies would be abolished. During the German big inflation of 1914 to 1918 one then well known economist proposed a “gallows currency”, which would lead to the death by hanging of any issuer who was responsible for issuing any currency at par, which later fell considerably in its local exchange rate against its value standard and could not offer sufficient wanted goods and services, accepted by him at par, to withdraw all his notes from circulation. However, I doubt that this kind of deterrence is really required once the monetary freedom options are sufficiently known and practised and the public has become used to deal, carefully and cautiously in several currencies, none of them will be guaranteed by any territorial government and none of which could be forced upon unwilling creditors, who had not themselves issued them. No more could be issued, as a rule, than the potential acceptors would be willing to accept for their short-term spending intentions. That could also be assured by a) turning them into mere clearing certificates or ticket money, or clearinghouse cheques, with their inherent limited circulation period, or b) stamping a period of a limited validity on all the notes. The reflux of these notes, when issued in discounts of sound short-term debt certificates (representing wanted goods and services) would be assured by the repayment obligation of these debt certificates. The fact that only the issuer would always have to accept them at par would limit the readiness of potential issuers to oblige themselves beyond their own delivery capacity of goods and services. – J.Z., 2.11.10. – BANKING PRINCIPLE, REAL BILLS DOCTRINE, SHOP FOUNDATION, TAX FOUNDATION, OPTIONAL MONIES, MARKET RATED & REFUSABLE, AS OPPOSED TO MONOPOLISTIC & FORCED CURRENCIES WITH LEGAL TENDER POWER (COMPULSORY ACCEPTANCE & FORCED VALUE), REFLUX FOUNDATION, DEBT FOUNDATION, ACCEPTANCE FOUNDATION, READINESS TO ACCEPT FOUNDATION, PUBLICITY, GOODS- & SERVICE COVERS FOR MONIES, OPTIONAL CURRENCIES, FREE MARKET MONIES

LINTON, MICHAEL: See: LETS.

LIQUIDITY & ILLIQUIDITY: One could be very liquid for all one's payment requirements if one were free to clear or to pay with one's own clearing certificates or notes, optional and acceptable to others, because they stand at par with their nominal value standard and are acceptable at par for daily wanted consumer goods and services. In the absence of this monetary freedom the same potential issuers could and often would be rather illiquid with regard to rare metal coins, legal tender cash issued by a monopolist like the central bank of issue and to any foreign exchange. With the stroke of a pen (by legislative repeal of monetary despotism) or by the act of a monetary revolution, the existing illiquidity of the victims of monetary despotism (not that of the victimisers and their supporters and favourites) could be turned into a self-initiated, self-managed and self-perpetuated liquidity. One might also call it an "ability to pay" to the extent that one is able and willing to offer wanted goods, services and labour, all at market prices. - J.Z., 16.8.92, 1.5.97. - To that extent there is no limit to the volume of these exchange media, clearing certificates or clearing accounts. - Under free choice of value standards and free market rating for currencies, voluntary acceptance and the refusal option any over-issues are almost impossible or only very limited and temporary. The issuers would still have to accept their issues at par but could no longer issue more notes while they stand below par in local circulation. - J.Z.,18.7.11. - ABILITY TO PAY.

LIQUIDITY CRISES: Even if banks had wrongly and inefficiently invested short term funds on long terms, then, under free clearing options they could arrange for a considerable percentage of the long-term invested funds becoming mobilised, in instalments, through clearing certificates, that could immediately be used against the long term borrowers, at least shortly before any instalment repayments of these borrowers become due and to the amounts of  these instalments. - J.Z., 3/97.

LIQUIDITY PROBLEMS: Most liquidity problems, business losses and bankruptcies are caused by governments, by their legislation (hardly any of it deserving the term "law") on taxation, exchange media, value standards, legal tender, credit, capital securities, prices, wages, rents, interest rates, foreign exchange and international trading. - Free clearing or full ­monetary freedom could avoid most liquidity problems, leaving ­only those caused by ignorance, miscalculations, frauds and ­catastrophes. - J.Z., 7.6.91, 26.4.97, 18.7.11.

LIQUIDITY THEORIES: They are so numerous that all should be listed - and confronted with the facts and contrary theories as far as is possible, in order to enable the patient researchers to finally sort the wheat from the chaff. - J. Z., 19.3.97. - Perhaps there are as many spleeny liquidity-, money-, credit-, interest-, banking- and "clearing"-hypotheses as there are religious faiths. This may have happened in spite of the fact that all these hypotheses try to deal with facts instead of dogmas, myths, faiths and imagine beings. - J.Z., 18.7.11.

LIQUIDITY: The owners of ready for sale goods and services should not be made dependent for their liquidity requirements and sales options upon the forced monopoly money of a central bank and whatever more or less misinformed and inapt monetary currency policy and measures it does presently apply. Instead, they should be set free or liberate themselves, e.g. through their own local shop associations, to monetise these short-term turnover-assets themselves. They could pay their employees and suppliers with their notes and clearing certificates. They should also be free to pay their taxes with them, until they can abolish these imposed tributes. Moreover, they should be free and would be advised to make short term loans with their private monies, mainly for wage and salary payments, to other local employers, through their own local bank of issue. Such shop foundation currency, spent or lent out on short terms, would soon stream back into the shops. The shops could use them to repay their loans from their issuing centre and also pay their wholesalers for orders to restock their shelves. The wholesalers could redeem with them their commercial bills, or other short-term debt certificates or account-IOU's, which they had initially used to pay the employers for goods received. Such bills etc., in payment for already produced and sold goods, should be the securities, discounted in the granting of short term loans, especially for wage and salary payments. This basis for banknote issues, as clearing certificates, or "cut up" small bills, in convenient denominations, to substitute, temporarily, large commercial bills, not in money denominations, was at best called the pure "banking principle" or note issue upon the " Real Bills Doctrine" (RBD) and was long seen, at least by some genuine economists, as an essentially self-limiting and self-liquidating turnover process, especially while all prices were marked in gold- or silver- weight units and no banknotes had forced acceptance and a forced value - except towards the issuer. Alas, in most people's minds and in that of most modern economists, too, this system was and is still mixed up with notions of the currency principle and thus even for sound banking principle banknotes a threefold security was demanded, namely 1.) redemption into gold by the issuer, upon demand of the note holder, 2.) sound or real commercial bills for mere turnover transactions and 3.) shop foundation, although objectively and economically, such triple convertibility, cover, redemption or clearing was not necessary or even wanted in most cases. Well, ignorance and prejudices on this subject predominate even in our times still. - Once the suppliers of consumer goods and services are legally and juridically free to make themselves monetarily liquid, in this way, and are sufficiently informed on this option, then, indirectly or directly, they will make liquid their suppliers, tradesmen, and landlords, too and the local employers and their employees, most of them customers of their shops. - The above circulation option is a traditional one but not the only possible one. Other potential local issuers exist in most local centres of population, production, transport and trade and they could also form their issue-, payment- and clearing communities, in parallel or merge with the shop association bank, as they please. - The local market would accept as many sound competing currencies as it would find convenient enough to handle. - Those less convenient for general local circulation would have to be discounted by those issuing more convenient local currencies - and then, by these centres of issue, placed into the hands of those who have something to pay to these other and limited note issuers. - J.Z., 2.5.97, 12.9.02, 18.7.11.

LITERATURE ON MONEY: Most such writings are describing or advocating, alas, just a variation upon monetary despotism, a centralised and exclusive and authoritarian system, supposedly ideal, imposed upon all people in a territory, via a monopoly and legal tender legislation. Or they do simply take it for granted, as if it were natural, rightful or necessary. Diverse authors of this kind just want to run their kind of monetary despotism somewhat different from that of most others. - Who is to blame for this? The monetary freedom advocates themselves have not yet got their act fully together. They have so far failed even to provide e.g. a complete bibliography, abstracts and review service, far less have they provided all their texts in affordable editions, upon demand or some handbooks on monetary freedom, explaining all the terms, concepts, practices and techniques, experiences and various traditions sufficiently. I have gone further in that special publishing direction than anyone else has so far, to my knowledge, but in the past I could afford to do this only on microfiche, which most people refuse to utilise. - (Now I could afford to put much of this onto a disc, after scanning in all these texts, but so far I have not found the time and energy to do this for tens of thousands of pages or even to so combine, properly, all such texts which I or others have already digitized. Copyrights claims by some are another obstacle. They could, however, be overcome, at least somewhat, through abstracts and reviews. All too many people still believe that a "uniform" currency with the widest possible circulation area would already thereby be ideal. They manage to forget that almost all such currencies over the last 100 years have been mismanaged, country-wide, by inflations, deflations and stag-flations - and that they have helped to finance all too many wrongful regimes, wars and uncounted wrongful and irrational government interventions. Such monopolized and forced currencies had to be severely protected against competition from the better ones of full monetary freedom, which free people would have found much more acceptable, useful and reliable. - J.Z., 28. 8.02, 19.7.11.

LITERATURE ON MONEY: Mostly, when one browses in it, not monetary wisdom is predominant but, rather, dogmatism, prejudices, errors, wrong observations, false hypotheses and misunderstandings, not only by the dozens but by hundreds to thousands. Its quantity is so large and so few truths are contained in most books on this subject, that the errors etc. ought to be extracted, alphabetized and confronted with the best refutations so far found, to produce, gradually, a useful encyclopaedia on the subject. When scanners and computers are used for this and, at least, few dozen people collaborate much on this project, such a work could be compiled rather fast and could be frequently supplemented and updated. No one has time and energy enough to peruse all the relevant literature on his own and deal with it in this way. - J.Z., 16.3.97. - Klaus Falke, with his www.monetary-freedom.net/ has made a start in this direction but, unless he gets sufficient support, he may give up in frustration, after having expended already much money, time and energy in this effort. - J.Z., 19.7.11. - HANDBOOK ON MONETARY FREEDOM

LOAN CERTIFICATES & EXCHANGE MEDIA: See: APHORISMS ON THE MONEY PROBLEM.

LOAN FUND CREATION: When any bank, somewhat rationally and responsible run, grants a short, medium or long-term credit, in form of a deposit entry, it does not draw or suck that deposit out of thin air, but takes all its other deposits, already on-hand, into consideration and uses them, anticipating the repayment by the debtor, when due, plus its profit and that of the other depositors, who, in effect, provided this loan, only mediated by the bank. Nor does it provide this credit for thin air but only for a sufficient security, which will assure the repayment, in most cases. Admittedly, the timing is often done wrong in practice, misleading the participants and establishing, quite unnecessarily, considerable repayment risks, at least for crisis times. But precisely the mistake of long-term investing the short-term deposits of others, about which critics do rightly complain, indicates already, contrary to the other dogma (thin air transformation into effective and even inflationary deposits) that deposits of others ARE used, or abused, quite wrongly and irrationally, instead of using all or some of the available thin air. One cannot have it both ways. -  Depositors with current account deposits expect their accounts to be used by the bank for the provision of short term liquidity to others. If not, they would just hire a bank's safe-deposit facilities and expect to have to pay for this service, instead of sharing in the bank's interest received, when lending out some of these funds. Otherwise they could not earn any interest on their deposits and would be subjected to bank charges for safely hoarding the deposits. If a bank could endlessly  multiply deposits, short-term, medium-term, long-term, creating them out of thin air, it would never run a timing risk at all. It would not need any deposits by other its clients. Then it would not need any capital, either. It could "create" it - simply out of "thin air", possibly even more where the air is relatively thick, e.g. at see level. Why then should it bother to attract deposits, at relatively high interest rates? Why should it bother to advertise for depositors at all? Then it would not need them at all. Thin air would be enough as its raw material or capital. It could "transform" it and lend it out and collect interest on it! - How unrealistic this whole notion is, is already indicated by the term used: thin air. Thin air is thinner than ground level air. Mountain-top air, cloud level air and the air jet liners cruise in, is relatively thin compared with sea level air, but most banks are not located high up in the air. Do the various "social credit" "thinkers" really propose that the nefarious bankers first capture such "thin air" and then turn it into their kind of paper gold and paper profits? One of them assured me once that hardly two Social Credit advocates, among their, probably, tens of thousands, do fully agree with each other. - If any bank really could "create" deposits and make loans from them, then it could also create medium and long term deposits "from nothing". It could make itself entirely independent from savers and depositors. Why should it then even bother asking its debtors to repay loans - since then it could simply "create" new deposits and spend them? - Why should it engage in the banking business at all, rather than merely creating its kind of credit and money or deposits from nothing and merely enjoy spending them? There is no reality or intelligence behind this notion at all. It is the equivalent to a religious spleen or a superstitious notion. - J.Z., 3/97, 19.7.11. - CREDIT CREATION? DEPOSIT CREATION? MONEY CREATION OUT OF THIN AIR? DIS.

LOCAL CURRENCIES, EXPLORATION FOR THEIR ISSUE POTENTIAL: One should not only examine the legal and public opinion obstacles but also the technical and economic obstacles and opportunities that do exist in any locality. - For example, modern mines, established by foreign companies in remote areas of Chile, where a ready workforce may not have existed before or only some subsistence economy villagers and while Chile's government practised only central banking, with all its flaws, had to consider attracting, keeping and paying their employees in alternative ways. They did so by providing very well supplied cantinas or general stores, with much more choice in competitively priced consumer goods, than existed in local stores, if there were any of these available at all. They kept these shops well stocked and, although nominally paying their employees in government paper money, allowed wage advance payments or small credits payable in warrants upon these stores. These private means of payment were called "fichas". The total of these advances­ and credits were later and soon deducted from their paper money wages. Thus the workers had a wider choice of consumer goods than they would otherwise have had, and this at lower prices, too, and the firms had their suitable wage payment means. Otherwise, their workers might, e.g., have had to travel long distances, to reach a town and many might there have e.g. drunk or gambled their earnings away or would have been robbed and not returned at all. No one was forced to accept these "fichas", anticipating his paper money earnings in this way or to take out small loans (advances upon their wages or salaries) in these local media of their own employer - but many to most preferred to do so. It gave them a better lifestyle than they had before and minimum transaction costs. This practice went on at least for decades in the 20th century. I do not know to what extent it is suppressed now, nor whether e.g. the government's paper money was also accepted at these cantinas or stores and at what rate, if it was severely inflated. - Ideally, the workers should have established a consumer coop and issued these fichas themselves, in loans to the employer, for wage payment means, taking in exchange the bills of the recipients of the ores produced at the mines. And with these they could have restocked the consumer coop stores from the wholesale markets, just like their employers did for their canteens. - What were or are the total local turnovers? Does a sufficiently great variety of local shops exist? How many consumer goods and services have still to be obtained from shops in other localities? To what extent are local shops stocked by local producers? How much of all present trading is local and how much is foreign trade? What potential is there for increasing local production and local trade - and "foreign trade" with other localities or nations? How many local people are unemployed or under-employed? What sales difficulties exist for local service and goods providers? What is the total value of the ready-for-sale local goods, services and labour? To what extent could that total be increased, in the short term, medium and long term? One should also enquire about the number of credit applications that had been made by locals, at the nearest conventional banks, and how often they were refused credits and why. To what extent is the local community dependent upon foreign trade, tourist trade, weather, the seasons? Are there sufficient transport and communication facilities and energy plants? How high is the tax burden? How well or badly is the local community supplied with government paper money and coins and government bank credit? Etc. No advanced monetary exchange system can be established in a vacuum, e.g., in a desert or a jungle, with no economic opportunities and people able and willing to work at market rates. Local mores and customs are also important. When sharing with non-productive relatives or friends remains a counter-productive habit, destroying individual initiative, nothing much can immediately be done for such people with the options of economic liberty. They have at least to be able and willing to work in a division of labour process and largely for the benefit of themselves and their nuclear families. Otherwise the incentives for continuing productive efforts and the accumulation of productive capital are insufficient. In areas where no other production would be as profitable as the growth of drug plants, their processing and sale of drugs, and thus subject also to the powers of the drug war campaigners and of the local warlords, not much positive other economic development can readily take place, not even under full monetary and financial freedom. - J.Z., 6.4.93, 27.5.97. - Richard R. H. Timberlake, Jr., has written at least one article on such issues: Free Market Money in Coal Mining Communities, 8pp, in THE FREEMAN (now online), Oct. 1989, citing many references. I reproduced it on microfiche, in PEACE PLANS 1248 and was surprised how many such issued occurred, even in North America. They come to tens of thousands in all and some may still be continued in our times. - J.Z., 19.7.11.

LOCAL CURRENCIES, MONETARY DESPOTISM & MONETARY REVOLUTIONS: Governments have managed to prevent or suppress sound, because market-issued and market-rated and market-secured competitive local currencies and to replace them with their exclusive, non-competitive, coercive and centrally mismanaged currencies, that are "local currencies" only in the national sense. This they still consider to be a rightful and valuable achievement rather than a wrongful and harmful monetary despotism. They even try to combine several of these despotic impositions into a single one, like the Euro-currency. Left to their own merits, if any, and to the judgement of sovereign consumers and competitors, their bad monies would soon be driven out by good alternative currencies. However, legalized monetary despotism has so far prevented that and it has so far nowhere and permanently been overthrown by a monetary revolution, one that would have introduced full monetary freedom. In an age where revolutions and insurrections become more and more frequent and bloody, the bloodless monetary revolutions, which could make other pro-freedom revolutions much easier, and which could solve many problems which mere political and social revolutions so far failed to solve, should finally be seriously considered, prepared for and then realised. - J.Z., 19.8.92.

LOCAL CURRENCIES: Any alternative new local currency, competitively issued and accepted, with or without permission by the local, State or federal government, might, initially, adopt the same value standard that the central bank of the country uses or abuses, to facilitate the introduction of the new local currency. Unless, of course, the main initial attraction of the new local currency would be that it offers a much better value standard right away than the inflated official currency does. However, the new currency should never promise cover by or redemption in the government currency but merely readiness to accept the own local currency, for the time being, at par with the government’s currency. Later, just like the value of e.g. the governmental US, Canadian, Australian and New Zealand dollars came to differ in value, and since these local currencies would be free market and competing currencies, not exclusive and forced ones for a whole country, they would get different exchange rates, especially against the currencies of central banks, even if they still were to use the term dollar for their value standard. A full emancipation from the government’s forced monopoly currency would require that they do adopt another and better value standard, also another term for it and not only a quite different appearance for their notes, coins and clearing certificates. Computers even in small shops would make pricing, reckoning and accounting in several different currencies relatively easy. To settle with the existing territorial tax authorities would be more difficult as long as individual secessionism remain suppressed and also exterritorial communities of volunteers, neither an ideal declaration of all genuine individual rights and liberties has been adopted and no ideal militia of volunteers, exclusively for the protection of these rights, to the extent that they are claimed by new and competing communities for their members) has been organized and trained. (The various welfare “rights”, claims and entitlements that some of these communities grant to their members they would have to pay for and protect themselves as best as they can, just like religious communities have to bear the costs of their rituals and dogmas.) Naturally, these local currencies would not have any legal tender power in general local circulation. Only the issuers, and, by contract, their debtors, would always have to accept them at par with their nominal value. Unless, of course, a particular local currency would be made so widely acceptable, that it would be locally quite generally accepted and become, at least for the time being, a customary local currency, for which the customary acceptance is always assumed to exist, unless something else is expressly stated in a contract or by a corresponding sign in sales premises. Then and only to that extent would it be, locally, a juridical or legal tender currency in effect, even if it has not been formally declared or decreed to be one. To impose it in the latter way would be another act of monetary despotism. Unless, of course, such an act or juridical decision is only applied among the volunteers of an exterritorially autonomous community or within a private payment community which imposes such a duty upon all its members. At least in the transition period to quite free societies, Local, State and Federal governments might still demand that their taxes, rates and other charges are paid to them in the currency they have issued or adopted. Those subjected to such tribute payments would have to purchase these currencies on a free market for them. If they only earn their incomes in local currency then they would become more inclined than they are so far to consider their tax strike options for themselves and other local people. They are then obviously able to run their own business without government “help”. – The first and later issues of local currencies should be very cautiously done. The daily exchange rate of it against other currencies should be constantly watched. At the first sign of a discount in local circulation (not in other districts or countries, where they would, quite naturally, develop their own foreign exchange rate, i.e. have a lower purchasing power than they have in their local issuing sphere, which would help to steer them back fast to where would be accepted at par with their nominal value) further issues should be stopped until that discount has disappeared. The discount will speed up the payment of debts to the local issuing centre, with the notes discounted in general local circulation and thus the discount will tend to be short, disappearing with the paid in discounted notes, all paid in to the issuer or his debtors (at least up to the value of his debt) at their full nominal value. – J.Z., 22.6.10. - PANARCHISM

LOCAL CURRENCIES: Either there will be a single major issuer, a large department store or a shopping centre association, then no major problems are to be expected with such an issue, apart from the legal and juridical ones and general ignorance and prejudice. However, when the scope and penetration of a local currency experiment is much smaller then the danger exists that e.g. one general store becomes the major acceptor for the currency issued and that it would have difficulties in using the local currency received in its local and other payments. Thus such participants should be free to declare right away that they would limit their daily acceptance of a newly issued local currency to certain total amounts only, let us say $ 50 or $ 500, at least until the new issue has become a widely accepted local currency. Then such potentially very valuable and even essential participants will not be forced to shoulder too much of the risk of the new issues and will not be turned off, very early, from participating in such an experiment. Anyhow, they would, probably, be better off by issuing their own token money, their own ship currency, as far as they can, completely under their own control and that of its voluntary acceptors. - The resistance among local wage and salary recipients against the new currency will also be reduced if they remain free and are even asked to declare how much of their wages they are willing to accept in the local currency. Sometimes and initially, only e.g. Christmas bonuses, may, be paid in a local currency or wage increases. Only in extreme cases will an employer be forced to declare to his employees: My situation is such that I have either to dismiss all of you and close my business down, or you will permit me to pay you, in full, in the newly issued local currency. - It will also be necessary ­to establish an exchange bureau, in which the local currency is market-rated and exchanged against the established national and perhaps even some foreign currencies. Every case of a discount of the local currency - while the shops of the associated issuers remain fully stocked with wanted goods and have idle service capacity at competitive prices, would then lead to extra sales for them, as if they had all started a discount sale, due to people buying the discounted local currency at this exchange and using it for their local shopping. One of the first steps of local businessmen, examining this option as a self-help measure, would be to find out their combined offers for sale and with this their potential issue limit. - J.Z., 3/97. -INTRODUCTION, TRANSITION PERIOD

LOCAL CURRENCIES: Freedom to issue local currencies, official, private and cooperative ones, all competitive and optional, i.e., without legal tender (except towards the issuer) and using agreed-upon alternative value standards, if they are desired. They are to be freely market-rated against their own chosen value standards - and all others and all details of their issue and reflux, readiness to accept foundation and short term securities, as their cover redemption and clearing backing, ought to be sufficiently publicised. In the main, they should be based upon the local goods and services, offered e.g. by local shopping centres and public utility companies, like gas, electricity and water and sewage services, transport facilities, like those of local bus companies, petrol stations, tradesmen- and professional services, insurance services, and even on local rates, to the extent that these are for wanted local services, by voluntary customers. Otherwise, all tax-foundation monies are, essentially, based upon wrongful because imposed tribute levies and, as such, they are as wrong as these levies are. Voluntary contributions, as membership fees for local communities of volunteers only, are quite another matter and can lead to contribution-based local note issues, all without legal tender power, without a monopoly and using an agreed-upon value standard. Local currencies could and should be issued for all local ready-for-sale potentials which are immediately or very soon available and to the extent that these are locally wanted. Clearing and note-exchange arrangements should be aimed at with other, especially neighbouring communities, which do also issue local currencies. A common clearing centre might be established for a few to many local currencies, taking the modern mobility of employees and shoppers into consideration. A local currency in a tiny village like Berrima, N.S.W., Australia, where I live, which is, mostly depending upon tourist trade, and on jobs and shops in three nearby small towns, Moss Vale, Bowral and Mittagong, could not circulate much in form of a local currency. However, Berrima Tokens might be attractive to note and coin collectors and at little cost to the issuers could bring them a relatively high return. - A shop association embracing the whole district, especially these three small towns, could achieve, under monetary freedom, a considerably large issue of shop currency, amounting to many millions every months to every quarter, locally accepted at par with its nominal value, while in other districts it might get a foreign exchange rate, determined by a free market for exchange media. - J.Z., 19.7.11.

LOCAL CURRENCIES: HOW MANY DIFFERENT ONES COULD COME TO EXIST SIDE BY SIDE? Firstly, as many as there are localities with shopping centres. But that would not confine us to one local currency in each locality. E.g., local rate, gas, electricity, school, rent, hospitality, entertainment, tradesmen's and professional's note issues, transport and petrol monies, might add to the variety. In general one could only say that the number of various notes locally accepted would depend upon how many varieties the potential note acceptors, holders and users would find convenient to use. No one has the right to make prescription to others on this matter. Free enterprise offers and sovereign consumer choices, i.e., the local individuals, will decide this matter for themselves, to their own advantage, just like they decide about their investments in mortgages, bonds, fixed deposits, shares or other securities, their consumer purchases, their reading, clothing, foods, drinks, entertainment, jobs etc. - J.Z., 24.4.97.

LOCAL CURRENCY POTENTIALS: What kind of local currency or alternative or competitive local currency would you be able to issue, alone or in association with others, if you were free to do so? Up to what amounts could you issue it, for a period from 1-3 months, judging by your current turnovers for forced and exclusive currencies and the business expansion that you consider possible for you, once sales are no problem for you any longer? Up to what percentage of your total money income would you accept in payment in local currency? What percentage of your ready-for-sale goods and service capacity could you use for local currency issues? How often do you turn over your total stock in goods and your service readiness now, within a year or a month? Naturally, the own judgement would not be final in this respect, rather that of the local community would be or that of individual local acceptors or that of the local shop association acting as a common note issuer for its members. Have you got local debtors who would gladly accept your own notes, to enable them to pay their debts to you? What kind of value standard would you use for your notes and prices, if you were free to choose among all of them? Would you like to become free to pay your local-, State- and federal taxes as well - in your own issues? Should you put pressure upon your local government to accept your local issues in its rates and use them for local payments, as far as it can, at least while your issues are at par in the general local circulation? Would you be prepared to pay a bit more if you could use your own currency in payments? How much of your total spending is local spending? - ABILITY TO PAY, USABILITY OF LOCAL CURRENCY. - J. Z., 26.3.93, 27.5.97, 19.7.11.

LOCAL SOLUTIONS: Mercantilist notions are not only found on the national level, as now expressed by "Buy Australian" or indirect appeals stating on goods: "Australian made". We can find them on the smaller levels of local communities, even within families. Alas, from these primitive self-help notions there seems to be a large step, one that most people, apparently, are unable to take, towards local businessmen issuing their own money, based on whatever goods and services they have to offer between them, and spending it for wages and supplies, granting short term loans with it, and finally redeeming it by their sales. Such money would, obviously, stay, mostly, locally. Even it were taken away, for a while, it would have nowhere elsewhere that it could be used as ready money, so it would soon return to the locality where it had been issued. - Which is the optimal size for such local currency areas? Let the issuers and acceptors decide that for themselves. Whatever money would be perceived to be better would drive out the bad or not so good ones. Naturally, the acceptance, evaluation, refusal, issue, market rating and the choice of value standards for such private exchange media and for the pricing of local goods, services, etc., should all be quite voluntary - with one significant exception: The issuers should not be allowed to refuse to accept their own notes or to accept them only at a discount. Every debtor has to recognize his own IOUs in full. - Alas, in monetary history, there were cases where even this simply common sense law was ignored. - J.Z., 8.3.93, 23.5.97. - LOCAL BUSINESS, LOCAL OWNERSHIP, KEEP THE MONEY IN YOUR TOWN, DON'T BUY FROM OUTSIDERS, KEEPING THE MONEY IN THE COUNTRY OR LOCALITY, BUY AUSTRALIAN, BUY AMERICAN, MADE IN GERMANY, PROTECTIONISM, DIS., ABILITY TO PAY, DIS.

LOCAL SPENDING BY LOCAL PEOPLE FOR LOCAL GOODS & SERVICES: Keep your money in your town!" Free consumer choice and bargain hunting, "imports from foreigners", other localities or even streets or businesses, are to be sacrificed, supposedly in the "public" interest, out of local patriotism, for the benefit of local businessmen and manufacturers. It amounts to protectionism vs. free trade on the smallest scale. "Keeping the money in the family" is a similar effort, on a still smaller scale. The resolution by an individual not to earn and spend any money at all, if he can help it, and, rather, laboriously to try to become entirely self-sufficient, and self-supporting, would be the smallest effort of this kind. (It would, logically, go to the ridiculous length of digging and processing one's ores oneself and forging the own tools with them, although Leonard E. Read effectively pointed out that no one can make a pencil or produce a can of beans quite on his own. - J.Z., 16.9.02.) - On the national and economic "theory" level it has been "graced" by the term "autarchy". Historically, it was a large feature in mercantilism, which tried to accumulate money (made of rare metal) in a country and to outlaw spending outside of it. (Many to most economists of the Austrian School of Economics still ignore that this effort indicated an at least subjectively perceived shortage of money. (Those, who deny the possibility of deflation, because they believe in a perfect and immediate adaptation of all prices to any reduced quantity of the means of exchange, still manage, to a large extent, to overlook this experience - among many others. - J.Z., 19.7.11.) The prices had not and never did fully, sufficiently or fast enough adapt to a reduced availability of rare metal coins - or other excusive currencies - coins to make sales of goods, services and labour quite easy, i.e., preserve the ability of everyone involved in free exchange to pay his way. - J.Z., 19.7.11. - If they had been, the efforts of the Mercantilists would never have become popular. - J.Z., 16.9.02.) - The nature of money and the mutually beneficial effects of all free exchanges are never sufficiently considered by all such superficial views. If local spenders really wanted "their" money to come back to them, then they should consider and use their own monetary freedom options: No money is "their" money, in a true sense, unless it is issued by them. Furthermore, the only basis upon which many to most people could issue money of their own, or some other useful forms of IOUs or clearing certificates or accounts, are their own ready-for-sale consumer goods and services, including labour. - J.Z., 19.7.11. Obviously, to the extent that they monetarily mobilised or liquidified these assets of theirs, e.g. in convenient goods warrants and service vouchers, i.e., in standardised and typified forms, in money denominations and using a good enough value standard, all their local and even "foreign" spending would be returned to them, rather soon, to be redeemed by them in their goods, services or labour. - If they only earn government legal tender money or exclusive silver or gold coins or redeemable rare metal certificates, then they will mostly try patriotic appeals, largely in vain, to induce currency holders of this kind from not taking up better bargains offered to them outside of their local communities. Such monies, when spent by them, will not always, completely or fast enough return to them. Only when the local community would, by outside spending, become so depleted of exchange media, that a local deflation would force its prices down, to emergency sales levels, would a strong incentive arise for outsiders to purchase there. Such fluctuations could be avoided by the competitive issue of sound local currencies. - J.Z., 8.3.93. (Law of fluctuating gold-quantities. That finally a kind of payment balance will be restored again, at least temporarily, is not a sufficient consolation for all those, who have payment difficulties in the meantime, which hit both, debtors and creditors rather hard. - The exclusive and forced currency system does not even work well enough when confined to a rare metal currency like gold coins and their certificates, not even under the "law of fluctuating gold quantities". For they not only fluctuate in different countries at different times, but the time required, for its "natural" adaptations, may be considerable and, in the meantime, corresponding currency famines can result. Dynamic and negative feed-back factors are involved. Among them and still largely overlooked is the effect of falling prices, as opposed to fallen prices. - The former discourages buyers or induces them to delay purchases. The latter encourages immediate spending. - J.Z., 16.9.02. - DIS., ABILITY TO PAY, PROTECTIONISM, AUTARCHY, MERCANTILISM, LOCALISM, PAROCHIALISM, DEFLATION

LOCATION LIST OF RARE MONETARY FREEDOM TEXTS: Towards private loan arrangements and future publishing options on cheap alternative media, today especially CDs, DVDs and external HDs. - J.Z., 19.7.11.

LONG, RODERICK, A Note on Credit Institutions in a Free Nation - Corrects and clarifies Roy Halliday's article Money, Banking and the Gambling-Stakes Paradign for Loan Collateral and Labor Contracts. The revised version of Roy Halliday's article is The Gambling-Stakes Paradigm for Loans and Labor Contracts. - Roy Halliday, in section on Free Market Banking.

LONG TERM LOAN CERTIFICATES ETC. AS CURRENCY? See: APHORISMS ON THE MONEY PROBLEM, ASSET CURRENCIES, GOVERNMENTAL DEBT CERTIFICATES AS COVER? DIS., ISSUE PRINCIPLE, COVER, REFLUX, ACCEPTANCE FOUNDATION, READINESS TO ACCEPT FOUNDATION, CURRENCY

LONGEVITY RESEARCH & FINANCIAL FREEDOM: Long-term and high risk investments, like anti-aging research, do at least require value-preserving clauses and exemptions from all taxation. Under stable competing currencies and full monetary freedom as large and speculative private investments would also become possible, with the extra incentives that early and large investors would have a priority claim to all effective treatments that are found. All such research and its finance should also be taken out of the hands of politicians and bureaucrats, because they would tend to use its finding mainly to further their addiction to power and monopolies. - At least in the developed countries close to the majority of working people should become able and willing to contribute e.g. at least $ 50 p.a. to such research, to possibly benefit themselves still or at least their children and grandchildren. - J.Z., 19.7.11.

LOST SOUL BLOG: Lost Soul: Banking Without Regulation - 3 Lessons from History - www.lostsoulblog.com/.../banking-without-regulation-3-lessons.htm... - Cached - 16 Jan 2010 – Fresh historical evidence, of the sort provided in this book, usefully complements the several other studies of free-market money and ... - This one sounds promising. - J.Z., 24.7.11. - HISTORICAL EXPERIENCES

LOVE OF MONEY: A good deal of misunderstandings arises from the persistent misreading of the proverb which speaks of the "love of money", for it is, of course, the love and not the money which is the root of all evil. - E. Benn, Happier Days, p.97. - I would rather say that it is the love of the money of monetary despotism which causes major evils, not the love of the money of monetary freedom. If people loved the latter then they would have, long ago, provided themselves with just enough of it for their purposes. - If we really came to understand the money of monetary despotism, then we would no longer love it but despise it and reject it at every opportunity and insist upon providing ourselves with something just, harmless and immensely beneficial to ourselves: the monies of monetary freedom and the capital that full financial freedom could and would provide. Then and therefore, being no longer dependent upon a monopoly money and short supplied with it, and no longer under-supplied with capital, we would no longer be greedy for it, either, in the same way as we are not greedy, as a rule, for tickets. Nor would we have to work so hard or long and with so many uncertainties and so heavily taxed and exploited by xyz monopolies, for the monies of monetary freedom and the capital assets of financial freedom. Through both liberties the rest of the economy could be liberated fast. - J.Z., 25.4.97, 19.7.11. - DIS.

LULU.COM: free market money - Lulu.com - www.lulu.com/browse/search.php?&fKeywords=free+market... - Cached - Find, shop and buy products on free market money at Lulu.com, where anyone can publish and sell products on free market money.

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MACHINES & UNEMPLOYMENT: Do machines in your house make you unemployed or do they merely allow you to do more, faster, better and easier? - If you think that they make you unemployed, why not try to cut your lawn with nail scissors? - J.Z., 21.4.01. - AUTOMATION, TOOLS, Q., UNEMPLOYMENT, JOBS, FULL EMPLOYMENT, DIS.

MACHINES: Do Machines Destroy Jobs? The answer is: Yes, machines destroy jobs. In fact, the purpose of the machines is to do the work formerly done by labor. And if a machine does not replace human labor, the making of that machine has been a waste of scarce resources, including the skilled labor that invented and constructed the machine in the first place. - Usually, however, this relationship between machines and jobs is expressed more softly. Machines decrease the costs or production, thus permitting lower prices to consumers. Machines are helpful to mankind because they can do the boring and repetitive tasks, thus freeing human laborers for the more interesting aspects of production. Both statements are true, of course. But in every case, the purpose of a machine is to replace human beings, and wipe out existing jobs. That is good, however, not bad. That process is the basis of all human progress. - In various of his essays and especially in "Human versus Mechanical Labor", Frederic Bastiat clearly saw this relationship between machines and jobs. And as usual, after pointing out "what is seen", he also looked behind popular opinion for "what is not seen". - Bastiat begins with a machine that replaces perhaps 100 workers, i.e., the machine can produce as much as 100 workers without machinery. Now, if it is true, continued Bastiat, "that invention (machines) and labor (jobs) cannot expand except at each other's expense, then we can expect the following result: where we find the most machines, we can expect to find the fewest workers." - Machines Increase Jobs. - But it seldom works out that way, said Bastiat, and he offered the textile districts of England as one of many similar examples. Thousands of new jobs were available there that were not available before the advent of the machines. Instead of destroying jobs, machines actually cause a net increase in jobs. - Dean Russell, Government and Legal Plunder. Bastiat Brought Up to Date, FEE, May 85, ISBN-0-9106614-70-9, 116pp, p.85/86. - Provided, that the additional production can be easily enough sold. This does, often, require full monetary and financial freedom, also other economic liberties. - J.Z., 26.4.11. - JOBS, EMPLOYMENT, PROGRESS, UNEMPLOYMENT, DIS.8

MACHINES: Finally there was enough capital (machines) available to enable a man to produce enough to put his children into schools, if he wished to do so. It was the machines under private ownership, not child labor laws, that finally took children out of the factories and put them into schools. - Dean Russell, Government and Legal Plunder. Bastiat Brought Up to Date, FEE, May 85, ISBN-0-9106614-70-9, 116pp, p.89. - CHILDREN, CHILD LABOR, LABOR LAWS, & EDUCATION, DIS.

MACHINES: There are far more jobs today in highly-mechanized Japan than ever before, and those jobs pay as much as ten times the pre-World War II wage rate. The result of massive capital formation in a free market economy is more jobs, shorter hours, higher pay, and better products at lower prices. - Dean Russell, Government and Legal Plunder. Bastiat Brought Up to Date, FEE, May 85, ISBN-0-9106614-70-9, 116pp, p.98/99. - Only to the extent that monetary despotism is not an obstacle to the easy sale of the additional products. - J.Z., 26.4.11. - JOBS, EMPLOYMENT, STANDARD OF LIVING, WAGES, MONETARY DESPOTISM VS. MONETARY FREEDOM, CAPITAL, CAPITALISM

MACHINES: there are two vital consequences that can be attributed directly to machines that were designed to put men out of work, and did. (1) With machines, we produce more, and have more, and live longer - even though we actually work less. (2) Since human slaves cannot compete with inhuman machines, millions of slaves lost their jobs. - When you stop to think about it, that is a remarkable achievement for something (mechanization) traditionally considered the deadly enemy of the working man. The mass education that is made possible by machines, however, seems to have actually intensified our hatred and fear of our benefactor - Dean Russell, Government and Legal Plunder. Bastiat Brought Up to Date, FEE, May 85, ISBN-0-9106614-70-9, 116pp, p.90. - DIS., SLAVERY

MAKING MONEY & UNEMPLOYMENT: All people should be free to "make money" by "coining" their own goods, services and labour, issuing their own notes or ticket money or token money upon them, which do oblige only themselves - namely, to accept them at par in all payments due to them. To the extent that they succeed in doing this, alone or in association with others, associated issuers and voluntary acceptors for their notes, all of them accepting them at par, from anyone, at any time, during business hours, they will not only provide additional sales for others but the same amount of sales for themselves. These IOU's issued by them will simply have anticipated these sales. They will be enabled to buy the goods, services they want before they have to supply their own - in exchange for their own notes. - To make their notes widely enough acceptable their "backing" by their goods and services must be sound, at market prices, their issue technique must be correct and they ought to use a sound enough value standard as well, in their notes and in their prices. - The rest is easy and the first successful examples of this kind would soon be copied by many others. The question is, whether such experiments will be allowed to proceed and to succeed or whether they will remain legally suppressed - already in the initial stages? - J.Z., 28.11.92, 23.5.97, 19.7.11. Selecting optimal times and conditions for such monetary freedom experiments would be advisable. They must be times and conditions in and under which any repression attempts would be made politically as impossible as one can manage to achieve. For instance, when massive deflation or inflation exists, with their consequences, shortly before an election and when the monetary freedom experiments are so well prepared, also in public opinion, that they can and will be very rapidly successful for all their participants. - J.Z., 16.9.02. - FREE BANKING, MONETARY FREEDOM, MONETARY DESPOTISM, FULL EMPLOYMENT, EXPERIMENTAL FREEDOM FOR MONETARY EXPERIMENTS AMONG VOLUNTEERS

MAKING MONEY: The term is usually applied only to successful efforts to acquire some of the money of monetary despotism, not to the issue and acceptance of the money of monetary freedom. - Those really interested in "making money" would have it easier to be often or regularly successful if they studied the pre-conditions for and then bothered to "make" their own kinds of money tokens and circulate them, to the extent that they could, for their own benefit and that of their potential customers. To the extent that they could issue their own money, redeemable only in their own goods, services and labour, they would supply themselves - by their spending of their self-issued money, with sales and jobs. Such money, by natural law and individual rights, they could get rightfully designed, printed and offer in payment to voluntary acceptors. This way of "making" or "producing" money would offer opportunities to them - and people in like positions, which are denied to them by the legalized note issue monopoly of the central bank and the other laws of monetary despotism, especially the legal tender laws. Making money should really become "making" or issuing the own kind of sound money and using a sound value standard for it - for all those able to do so. Naturally, not all people are in the optimal position for issuing their own money tokens - but all could issue their own clearing certificates or IOUs, in convenient denominations and use a common clearing house in their community - if the laws, the bureaucracy and the politicians do not manage to continue to suppress such self-help efforts. Potentially, all pay-outs and receipts could be settled by mere clearing. - No one should be confined only to "make" (or struggle for) the money of monetary despotism, which is almost always inflated, deflated or stag-flated and amounts, for its victims to still more taxation, sometimes in form of an inflated interest rate. - J.Z., 29.4.95, 16.4.97, 19.7.11.

MALONEY, MIKE, Mike Maloney | LucyUrtazaVasquez.com / Decide. Commit. Succeed ... - lucyurtazavasquez.com/resources/mike-maloney/ - Cached - 30 Jan 2011 – What do you mean, free markets don't work? You can't have a “Free Market” without free market money! Here And Now: Putting It All Together ... ALSO: Mike Maloney | MarcCVasquez.com / Decide. Commit. Prosper ... - marccvasquez.com/resources/mike-maloney/ - Cached - 23 Jan 2011 – What do you mean, free markets don't work? You can't have a “Free Market” without free market money! Here And Now: Putting It All Together ... ALSO: Mike Maloney | Perfectus Verum Solutions / Decide. Commit. Succeed ... - perfectusverumsolutions.com/resources/mike-maloney/ - Cached - 1 Feb 2011 – What do you mean, free markets don't work? You can't have a “Free Market” without free market money! Here And Now: Putting It All Together ... ALSO: Mike Maloney | DonumVitaSolutions / Decide. Commit. Prosper ... - donumvitasolutions.com/resources/mike-maloney/ - Cached - 1 Feb 2011 – What do you mean, free markets don't work? You can't have a “Free Market” without free market money! Here And Now: Putting It All Together ... ALSO: Mike Maloney | STOUTLIFE - stoutlife.com/resources/mike-maloney/ - Cached - What do you mean, free markets don't work? You can't have a “Free Market” without free market money! Here And Now: Putting It All Together. Why I Sleep Well ...

MANIFEST YOUR DREAMS.BIZ: How About Getting a Basic Understanding of MONEY? | The "7 Steps ... - manifestyourdreams.biz/.../how-about-getting-a-basic-understanding ... - Cached - 19 Oct 2010 – Next, a Free Market Money emerges. This is a Need due to the fact that different quantities of different items have a “different value”. ...

MANN, FREDERICK, See: TERRA LIBRA.

MARCUS, B. K., Cigarette Money, cigarette money « bkmarcus.com - bkmarcus.com/2005/02/25/cigarette-money/  - Cached - 25 Feb 2005 – PPPS For the reason I assume a free-market money would be metal-based, see my Gilligan article, mentioned above. Share this: ...

MARKET & MONETARY DESPOTISM: A market subject to monetary despotism isn't free. To prevent and end both, inflation and deflation (capital destruction and unemployment), monetary freedom has to be introduced.  - J. Z., 77 & 97.

MARKET ORACLE, THE: The Dark Side of the Credit Boom :: The Market Oracle :: Financial ... - www.marketoracle.co.uk/Article1039.html  - Cached - 19 May 2007 – Why Austrians call for a return to free-market money. Austrians maintain that international monetary affairs have entered a vicious cycle: a ... - Alas, how many of the Austrian School have so far defined "free markt money" properly, including all its rightful and sound options, rather than confining their views to the classical rare metal cover and redemption currencies? - J.Z., 9..8.11. - AUSTRIAN SCHOOL OF ECONOMICS, FREE MARKET MONEY

MARKET ORACLE, THE, Who Are the Gold Experts? :: The Market Oracle :: Financial ... - www.marketoracle.co.uk/Article22928.html - Cached - 23 Sep 2010 – This hostility to free-market money is opposed to the official position of the monetarists with respect to other aspects of the market ...

MARKETING GOODS, SERVICES & LABOUR: - Privately or cooperatively issued notes or clearing certificates have no other use, value and foundation than the goods, services and labour that their issuers are ready to supply for them and the goods, services and labour which the issuers can buy with them. They have no other use for their acceptors than the sales they achieve through them and the readiness of the issuers to accept them in par in all payments due to them. They are just and sound alternative media of exchange, mediating goods, service and labour exchanges, in an economy based upon the division of labour and free exchange. They will inevitably stream back to their issuers in payment or clearing. They do not possess or need any other foundation or value. This suffices to make them self-limiting and self-liquidating. To the extent that they can be issued and are accepted, they will assure sales of goods, services and labour, firstly upon their acceptance by sellers, lastly upon their final acceptance by their issuers and, in between, for whoever accepts and spends them in the meantime. No one could force any more of them into circulation than corresponds to his readiness to accept. He could not do so any more than he could enforce the purchase of his goods, services and labour by others. Others, with their goods, services and labour, will ask for the notes issued by an issuer only to the extent that they want to acquire his goods, services and labour, giving their own in exchange - or pass them easily on, in payments, to those who do. This means, at least potentially, that all local goods, services and labour can thus be freely exchanged to the extent that they are locally wanted. That much is obvious. To that extent one or even several local currencies could be established in every more or less self-supporting village, town or regional shopping area or centre. National and international currencies could not be provided upon such a limited local issue basis. They would require larger associations of suppliers with a combined and much larger "readiness to accept foundation" to make their exchange or clearing certificates widely enough acceptable, at least among national and international traders, to serve as an alternative national and international trade currency. However, for many centuries already, honest and known merchants were able to get their individual commercial bills internationally accepted among other merchants. Those who accepted them and used them as means of payment, in their turn, became guarantors or insurers for its final payment or acceptance in settlement or clearing, by the issuer or the debtor of the issuer, upon whom the bill was drawn. Thus each bill established its own payment community, even when there were great distances between its members. Seeing all exchange media as merely convenient clearing facilitators, one might consider such bills as mere portable and mailable clearing accounts. However, they were in uneven and usually large denominations. Nor did they guaranty and insure each other. Each was on its own individual track and depended upon its own track record. Thus, for international trade, as well as for national and local trading, sound commercial bills, representing goods already produced and sold, should be made freely discountable into privately and competitively issued small bills, in convenient money denominations (banknotes), or corresponding trade and clearing accounts, in books, cards or computer memories or clearing house certificates, that would be able to circulate or be transferred much more easily than the larger and uneven commercial bills (which they would thus temporarily replace), until they would become due. The total of the notes, clearing certificates or accounts thus issued, including the profit margins claimed by their traders, would, upon due dates, suffice to pay for or clear all the due bills and remove them thus from circulation or accounts, to be replaced by others and other such discount transactions. No monopoly or governmental restriction or taxation of such banks for international currencies and clearing certificates and clearing processes should be allowed. Then goods, services and labour could be freely exchanged - internationally as well. The ready for sale or soon ready for sale export goods of all exporters in a country could thus become mobilised by them into a corresponding international purchasing power, with which the imports into that country could be paid. Via a special money market for such issues, importers would buy these certificates or accounts and use them to pay for their imports. To that extent imports and exports would be automatically balanced and this rather obviously. As for State- and federation-wide national exchanges: Local currency issuers and clearing houses would establish State- and federation-wide discounting houses and clearing centres, in which they could exchange their local currency notes for State- or federation-wide banknotes or clearing certificates. Other exchange offices or the same would also exchange local currencies directly for each other, as part of the automatically arranged note exchanges and clearing settlements. Even today private travellers' cheques are already widely used as international alternative currencies, although only privately issued and managed and ultimately tied, alas, to exclusive and forced legal tender currencies. It is interesting, that they are able to make their private currencies internationally more readily and widely acceptable than the national legal tender currencies are themselves, which have, naturally, no legal tender powers internationally. - How dense and how varied the local, State-wide, federation-wide and international exchange media and clearing certificate or paper or electronic clearing network will be and how convenient or inconvenient, should be left to the free choices of the participants. Not being a jet-setter or having jet-setting friends, I would e.g. have no use for opera or theatre tickets in London or New York - but as a collector of freedom literature, I would be interested e.g. in standardised literature payment certificates that I could convert into new or second-hand printed books or books and papers on microfiche or floppy disks or CD-ROMs, etc., at any associated supplier on Earth. As a supplier of micro-fiched freedom writings, I would gladly participate in a common sales listing and distribution centre. Moreover, then I could, probably, discount at such an international distribution centre some of my own IOUs, redeemable in my LMP freedom microfiche or freedom book collection discs, not only in credits for other freedom literature, in any medium, sold through that centre, but also for any other exchange media that it would receive in its sales, to the extent that it would manage to sell my LMP freedom literature offered on my microfiche or on discs, not only for other literature credits but for other currencies. But this example indicates also the limits for free issues: As long as there is only a very tiny demand for freedom literature on microfiche, floppy disks, CD-ROMs, video tapes, audio tapes, hard disks, and on-line, or on photocopies, this tiny demand cannot be turned into widely enough circulating medium. No ready buyers - no issue capacity. Only goods and services in daily demand can form the basis for readily circulating currencies. Other goods and services, only rarely traded, can, as a rule, only be exchanged for readily issued and accepted currencies issued by others. Rare art treasures or insufficiently wanted information are not a sufficient basis for the issue of a currency, although they are valuable and can be traded between a few and sold to a few for other currencies. - J. Z., 23.8.85, 3.5.97, 19.7.11. - NOT ONLY LOCALLY BUT NATIONALLY & INTERNATIONALLY, THROUGH MONETARY FREEDOM

MARKETING OR DISTRIBUTION: An easier marketing or sale of goods and services, including labour services, is achievable via the issue of purchasing and clearing vouchers based upon these goods and services, provided this issue is undertaken by the owners of these goods and services themselves or by the associations they establish and use for this purpose. They should use for this convenient money denominations and sound value standards and full publicity for their issues, whose acceptance should be optional in general circulation and whose ratings should also be left to the free market, especially the local one. To be able to issue them, again and again, and get them accepted by many of their potential customers, the issuers would have to keep them at par with their nominal values or close enough to the par value, most of the time. Then, to the extent that they could issue these notes and seeing that their potential customers would have no other use for these notes, they would have assured for themselves corresponding sales. In essence, the notes would circulate only as long as needed to get into the hands of consumers who want to pay with them for their daily consumption requirements. That kind of demand for means of payment is vast and can, probably, keep a circulation at par that corresponds not only to the daily consumption but to the consumption of the next month to 3 months, if the experience with real bills and with tax foundation money is still a valid guide. The daily rating of private exchange media against their value standards would be a better indicator. They can be readily issued as long as they are accepted at par. Then, in the own interest, the issuers will stop further issues until the par is restored. They do not want to suffer a loss and do want to stay in the note issuing business. Moreover, they want to be able to settle their balances with other note issuers. On the other side, the acceptance of notes will become greatly reduced when notes fall below par, at least among all those, who do not have to pay due debts to the issuer or who want to immediately buy goods or services from him. When they want to receive a CURRENCY then people are not satisfied with receiving something that is NOT currently at par in general circulation but merely acceptable at par by the issuer, whose goods and services they might not want or need at present. Only some debtors of the issuer would then still be prepared to accept or obliged to accept the notes at par. No issuer would have to assure convertibility of his notes into rare metals, unless he had obliged himself to make this additional and objectively unnecessary expense. His competitors, not addicted to notions of metallic redemptionism, would not have this additional transaction cost and thus could undercut his prices. - Such alternative means of exchange and value standards to get and keep the economy, the daily turnovers, production, retail businesses and jobs going and integrate millions of unemployed into the economy, could be rightfully and efficiently supplied very fast, especially when and while governments are, quite obviously, unable to supply enough or sound enough exchange media and value standards - a situation which has often catastrophic consequences. - There is no moral obligation to respect the forced government currency and the monopoly of the central bank. Under certain conditions they will not or cannot be enforced. These situations should be utilised and one should sufficiently prepare oneself for them. - J.Z., 20.9.91, 27.4.97, 9.7.11.

MARKOVITZ, MORRIS J., Fractional versus 100% Reserve Banking - June 1988. - "As the fractional reservers point out, there’s nothing wrong with loan-brokering. What’s wrong is forcing people to deposit into a loan-brokering scheme by forbidding the alternative, while simultaneously falsely advertising the loan-broker outfit as a safe warehouse. That’s what today’s banking system does and both sides would agree that it’s wrong." - Roy Halliday

MATONIS, JON W., Digital Cash and Monetary Freedom - Roy Halliday, in section on Genuine Money.

MATONIS, JON W., current address not known to me. Tried to establish The Monetary Freedom Institute, MONETARY FREEDOM QUARTERLY and wrote much on monetary freedom and made many photocopies of such texts available to me. - Searching with Google for "Jon Matonis" + "monetary freedom" + "digital currency", I get today 282 results, including: The Monetary Future - themonetaryfuture.blogspot.com/ - "Jon Matonis" brings me 15,700 hints. There are two people called Jon Matonis in Utah, and 8070 hints are offered on them. - Jon Matonis - Schweiz | LinkedIn - ch.linkedin.com/in/jonmatonis - Cached - Zürich Area, Switzerland -Digital Currency Executive-Network Inference - Sehen Sie sich das Karriere-Profil von Jon Matonis (Schweiz) auf LinkedIn an. ... I am editor of The Monetary Future, a leading economics blog at the ... I have not been in touch with him for many years. - Jon Matonis - @jonmatonis - J.Z., 19.7.11. - DIGITAL CURRENCY, MONETARY FREEDOM, BIBLIOGRAPHY, CYBERCASH.

MEANS OF CIRCULATION VS. MEANS FOR CAPITALISATION: See: APHORISMS ON THE MONEY PROBLEM. CURRENCY, ASSET CURRENCY, LAND CURRENCY, FOUNDATION OF MONEY ISSUES, COVER, REDEMPTION, FINANCIAL FREEDOM

McILWAINE, SIMON, The Failure of State Money and the Case for Monetary Individualism - Hint by Roy Halliday.

McWILLIAMS, DAVID, David McWilliams discusses Ireland's deficit - The People's Economy - thepeopleseconomy.com/day-5-david-mcwilliams-discusses-irelands... - Cached - ... bank model of money creation is the best option for the majority of people or is there better way such as free market money or treasury issued money? ...

MEETING, CONFERENCE & SEMINAR CALENDAR, INTERNATIONAL, AS PART OF A MONETARY FREEDOM NEWSLETTER OR JOURNAL:

MELTZER, ALLAN H., What’s Wrong with the IMF? What Would Be Better? - "Created in 1944 to help stabilize debtor countries, the International Monetary Fund today is a source of instability, chiefly through its subsidies of risky bank loans and penalties on sound ones. The time has come to rely more on bank capital and market-based incentives to strengthen the international financial system." - Roy Halliday, in section on International Banking.

MERCANTILISM, MONETARY DESPOTISM & MONETARY FREEDOM: While the mercantilists thought that to become better off one would have to accumulate more money, having in mind merely a scarce and exclusive silver or and gold currency, the monetary freedom advocates hold that one would have to produce more sound money, sufficient for all wanted exchanges, largely based upon wanted goods and services, already produced and sold, at least to wholesalers, or already offered in retail shops. They assume that only thereby one would facilitate sales and trade and thus increase orders and more production and trade and increase general prosperity or the standard of living, as much as one could, with the existing technology and sciences, skills and training, resources and productively invested savings. Under monetary freedom savings would also accumulate fast and under financial freedom they could and would be more fully and readily available for productive investments. - I would like to see a model experiment undertaken, e.g., in a Red Indian reservation or in some poor village in Haiti or under similar underdeveloped conditions, e.g. among Negroes in Harlem. It could begin with a single general store, issuing its own token currency, based especially upon local products for local consumption and would make a few wage payment loans with its token currency to local producers, too. (A fringe benefit for the store would be, it would not be held up for this kind of private and competitive cash for its holders and spenders could be very easily traced. - One of the benefits of a limited and local circulation. - J.Z., 12.9.02.) - How fast could such a system expand, e.g. to include the local shopping centre, increasing local productivity and local sales and local employment as well as local savings, assuming only that there exist no mental, legal, customary, traditional, juridical and administrative blocks against such a self-help development and against making and accepting one's own money, or that of competing money issuers and using these exchange media (or clearing certificates or account credits) optimally for one's own productive and exchange purposes? How long would it take before there might be two shops and the number of those paid wages for productive local work in this local currency would be doubled? How long before there would be small local surpluses, which could be invested in mini-loans for local mini-enterprises? (The repayment of mini-loans made only in the exclusive currency of monetary despotism, in other times than rapid inflation, leads to the usual difficulties for these debtors, too. - J.Z., 20.7.11.) How long would it be before such a local economy and local currency issue would help the local economy to, so to speak, pull itself up by its bootstraps?  Naturally, that would require local autonomy towards the central monetary despotism, probably also exemptions from all taxes imposed by outsiders. - But with the sympathies that ethnic minorities can now often count upon, they might have it easier than others to thus break the stranglehold of monetary despotism and become self-supporting, economically independent citizens of their self-chosen communities. - Judging from what I have read about the innovative genius, skills and readiness to learn new things, among e.g. Eskimos, according to some reporters or observers, their remaining communities, to the extent that they got away from subsistence economics, might be most suitable for starting such experiments, if only their environment and climate and distance from existing trading centres would not prevent them from engaging e.g. in any agricultural (e.g. fish farming) or industrial production. - Mere food gathering, hunting, fishing and handicraft economies are possibly not sufficient to develop sound local currencies and to develop the local economy beyond that foundation, including the local economy in the general division of labour scheme, beyond local subsistence efforts. - Assume that tribal rights would now be more widely recognized, even those of Eskimos, desert tribes or Firelanders (if any of these survived to today), who were formerly driven into icy or hot deserts, by more warlike tribes. Presume further that they would not be bound to merely continue with their old ways of life but that the dissenters among them would be free to adopt new and free ways of making a living and that their autonomy would be recognized, even to the extent that they would be granted exterritorial autonomy and freedom to settle and work anywhere. (No longer subject to the usual territorial political despotism, however camouflaged via e.g. representative majoritarian "democracy". Then, perhaps, e.g. the Eskimos might come to shine and provide "economic wonders" far beyond those provided by West Germany or Japan after WW II, and by the Asian "tiger economies" from a soon achieved much wider base of knowledge, skills and resources. - Indeed, by now generations of welfare statism may have largely changed the character, mentality and natural drives of the remaining reservation Eskimos as they seem to have those of many Red Indians and Aborigines confined to more or less wasteland reservations. However, if just a few are free to do their things, using their monetary and financial freedom rights, well enough informed about them and thus and therefore succeeded, once they began to act upon them - or failed, if they still make too many mistakes - free to act upon sound ideas or free market money and currencies, with their labours, knowledge, ideas, enterprise and initiative, unhindered by bureaucrats, politicians, lawyers and popular prejudices or customs (not confined to their old traditions, or to tourist entertainment, gambling facilities etc.), how long would it take then before at least some of them would quite intelligently take up e.g. their monetary and financial freedom options, demonstrate their efficiency to the doubtful Thomases and then see many others follow their example? - To speed the process up, one could assume that the reservation communities would also have the right to take up loans on a stable value basis and to grant tax exemptions to enterprises set up in their areas and to introduce unilateral free trade for them. Then they might be swamped with development offers. Assume further, that supermarkets and department stores in their reservations would also be free to issue their own currencies. How much time would then pass before enough of them would be established to be able to provide short term credits for wage payments for many local productive jobs? I am not thinking merely in terms of casinos and craft and tourist activities but of full autonomy for minority groups, initially only within their reservations and later outside, too, on the basis of personal laws, and, especially, in terms of full monetary and financial freedom. - People who remain bound by traditions, customs or habits or have developed the hand-out mentality, or who excuse all their inactivity and failures merely with reference to national and racial or religious prosecutions in the past, would not make optimal use of such opportunities. But there might be enough among the others, who would gladly grab and realize such self-help opportunities and use them not only to impress the traditionalists in their own communities but also those in the rest of the world. Indeed, some reservation communities might have to split, based upon individual choices, into the traditionalists and progressives - and, perhaps, into the local socialists and the local capitalists, too. - Is there any place or reservation in the world where this approach could be tried? Even those, who look down upon minorities or even hate them, should have less objections against such self-help steps than against riots, demonstrations, protests, gun battles, occupations, endless court cases and continued hand-out anti-economics. - Current inhabitants of reservations seem to think, like mercantilists thought formerly, that they could get rich only via the money produced by and imported from others and then kept in the own country, as far as possible. They did not consider producing sound money themselves, sufficient for all their exchange requirements and encouraging them to produce more to the extent that more or their goods and services are wanted by them - or by outsiders. - J.Z., 11.1.80, 28.6.89, 15.5.97. - They ought to ponder their modern "wampum" options. - J.Z., 20.17.11. - ESKIMOS, RED INDIANS, RESERVATIONS, RACIAL MINORITY GROUPS

MERCANTILISM, MONEY MONOPOLY & CURRENCY FAMINE: At least the mercantilists saw one thing clear: a persistent currency famine. They knew that with a greater supply of sound exchange media they could produce and exchange much more. However, they tried to overcome this shortage in a wrong and inefficient way, namely by accumulating scarce and exclusive exchange media, like rare metal coins, and prohibiting their export, instead of abolishing this kind of money monopoly and producing themselves, competitively, as much sound money as the market would accept at par, i. e., without discounting it. - Note to Theodor Hertzka, Die Probleme der menschlichen Wirtschaft, S.8. - J.Z., 11.1.81, 15.5.97, 20.7.11.

MEULEN, HENRY, ON MONETARY DESPOTISM & CREDIT RESTRICTIONS: What I do know with certainty is the amazing contradiction of a world that most certainly desires increased production, and is yet busily engaged everywhere in stripping down production by squeezing credit. This contradiction springs solely from the fact that governments have everywhere prohibited industry from furnishing its own means of exchange. The two instruments of this prohibition are (1) insistence on maintaining gold as a fixed price; (2) prohibition of commercial bank note issues." - Henry Meulen, THE INDIVIDUALIST, 1/76. - Not only industry but commerce, agriculture and transport companies are under credit restrictions. Legal or insistence upon ANY value standard does restrict credit, as opposed to free choice of value standards, which Meulen to my knowledge never advocated. Nor should commercial banks be the only permitted issuers of banknotes, clearing certificates and other means of exchange, like, e.g., railway monies and sound private coinage. Like almost all money reformers, this free banking advocate had his own favourite system which blinded him to all other monetary freedom options. This remained true even after many years, if not decades, of correspondence with Ulrich von Beckerath, of which, alas, all too little is still in existence. Fixed ideas still predominate in this sphere, too, even among individualists, even among readers and advocates of Max Stirner. - J.Z., 29.4.97.

MEULEN, HENRY: His views are still to be extracted from THE INDIVIDUALIST and his book, pamphlets and letters, to the extent that the latter are on hand or can still be obtained, with refutations, where necessary. See the books essays and letters by Ulrich von Beckerath on Henry Meulen's basic monetary and value standard errors. - J.Z., 20.7.11.

MEULEN, HENRY: PAPER MONEY UNDER HENRY MEULEN'S GOLD "STANDARD": If ... our paper money can be exchanged for gold at the current free market price of the metal, we should be satisfied." - HENRY MEULEN, THE INDIVIDUALIST, 12/75, p62. - On the contrary. Even the most inflated paper money can still be so exchanged. - J.Z., 13.6.85. - Like many others, Meulen never fully comprehended the effects of legal tender and liberated his thinking from gold-redemptionism. He wanted to have competing paper monies redeemed by various quantities of gold, representing gold value fluctuations in a free gold market, so that his "real" value standard would have been a supposedly stable one, because, according to him, it would then be properly manipulated, still a paper value standard, redeemed in varying quantities of gold weights with which, as he supposed, always about the same quantity and quality of goods and services could always be bought. He favoured only a limited issue competition for such exchange media and did not favour free choice of value standards, either. He also thought legal tender to be rather harmless, because ultimately it would be refused after a severe inflation. In this he managed to overlook the damage it would have done in the meantime. He also asserted, in my opinion wrongly, that in England goods- and service warrants, in money denominations, could be freely issued, if only they would not promise redemption in gold or in pounds sterling. He surveyed the older monetary legislation pretty well but ignored, I think, all the modern laws against private note issues and clearing arrangements. If Englishmen were not legally and juridically restrained from monetary self-help steps, then they would have to be pretty ignorant or stupid to put up with the monetary despotism of the Bank of England, its inflations, deflations and stagflations, which currently have driven the U.K. once again into the "tender embraces" of the State socialists, after a few years in which private property rights were somewhat respected or even spread. - J. Z., 13.6.85, 4.5.97, 20.7.11.

MICHAELTMAK.COM: Younique Wealth And The History Of Money | Part 1 - www.michaeltmak.com/.../younique-wealth-and-the-history-of-mon... - Cached - 18 Mar 2011 – The Life Cycle Of Money Part 2 – Free Market Money Emerges. With the emergence of a free market, free money must emerge, to enable smooth ...

MICRO-CREDITS: The prolonged and wide-spread micro-credit scheme, that had started a whole new credit industry, came to an inglorious state of affairs. In at least one Indian State it was even outlawed. It was started by Dr. Muhammad Yunus and was operating only within the limited opportunities of monetary despotism, based upon the false assumption that all the poor needed was some capital, even if only a mini-capital, to become productive and finally prosperous. That is also one of the basic errors of many of the Miseans and Rothbardians. - "Grameen, the bank for the poor he started three decades ago with $US 27 [million? - J.Z.] from his own pocket, now boasts $US1 billion in loans, more in savings, and more than 8 million customers. - Less a bank than an empire, Grameen also operates a mobile phone company, a knitwear factory and a power prover. Its billboards are ubiquitous, and hawkers peddle its founder's books at traffic lights with a single word 'Yunus?'. … Studies show that only about percent f borrowers 'graduate' to financial independence." - Millions in aid were granted to the scheme e.g. by the U.N. and by the US. (*) - THE SYDNEY MORNING HERALD, April 9-10, 11, smh.com.au, p. 20, Ben Doherty in Dhaka, Poor can no longer bank on micro-credit. - (*) AusAid was also committed to subsidies to the scheme to the tune of $ 22.5 millions p.a., which indicates that it was not a self-supporting scheme, although the members, 20 million households had savings of $US 1.3 billion. - This article by Ben Doherty is the best of three that I have recently seen on the subject. But even it does no examine and criticize the unsound premise that merely some capital is required for the enterprising poor, capital in form of the government's monopoly money, which led to the fact that it became also, at least in some instances, a loan-sharking scheme with very high interest rate. One company charged up to 125%. In some cases people were forced into accepting loans without a hope of repaying them. Debtors were, sometimes, bullied, harassed and beaten into making repayments, so that in the Indian state of Andhra Padesh more than 50 farmers committed suicide. Dr. Yunus, 70, was put out of office, into an unwilling retirement, not only because he had exceeded the legal age limit of 65 years for bank executives in Bangladesh. He was said to be autocratic and unwilling to brook criticism. He also intended to set up an anti-corruption party which made him rather unpopular with the existing parties. Did he attempt to fight corruption in the own scheme? The movement was extended into many countries, e.g. Mexico, Nigeria. According to this Ben Doherty, the movement is at a crossroad. But is it on the road to monetary and financial freedom, which could have avoided its difficulties and wrongs? I have not found any sign of that. No matter how large a capital is available for loans for productive purposes, it cannot easily pay interest or even merely repay the capital lent, until sufficient sales are assured for its products or services. Under monetary despotism, with its monopoly money, these sales are NOT assured. If they had been granted in competitively supplied local currencies or even mere "street money", as was issued for some time in China, the situation could have been radically changed. Not only could the debtors have repaid such loans much easier from local sales but they could themselves have associated and offered their own goods and service vouchers in monetary denominations, accepting them for the goods and services they offer between them. Under full monetary freedom all of them could also have gained productive jobs as employees, at market rates, corresponding to their productivity, when employers provided them with tools or machines. The would no longer have been forced to sell their labor, if they could get jobs at all, at emergency sales prices or wages, payable only in the government's monopoly money, which was, moreover, usually inflated. They could then also have formed productive coops with a much higher success rate than under monetary despotism. But in all the writings that I have seen on the subject, this possibility was never raised. - By the way, regarding poverty in Bangladesh, I got recently an interesting statement from a local doctor, who immigrated to Australia from Bangladesh. When I mentioned that he was probably glad to be out of Bangladesh, he asserted, that most people had a wrong impression of its poverty. Of its 150 million people there would be 50 million with a higher standard of living than the average Australian has and only the remaining 100 million would be poorer or very poor. I have seen no confirmation of this statement so far from others. - J.Z., 2.5.11.

MICROFICHE & UNEMPLOYMENT: Ever since LMP has produced many monetary freedom writings on microfiche, anybody can seek and find and very cheaply acquire these writings or add to them, although only in this format and in photocopies or scans made from them, at his expense. They do already offer much of the recorded wisdom on how to overcome mass unemployment completely and very fast through monetary self-help measures, i. e., without further robberies and oppressions. All government programmes, instead, destroy more and better jobs than they provide. - J.Z.,10.1.94, 24.5.97. - Since then many monetary freedom writings have become available digitized. Today's Google search for "free market money" brought me 1,580,000 results. I got only around to quickly skim the first 20 pages and saw there already many texts indicated that were new to me. - J.Z., 20.7.11. - DIGITIZED TEXTS, FREE MARKET MONEY

MILITIAS, VOLUNTARY, LOCALLY ORGANIZED & FEDERATED, FOR THE PROTECTION OF ALL INDIVIDUAL RIGHTS: Lastly, the advocates of monetary freedom, together with the advocates of all other individual liberties and rights, may have to arm, organise, train and motivate themselves to help realize and maintain their liberties and rights against all those inclined towards despotism in this and other spheres. - J.Z., n.d., 21.7.11.

MINORITY GROUPS' BANKS OF ISSUE: Much of the sympathies existing for minority groups, that do not fanatically insist upon their complete integration, handouts and indemnities for wrongs committed against their ancestors, could be gathered to support e.g. their right to establish competing free banks of issue. - But I would also like to see a multicultural bank of issue and would consider its free banking practice to be even more important than its clearly expressed lack of racist or cultural bias. - J. Z., 27.5.97.

MISES INSTITUTE, Gold is Free Market Money | Liberty Australia - www.la.org.au/video/271109/gold-free-market-money- Cached - Recorded at the Mises Institute Supporters Summit, 1 November 2008; Auburn, Alabama. [27:24]Embedded Video.

MISES, LUDWIG von, Free Banking and Contract Law - "Free banking is the only method available for the prevention of the dangers inherent in credit expansion. It would, it is true, not hinder a slow credit expansion, kept within very narrow limits, on the part of cautious banks which provide the public with all information required about their financial status. But under free banking it would have been impossible for credit expansion with all its inevitable consequences to have developed into a regular - one is tempted to say normal - feature of the economic system. Only free banking would have rendered the market economy secure against crises and depressions." - Roy Halliday, in section on Free Market Banking.

MISES, LUDWIG von, Free Banking versus Large-scale Credit Expansion - "Government interference with the present state of banking affairs could be justified if its aim were to liquidate the unsatisfactory conditions by preventing or at least seriously restricting any further credit expansion. In fact, the chief objective of present-day government interference is to intensify further credit expansion. This policy is doomed to failure. Sooner or later it must result in a catastrophe." - Roy Halliday, in section on Free Market Banking.

MISES, LUDWIG von, Gold vs Paper - July 13, 1953 - by Ludwig von Mises. - "The excellence of the gold standard is to be seen in the fact that it makes the monetary unit's purchasing power independent of the arbitrary and vacillating policies of governments, political parties, and pressure groups. Historical experience, especially in the last decades, has clearly shown the evils inherent in a national currency system that lacks this independence." - Roy Halliday, in section on gold. - A case of false opposites. Neither should be imposed. Both should be subject to free choice. Open your eyes and your mind to the rightful alternatives. - J.Z., 9.8.11.

MISES, LUDWIG von, The Gold Standard - "The gold standard is certainly not a perfect or ideal standard. There is no such thing as perfection in human things. But nobody is in a position to tell us how something more satisfactory could be put in place of the gold standard." -  - Roy Halliday, in section on gold.

MISES, LUDWIG von, The Problem of the Freedom of the Banks - "Everything that has been said in favor of control of the banking system pales into insignificance beside the objections that can nowadays be advanced against state regulation of the issue of notes." - Roy Halliday, in section on Government-Regulated Banking

MISES, LUDWIG von, Theory of Money and Credit - "In 1912, when Mises, at age thirty-one, wrote this landmark book, no monetary theory could be described as both securely founded on economic reality and properly incorporated into an analysis of the entire economic system. The Theory of Money and Credit opened new vistas. It integrated monetary theory into the main body of economic analysis for the first time, providing fresh new insights into the nature of money and its role in the economy." - Roy Halliday http://royhalliday.home.mindspring.com/

MISES, LUDWIG von, Who is Ludwig von Mises? - discoverludwigvonmises.com/articles/WhoIsLudwigVonMises.htm - Cached - He realised that money is not some strange concept that has to be treated separately from commodities; it is a commodity (in fact, in a free-market, money ...

MISES, LUDWIG VON: Correct and incorrect views of L. v. Mises on monetary freedom, might be listed separately, with the required refutations of the remaining flaws in his monetary thinking. - Even the members of the Austrian School of economics and the fans of Mises himself, should start to think on some points beyond Mises, as e.g. Hayek did. - Mises was a scientist and as such he would never have insisted that his monetary views and assumptions should be totally accepted as irrefutable dogmas or natural laws on money and currency. - J.Z., 20.7.11. - E.g., Lara & Murphy, in their recent book on supposedly free banking (*), quote Mises, at the beginning of Chapter 4, p. 203, as saying: "There was no reason whaever to abandon the principle of free enterprise in the field of banking." - However, what Mises et al of the Austrian School consider to be "free enterprise" in this sphere does greatly differ from what others consider free enterprise in banking to be. Lysander Spooner and Land Bank advocates imagined that even capital assets could be directly turned into sound currency. Most Mises followers imagine that only rare metal stocks could and should be turned into currency, metallic coins or paper certificates for them. The Swiss, German and Jewish free banking school of the 1930's, continued so far only by a very few like myself, asserts, instead, that all wanted consumer goods and services, ready for sale, could be turned into sound currency tokens, to the extent that such issues would remain at par with their chosen sound value standard. - J.Z., 23.7.11. - (*) How Privatized Banking Really Works, Integrating Austrian Economics with the Infinite Banking Concept, by L. Carlos Lara & Robert P. Murphy, 2010, ISBN 978-0-615-32682-5), offered free online, alas only in PDF, http://consultingbyrpm.com/uploads/HPBRW.pdf - which I could not convert, to criticize easily copied extracts from it. - Judging by what I have read of it so far, it has very little to do with free banking in my sense. - J.Z., 23.7.11.

MISES, LUDWIG VON: He was a great guy, thinker, researcher and writer in many ways but still only human. He, too, had his limits in his insights, visions and proposals and, like many innovators, wanted to confine us to his ideas and proposals. We should let free people, in a free market be creative and pioneering in spheres where Mises was not sufficiently creative and think and act beyond his favorite proposals and schemes. He was neither for full monetary freedom nor for exterritorial and panarchistic voluntary competition between all political, economic and social systems. He did not explore the various self-management options for enterprises, either, just like Ayn Rand didn’t. We should not expect too much from any of our heroes. They, too, were no supermen or superwomen. – J.Z., 27.4.05, 5.10.10.

MISES, LUDWIG von: MISTAKES IN HIS MONETARY TEACHINGS: See: MISTAKES OF THE AUSTRIAN SCHOOL OF ECONOMICS ON MONEY; AUSTRIAN SCHOOL OF ECONOMICS; MONEY MANIPULATION ACCORDING TO MISES.

MISES, LUDWIG von: The market always finds a way » Human Action - www.humanaction.co.za/2011/03/the-market-always-finds-a-way/ - Cached - 29 Mar 2011 – In the same way, free market money will eventually win out against the dollar, euro, yuan and all the other protected pretenders. ...

MISTAKES OF THE AUSTRIAN SCHOOL OF ECONOMICS ON MONEY: There are a number of different errors and mistakes among the various adherents of this school. They do not share all their errors among themselves but some they tend to have in common - apart from their numerous valuable truths and insights. - (1.) The 100 % gold cover and convertibility spleen or, alternatively, the belief that a fractional gold reserve would always be sufficient. - (2.) The notion that under an exclusive gold coin circulation - and that of redeemable gold certificates - all prices and wages would automatically, sufficiently and fast enough adapt to totally avoid phenomena like currency shortages or currency famines. - (3.) Its advocacy of the CURRENCY PRINCIPLE and condemnation of the BANKING PRINCIPLE & REAL BILLS DOCTRINE. See there. - (4.) While seeing some of the wrongs and disadvantages of legal tender, it remained largely unaware that the evils it fears of alternative currencies, not fractionally or 100% covered by gold, would not occur for currencies that are competitive supplied, optional, i.e. refusable and free market rated, i.e., discountable. Not all alternative issues are automatically worthless or depreciating "fiat money". Almost anyone nowadays condemns totalitarianism. Similarly, one can condemn monetary despotism - and do this with little awareness of the full range of all human liberties e.g. of all of monetary freedom. Just consider how long it took an as famous and scholarly Austrian like Hayek to come to advocate a large degree of monetary freedom in "Free Choice in Currency" (1975), and in "Denationalisation of Money" (1976). Those few academics who followed in his footsteps have, mostly, still not become fully aware of this monetary freedom predecessors, their writings and teachings, and thus not of the full monetary freedom options. - (5.) Money manipulations: Mises remained insufficiently aware that any legal tender law (except that enforcing legal tender ONLY towards the issuer, for his own notes) and any exclusive currency and exchange medium status (money monopoly), does already amount to a coercive manipulation of money. - I will, certainly not try here and now to list all these mistakes (I am no Mises scholar. That should be done by free-thinking Miseans, in their own interest), especially those relating to the "classical gold standard", perceived as one consisting only of gold coins and 100% covered and convertible gold certificates. Rothbard considered all other issues as fraudulent. So did Mises, in Money Manipulation, p.44, where he speaks of an "absolute prohibition" of other options. - While it is right to outlaw monetary despotism steps, laws, measures, policies and institutions, it is wrong to outlaw monetary freedom steps. (As an exclusive exchange medium and an exclusive value standard the money and currency preferred by Mises and other Austrian School economists should also be outlawed, just as much as the monopolized and forced paper currency in all territorial States. It would be legitimate only among voluntary followers, i.e., members of an exterritorially autonomous community. - J.Z., 12.9.02.) - (6.) Due to Mises' rejection of morality and ethics in economics and adoption of "praxeology" instead, he would never have been interested in or able to state the rights and liberties of monetary freedom. Thus he could recommend only what he considered to be practicable and economical, from a point of view that was inevitably limited, as even those of the wisest men among us are. - J. Z., 4.12.92, 30.4.97. - I must admit that I consider the economic and even the monetary views of the Austrians to be important, so important that they should all be collected, stated together and sufficiently refuted, to the extent that this is needed, to the satisfaction of even the best Austrian School economists. - J.Z., 30.4.97. - With his all too late and somewhat detailed writings on monetary freedom Hayek has opened a breach in their former dogmatic positions - but it has not yet been fully followed through into the wide field of full monetary and financial freedom. The old fallacies, dogmas, errors and myths have, like all popular prejudices, revealed strength and longevity - while the monetary freedom truths remain insufficiently stated or publicised. - J. Z., 12.9.02, 20.7.11. - PURCHASING POWER; REDEMPTIONISM & ITS AUTOMATION, GOLD STANDARD

MISTAKES: The right to make mistakes - at the own expense and risk and that of only voluntary followers or partners - is as important in the sphere of exchange media and value standards as it is in others. - But under full freedom in this sphere mistakes will soon become rarer and rarer and harmfully affect smaller and smaller groups of the remaining true believers in them. - J.Z., 24.4.97.

MM, THE MILLIONAIRES' MANUAL: A digest sized magazine that is or was published quarterly. It deals with "common sense" economics ... and politics, as economics and politics go hand in hand. Subs.: $30 p.a.: MM (Cheques to the MILLIONAIRES' MANUAL), P.O. Box 1928, Cocoa, Fl. 32 923. - I have seen only one issue of it so far, undated, in 1986: 132 pages. It is edited by Robert White and contains an article by GREEN, JAMES L., Prof. of Ec., Univ. of Georgia: Investments & Sound Money. Also articles by Antony C. Sutton and Marshall Payn. He may be the same ROBERT WHITE who issued Duck Books I & II, both full of material from financial newsletters. - GREEN, JAMES L.

MODERATING THE ECONOMY: Successfully moderate the economy. - I believe that was also one of the "pearls of wisdom" by our former "great leader", PM Keating, possibly also uttered on 14.12.94. - Other such expressions are "cooling  the economy down" and "demand manipulation", or "shaving the top off demand". - All your income, paid only in the money they have excessively issued, is considered to be "excess demand" that "overheats" the economy. Their spending and waste, often even on luxuries for their own enjoyment, at least whilst they remain in power, is not to be subject to any restrictions, least of all restrictions that voters are to be free to vote upon and decide. - They are not ready to moderate their monetary and financial and general economic despotism. On the contrary, they are always ready to increase it at your expense and then to call it "moderating the economy". I know of no moderate terms for this kind of policy, nor even of a term which would be severe enough in condemning these frauds, robbers and despots or political con-men. At present, the Australian socialists and modern liberals compete with each other in selling off public assets, with the proceeds always ending up in their own pockets or budgets for further wasteful and misdirected spending, to let them appear as benefactors to the public, rather than robbers and embezzlers. But, formerly nationalised or municipalised enterprises belong to the taxpayers as involuntary shareholders or citizen owners of all public assets in Australia. Thus these shareholders or citizens should, upon each privatisation, have got their personal shares in these assets. Instead, once again, they are robbed by their "representatives" and "leaders" and foolish enough to put up with this. Only in some cases, in the formerly sovietised countries, have vouchers been distributed to the citizens, with which they could buy an interest in formerly nationalised enterprises. - For a comprehensive and rightful denationalisation plan, one that could also finance a liberation effort by a libertarian party, see my PEACE PLANS 19c: Let Freedom Pay Its Way. Its 3rd. edition is now also digitized and available as an e-mail, until it becomes available on a website and on CD-ROM. - DIS.

MOGAMBO GURU, THE, From the US to Zimbabwe - June 27, 2009. - by The Mogambo Guru. - "I notice that I am still using exclamation points to express my profound stupefaction that the damned Federal Reserve is creating so much money, which means that the value of the dollar will go down, and we are on the same path as the morons running Zimbabwe who, I guess you heard, finally created so much money - which created so much inflation in prices as the oversupply of new money completely diluted the existing stock of money - that the Zimbabwe dollar is now officially worthless. Worthless!" - Roy Halliday

MOGG, WILLIAM REES, Is Gold Money? - "We need also to have permanent money, which can be relied upon to survive, even though its value may decline over time. The historic value of gold has been astonishingly stable over centuries." - Roy Halliday, in section on gold.

MONETARIST SCHOOL: Money matters" & "money matters most" are the mottoes of the monetarist school, according to Henry Hazlitt, in THE FREEMAN, Aug. 76. - MONEY MATTERS, MONEY MATTERS MOST

MONETARY & FINANCIAL FREEDOM: Among other things, it will mean the independence of the American and thereby largely also the world economy, from central bankers like Alan Greenspan and his errors, prejudices, dogmas, policies and decrees - and those of the central bankers in other countries. - J.Z., 26.8.02. - VS. CENTRAL BANKING & CENTRAL BANK "INDEPENDENCE".

MONETARY & FINANCIAL FREEDOM: Once it is realized boom times will be permanent. We would not merely temporarily experience some limited boom periods and in between recessions to depressions. Temporary gold, silver, share or land booms, out of fear of further inflation, would also become be a thing of the past, as well as excessive speculation in extremely fluctuating because managed or mismanaged foreign currencies. We would also have to do without the numerous bargains now obtainable from forced sales and the boom times for bureaucrats, their measures, committees, boards, authorities and quangos, and for politicians with their popular prejudices and misleading and false promises and the high burdens they can manage to impose upon the economy. Another "drawback", once monetary and financial freedom are universally introduced, will be the absence of refugee capital from other countries, i.e., of capital forced to flee to a few places where it is still treated somewhat respectfully and gratefully. Naturally, the country that first introduced monetary and financial freedom would get the full benefit of all such capital. The fluctuations at the stock exchanges will be much less. Garage sales and shops dealing in second hand goods will almost disappear - as they had almost disappeared in West Germany by 1991. So will beggars. Drug use, drunkenness, gambling and crime will be reduced. Even terrorism, dictatorships, civil wars, revolutions and international wars will become much less frequent or lasting. We would loose the "industrial reserve army", too. - Shall we mourn their passing? - J. Z., 19.3.97, 28.8.02, 20.7.11. - DIS.

MONETARY & VALUE STANDARD DEVELOPMENTS PREDICTED IN THE ABSENCE OF ANY MONEY LEGISLATION OR WHENEVER IT IS NO LONGER OR CAN NO LONGER BE ENFORCED: See especially the long paper by Ulrich von Beckerath on this. - THE FUTURE OF MONEY.

MONETARY CONTROLS: The exclusive and forced money of monetary despotism is, essentially, out of control - not only out of control by its victims but also out of control by its issuers and manipulators. They can start, continue and prolong crises with them but they cannot stop them with it. They tumble helplessly, ignorant and prejudiced between inflations, deflations and stagflations, trying to counter inflation with unemployment, and deflation with inflation, but never succeed for any length with either and are unable to make all possible, desirable and wanted exchanges of goods, services and labour possible with their exclusive and forced currencies. They suppressed all too many natural price indicators and market forces for currencies and have no substitutes for them. All monetary self-controls are abolished by the system and political pressures are very strong for the continued abuse of this despotic system to defraud voters and taxpayers and all creditors, including all employees and old age pensioners, more and more. To further entrust any more control powers to those already possessing and abusing enormous monopolistic and coercive powers in the monetary sphere is simply absurd. As absurd, as e.g. the communist project of trying to fight the "monopolism" of ca. 10 million employers in the U.S. by establishing a single monopoly employer for the U.S. Indeed, central banking, with its monetary control, was an early communist demand (in the Communist Manifesto of 1848) and, nevertheless, it is still practised in all "capitalistic" countries. - Alas, opposition to monetary controls are usually only on the basis of "practicality" not morality and the popular demand is that monetary controls should be ever more comprehensive, lastly turning all of us into inmates of nation-wide prisons. In ordinary prisons the purchasing power of inmates is very strictly controlled, indeed. - "'And monetary controls are not much good unless you can control ALL lending'. Says leading merchant banker Harold Abbott, managing director of the Martin Corporation: 'It is no use slapping controls on the banks unless you also can take steps to control hire-purchase finance companies and others. And to do this the Federal Government would have to seek new powers which it doesn't have at the moment. The situation is particularly pointless when you have many of the banks with large interests in finance houses.' - In fact, last year, when the banks and building societies were hit so hard that it was almost impossible for a couple to get a home loan, the hire purchase finance companies were lending money at an unprecedented rate - charging inflated interest rates and making record profits. Melbourne share broker A. C. Goode makes the point: 'Monetary controls, if they are to be effective, must be applied to such an extent as to cause stress and involve an unequal burden - which usually falls heaviest where it is least desired from a community point of view.'" - THE BULLETIN, Feb. 13, 1971. - Note that the controls of monetary despotism and its central banks and monetary legislation are not criticised and not seen as the main causes for all monetary and credit problems. The remaining and still somewhat free and unregulated banks and financial institutions are seen as culprits, just as the Social Credit faithful and remaining communists would see them as the main evils. In "response" to the enormous monopolies and powers of monetary despotism and all the evils they bring with them, not liberation but more controls are asked for - and the discussion is only what degree of controls would be practicable or how much they can be increased or extended. The natural controls of a free market in currencies and of voluntary acceptance or refusals or discounts of currencies and full publicity for all issues and of legal tender towards the issuer only, are discussed still only by a tiny fraction of all economists and of all writings on economics and on money and banking. - Luckily, even the advocates of further monetary controls have at least some doubts regarding them: "One problem with monetary control is that it can have quite uneven effects on different sectors of the economy. In particular, as our experience this last year has shown, it can act with special severity on the level of new housing starts. It can have unpredictable effects on confidence, especially in the money and capital markets ... Unfortunately, if you do not apply monetary policy rigorously enough it is likely to prove ineffective and if you apply it vigorously, you run the risk of overkill ... Nor are the effects of monetary policy any more predictable than those of fiscal policy. Important as they are, fiscal and monetary policies, even when employed in exactly the 'right mix', cannot be relied upon to achieve to the maximum our major economic objectives of full employment, external balance, reasonable price stability, economic growth, rising living standards, and an equitable distribution of income." - The Hon. B. M. Snedden, THE AUSTRALIAN QUARTERLY, 4.12.70. - Alas, none of our Australian rulers, treasurers, reserve bank directors or government advisors has so far, to my knowledge, spoken up in favour of monetary freedom to get us out of the destructive labyrinth of monetary despotism. - We suffer already from a surfeit of monetary controls which, in their combination, particularly legal tender laws, laws establishing and maintaining the issue monopoly and outlawing sound alternative value standards, like gold weight units on a free gold market, are the cause of inflation. The avalanche of monetary legislation is so large that I was so far unable to get a full set of it. Continuously more legal provisions are added. Some of the acts were out of print when I asked for them last time at the federal printing office and other additional relevant amendments and clauses are dispersed over numerous thick collections of amendments. No one has bothered to combine all the relevant legislation in one or several volumes and to keep them updated or to update them on microfiche, on floppy disks or on CD-ROMs or online, as far as I know. - Thus all of the monetary laws are not even readily in print and cheaply available. Why should one have to spend e.g. $ 20 for one of several large collections of amendments, when such a thick volume contains just one amended paragraph of one act on money, currency, credit or banking? - Thus the law has largely become not only impracticable and unobtainable but unknowable unless one visits e.g. the Reserve Bank library - where non-staff are not welcomed but rather thrown out, or the Australian National Library. - Some law texts were also withdrawn, although the laws still applied, simply because changes were expected soon, although they are not yet enacted into law. I see this as an all too lawful or even lawless legal situation. - But with all the avalanches of legislative changes in this sphere, the basic pillars of monetary despotism remained untouched. Deregulation extended only to the peripheries of banking and even there it did not go far enough. - J.Z., 2.4.97, 20.7.11.

MONETARY DESPOTISM & BOOMS & SLUMPS: It is State interference with the money supply that causes the alternation of boom and slump - the succession of boom and slump that provides the chief target of criticism in the socialist attack on capitalism. - Henry Meulen, THE INDIVIDUALIST, 6/75. - SOCIALISM & CAPITALISM

MONETARY DESPOTISM & CENTRAL BANKING: Absolute monetary power is also being absolutely abused. - J.Z., 20.8.74.

MONETARY DESPOTISM & DEMOCRACY: Democratise money. Repeal the central bank's issue monopoly. Repeal the legal tender power for its paper money. Abolish monetary despotism. Establish monetary freedom. Until this is done no other liberties and rights will be complete and secure. Pluralism and free choice and competition and voluntary rather than enforced collaboration, voluntary rather than enforced exchange media and standards are the solution. Monetary despotism has held sway over us for thousands of years, like slavery did - and enforced tribute payments or tax slavery still do. We ought to replace them by monetary emancipation or monetary freedom and voluntary taxation. We could either aim at these important but limited objectives directly or could realise them indirectly through achieving free choice of governments, or competing governments - and free societies, all based upon individual secessionism and voluntary membership, made possible through the possibility of exterritorial autonomy and personal laws, with their long history and experience, however neglected they still are at present. Then the realisation of monetary freedom in at least one of the resulting "panarchies", formed e.g., by some limited government libertarians or some of the no-government anarchists, would indirectly realise monetary freedom, for them, too. - J.Z., 11.4.93, 27.5.97. - MONETARY LIBERATION OR EMANCIPATION, PANARCHISM, INDIVIDUAL & MINORITY GROUP SECESSIONISM, EXTERRITORIAL AUTONOMY FOR VOLUNTEERS, EXPERIMENTAL FREEDOM

MONETARY DESPOTISM & EMPLOYMENT: Employment opportunities should not be legally confined to the number of jobs for which the government makes its exclusive and forced currency available for wage and salary payments. - J.Z., 7.8.75, 20.3.97, 20.7.11.

MONETARY DESPOTISM & MEDIUM OF EXCHANGE: Governments cannot be trusted with power to determine what traders should use as a medium of exchange. - Leonard E. Read, THE FREEMAN, 1/75. - Or as a value standard! - J.Z., n.d.

MONETARY DESPOTISM & MONETARY FREEDOM REVOLUTION: But if we beat this thing, public opinion will crucify anyone who tries to punish us. - F. M. Busby, The Breeds of Man, p.65. - In carefully chosen situations and with sufficient monetary enlightenment, one can break the laws of  monetary despotism and get away with it. - J.Z., 24.8.02. At least it is still legal to prepare ourselves, by some of the more efficient enlightenment methods for such a situation. See my digitized book manuscript, still only called "New Draft", which I would gladly send, upon request, as a zipped email attachment. - J.Z., 21.7.11.

MONETARY DESPOTISM & MONETARY FREEDOM: When monetary freedom is illegal monetary despotism and all its abuses is the only remaining legal alternative. - J.Z., 74.

MONETARY DESPOTISM & MONETARY REFORMS: The inflations and deflations of the government's money monopoly and its money manipulations, e.g. by discount rate-, interest- and open-market-policies, and compulsory "reserve" requirements, do wrongfully and harmfully affect all monetary and financial transactions, inflate or deflate or stagflate cash, deposits, savings, all credits and debts. Instead of trying to "reform" that monopoly and power, we ought to strive towards its abolition. That does not necessarily mean its outlawry or prohibition but its shrinking, finally to nothing - by depriving it of all involuntary support and thus letting it fail upon its demerits. - J.Z., 3/97, 21.7.11. - PANARCHISM, DIS., MONETARY & CURRENCY POLICY, CENTRAL BANKING, FISCAL RULES, FINANCIAL REGULATIONS

MONETARY DESPOTISM & OUR ECONOMIC DEVELOPMENT POTENTIAL: Years ago, on a trip with my 3 boys, when they were young, and not far from here, along the Old Hume Highway (I think it was near Bargo), I saw a pitiful sight: An eagle chained to a fence post! To do that to an eagle seems to me to be even worse than to do it to one of the less soaring birds. To some extent, this chained eagle can supply an analogy to monetary despotism and indicate our more or less miserable situation in it. In this case the chain is the forced and exclusive paper currency of the government's central bank and the post itself to which it is anchored, is the central bank. Under monetary freedom, like an eagle unchained, we would soon be able to soar - to the limits of our physical and mental capacities and willingness to use them productively to satisfy other producers and traders, at market prices, and thereby get our consumer satisfactions in exchange. - I do know, like all others, this analogy limps, too. Eagles are not exchangers but, rather, like governments, beasts of prey. They are not sound potential issuers and free traders. They are not productive but parasitic, apart from their developmental role in improving other species, which they hunt, by eliminating their weaklings. Typically, many governments have chosen them for their symbols. At the same time, their high and wide-ranging and, seemingly. effortless flights, have also turned them into symbols of freedom. Eagles and free currencies have some other characteristics in common, though. They do not multiply endlessly until we suffocate in eagle feathers. There is a natural limit to their reproduction. And if there is no coercive intervention by hunters, there is no deflation of eagles, either. They just fill their natural niche. In Australia, they probably helped, together with foxes, to reduce the rabbit plague. Rabbits really "inflated" themselves. But even with them multiplication had its limits. During drought times, when food for them was sparse, pregnant rabbits were able to assimilate their embryos again, as food for themselves. And the flood of their numbers, at least from the point of view of graziers and gardeners, was not ­restrained by the right of graziers to refuse to accept them on their properties. They did try, not very successfully, via rabbit proof fences. But then so much of Australia is still unfenced or fenced-in only to keep cattle and sheep in. Rabbits multiplied not because of legal tender but as a natural force, turning into a natural catastrophe, in a country where they did not have sufficient natural enemies, only e.g. eagles, and dingo (dogs), not wolves. Foxes were introduced and helped to reduce their numbers (but were themselves hunted for their pelts) and later rabbit-specific virus infections. Weasel-like animals, which in India reduced the snake plague were introduced here on a trial basis, but went for rabbits, instead. I do not know why they were not retained as enemies for rabbits. Probably the lobby of chicken farmers objected. The second rabbit plague - the calcivirus - after the first, myxomatosis, did no longer work well enough, was accidentally released from its trial area, an island. (The biologists involved did not anticipate birds or insects could bridge an ocean gap of only 4 km easily, so something was missing in their biological education.) Then it spread so fast that rabbit hunters could no longer make a living from them. Felt hat producers were looking around for farm bred rabbits instead. (By now this situation has changed again and rabbits have become plentiful again, at least where I live. - J. Z., 7.9.02.) I think that under free migration rabbit hunting could have reduced them sufficiently. I do remember a park near my home in Berlin, which was, just before the war, crowded by rabbits. It took only a few weeks of war and its meat rations to reduce that rabbit population to zero. Under certain conditions certain animal ­populations can become inflated. Such an inflation for humans has not yet happened and is unlikely to occur. We have inbuilt and artificial preventative