Monetary Secession Now

By Franklin Sanders

“First, do no harm.” Hippocrates' rule for physicians applies to secession movements as well. Secession ought to better the nation and not harm it. Otherwise, why undergo the danger and fatigue of changing one government for another? How will hearts be won to secession unless it improves lives?

The money we choose will affect everything else in our world. The monetary question boils down to this, whether our lives will be ruled by realities, or by abstractions. Real things, or non-existent illusions conjured up to defraud us. Real things and real values we freely choose for ourselves, or unreal abstracts forced on us by somebody else. If money must have value, then I have to go out and earn – accumulate – real wealth. If money is merely a symbol, then productive work is unnecessary. Whoever creates the symbols controls society, and the rest of us become their gulled slaves.

SYMBOL v. SUBSTANCE: RECIPROCITY v. HOT POTATO

When money has substance, perfect reciprocity rules every human exchange. Why? Because the market values substance money for itself. Real people value that money for some real benefits conferred by its nature.

When I exchange using substance money, every transaction is complete and just, trading value for value. I give you a weight of silver or gold or tobacco or goats, and you give me a weight of lumber or milk or vegetables or cloth. Good for good, measure for measure.

Don't miss this transaction's essence: you and I exchange real things. Value for value. Reality for reality.

When I exchange money as symbol, no transaction is ever complete, or equitable. It is never complete because the symbolic money does not pay anyone. It delivers nothing of substance, it merely transfers a promise to pay to the next person who ends up with the symbol. Symbolic money creates a never ending game of hot potato.

Using symbolic money, no transaction is ever equitable, either, because one party receives something of substance (some valuable real thing) while the other receives only a symbol. That symbol, in turn, represents – nothing! Whether the symbol represents only debt (the negation of value), or whether it represents only confidence (the willingness of the next victim to take it), the symbol itself has no value.

A TOOL OF LOVE OR POWER

There is no other system or theory of money besides these two. Money either exchanges substance for substance, or substance for symbol. Money is either a tool of mutual enrichment and love, or a tool of exploitation & power. By “love” I mean not sentimental affection, but the justice of the Golden Rule. As Andrew Lytle observed, “The opposite of love is not hate, but power.”

These two monetary systems are utterly incompatible. Where they exist side by side, one will always drive out the other, just as bad money armed with government force always drives good money out of circulation. Only one monetary system is compatible with freedom, and that is substance. Only one system can protect and maintain property rights, and that is substance. A symbolic money system will eventually transfer title to all property to whoever creates the symbols.

Think about it: it must end that way.

On one side are people who can only get money by working for it, while on the other are those who create it out of thin air. At what point will the “creators” decide they have created “enough” money?

Answer: when they have created enough money to own everything.

PART I - NATIONAL MONETARY SECESSION

Nowhere can change do greater harm than in the monetary system. As the economy's lifeblood, any faulty reform to money threatens to poison the whole economy. Money is also the chokepoint where corporations (“Big Business”) control our personal and political lives.

Can we free ourselves from their monetary control?

If so, at the same time we free ourselves from their economic and political control.

But how do we start?

AN OLDE ENGLISH LESSON

Like him or not, Henry VIII offers secessionists a canny lesson. When he broke up the great monasteries, he divided their holdings among his loyal followers, begetting in them a strong interest for perpetuating the new order. In a similar but less Machiavellian way, secession's monetary reform ought to promise, and actually deliver, such improvement in lives that people want to support it.

Monetary reform can do much more for secession: it can revive local economies, stimulate local cash flow, and create today the communities that will become the nation tomorrow. Monetary secession doesn't need to wait for national movements or congresses or legislatures or treaties or wars, because monetary secession begins now. It begins now, it benefits now, it attaches hearts and minds to secession now as individuals successfully take back control of their lives.

Monetary secession is national secession quickening and kicking in the womb.

REGAINING CONTROL

The present U.S. imperial economic system strips individuals and communities of control over their own fates. More accurately, this system strip-mines the economies and souls of individuals and communities, leaving ugly, empty pits in its path.

Who can unravel all the twisted history of corporate maneuvering to control the U.S. economy and monetary system through a central bank – Hamilton, the Bank of North America, the First & Second Banks of the United States, the embryonic victory under Lincoln, and the final victory with the Federal Reserve?

In the end, the U.S. Congress gave a private corporation (the Federal Reserve) the monopoly privilege to create money out of thin air. Worse yet, Congress gave the Fed power to force us cattle to accept their worthless script.

Before the Fed, the nation had a self-regulating bimetallic system, based on the independent market values of gold and silver. Since the Fed the nation has been forced into monetary dependency.

THE SOLUTION

Without monetary independence, the new nation can never declare political independence. It must have money with independent value –independent, that is, of secret central bank agreements manipulating exchange rates, and free of central bank/commercial bank cartel inflation. Among the many alternatives – goats, beans, wampum, giant stone wheels – gold and silver offer the best choice with the longest and most reliable pedigree.

Monetary reform should both prepare the way for secession and solidify support for it once gained. The goals of a monetary secession are to:

1. Replace foreign money with local secession money
2. Revive local economies with silver and gold circulating locally, encouraging local purchases, and boosting local cash flow
3. Provide a prosperity-breeding money that weds citizens to the new money and secession.
4. Establish an alternative money already in use when secession comes, and so ease transition to economic independence
5. Decentralise and protect money supply and wealth, dispersing them as widely as possible among people
6. Provide a money independent of the United States empire and every other nation.

PART II - PERSONAL MONETARY SECESSION

Personal monetary secession means that we must stop thinking of money, and start thinking of wealth. After coinage appeared about 650 BC, economic focus shifted drastically from building wealth (land, cattle, ships, productive enterprises) to piling up money. This a shift from reality (wealth) to abstraction (money) nearly ruined the Greeks.

A first step to personal monetary secession is to stop thinking of ‘wealth” as abstractions like financial assets, stocks, bonds, dollars, and start thinking about wealth as “productive assets,” like businesses and farms, that can produce and keep on producing without constantly feeding them more and more expensive inputs.

Personal monetary secession must proceed as a community in the local economy. We cannot save ourselves by hoarding silver and gold, because every economy is a network of individuals and transactions. By ourselves, we can't create an economy, only a hermitage. Unless we rebuild local economies first, we can't rebuild anything else.

Our motivation here must be love, not mere sentiment or affection, but the determination to do justice by every man. Part of loving our neighbour is helping him succeed, creating and keeping an environment where we can prosper together.

Finally, whatever replaces the present monetary system must work. It must make us more prosperous, not less. We can't impose something on ourselves and others for blind ideological reasons. Rather, any change must be a change for the better.

USING GOLD AND SILVER AS MONEY

There are numerous “community currency” ideas, old and new. They may be good or bad, workable or not, but they are all variations of the symbolic (versus “substance-based”) money theory. It is recommendation enough that gold and silver money have worked for 4,500 years of recorded history.

Money must serve three functions: store of value, standard of value, and medium of exchange. Presently, silver and gold perform the first function very well, but politics keeps them from performing the other two. Both are essential to monetary freedom.

NUMERAIRE

A money serving all these functions is our numeraire, the money we think in terms of as our common denominator. The English think in pounds, Americans think in dollars.

We must replace our numeraire, using silver and gold instead of the US dollar. Let them become our standard of value and soon they'll become our medium of exchange.

STANDARD OF VALUE

A standard of value tells us what something is worth in terms of that measure. We must begin to think in terms of ounces, and not “dollars.”

The table shows what an acre of rural Tennessee land cost in 1999 and 2006. Thinking in US dollars, the price of land has nearly doubled, but not in silver.

Suppose that at the end of May, 1999, you had converted your dollars into silver. Silver then cost US$4.973/oz. The same acre that cost 150.80 silver ounces in 1999 today costs only 105.09 ounces. In other words, although land's price has nearly doubled in US dollar terms, in silver it has fallen more than 30%.

Land's price has not risen in gold, either. At end-May 1999 an acre cost 2.774 gold ounces. By end-May, 2006, the US dollar price of that land had nearly doubled, but the gold price had dropped 25%, to only 2.08 ounces.

These examples easily illustrate silver & gold's recent superiority as a “store of value.” If you had been planning to buy land and storing value in US dollars, you lost about half your value while you were waiting. With silver and gold, your money gained over 25% in value.

METALS vs. STOCKS

Wait! Won't we lose money holding silver and gold rather than stocks or CDs? Won't we miss interest and dividends? Nope, you'll just lose value. Since February 2002 the US dollar index has lost about 30% against major currencies. Since 1999 stocks have dropped more than 50% against silver and gold. Both moves belong to primary down trends (“bear markets”) that will last another 10 or more years, if the US government and US dollar don't land in even bigger trouble sooner.

MEDIUM OF EXCHANGE

Our project to free ourselves seems stumped by the “medium of exchange” function. Why? Because by political manipulation silver and gold have been de-monetized. I can't take my 100 ounce silver bar or gold coin down to the grocery store and buy bread with it directly. First, I have to find somebody willing to exchange it for US dollars, then take dollars to the grocery store to buy bread. The inconvenience alone keeps me from using silver and gold as money, and it was intended that way.

But what if citizens in a local economy began to accept silver and gold among themselves, every day, as they buy and sell to each other? Here is the key to your shackles: you free yourself, and deny the Empire use of your wealth, when you deal in gold and silver coin directly.

This is the great secret of the U.S. system about all our “stolen” rights. They aren't really stolen: we are fooled into renouncing them voluntarily.

Beyond all quibble, we all have a common law, constitutional, and statutory right to gold and silver money. In fact, the notes of the federal reserve bank, or any other bank, are not “money” under current law: they are “notes.” A “note” is not money but an obligation to pay money. They may be “legal tender”, but they are not money.

But wait! Aren't we legally forced to accept “legal tender”? Not at all. That's the catch. You can avoid the legal tender system by specifying beforehand what form of payment you will accept. Legal tender only operates by default, absent any other specification. You are free to contract for specific payment in any form, provided you make that known by contract or public announcement.

What stands in the way of your monetary freedom? Two things: ignorance, and laziness. Ignorance, because you don't know how to use silver and gold as money, and laziness because it's easier to use paper money or credit cards. I may be able to help you with the ignorance, but the laziness you're going to have to take care of yourself.

PRACTICALITIES

How do you start using silver and gold every day? All you must do is overcome a simple exchange rate problem. Because the U.S. enjoys a huge internal market, few Americans ever deal with foreign currencies. But citizens all over the world living near national borders deal in diverse currencies daily. Even in Vermont

If they can do it, you can do it.

For life's larger transactions, you can use GoldMoney.com. You actually own gold through a Channel Islands company that stores your gold outside the US. You can transfer ownership to any other GoldMoney account holder instantaneously over the Internet.

For most daily transactions, you'll be using silver. Today an ounce of silver brings about US$12.00. Ten silver dimes, which contain nearly three-quarters of an ounce, cost about US$8.75, so one is worth US$0.875. The smallest generally available gold coin, a 1/10 ounce, costs about US$68.

How can you learn what these coins are worth today?

Go to www.kitco.com and look up spot gold and silver prices. Or visit my website, www.the-moneychanger.com, scroll down the home page to the yellow banner that says, “Download Free Portfolio Calculator,” double click on that, and fill out the pop-up form. That will automatically add you to the list to receive my free daily e-mail commentary, which includes the prices of dozens of items and spot gold and silver.

Once you know the spot silver or gold price, and the metal content of any coin, simply multiply content by spot price to calculate the US dollar value.

To make life even easier, Catherine Austin Fitts of Solari.com and I have put together a website, www.silverandgoldaremoney.com. Go there and enter the current spot gold and silver prices and the amount you want to pay in dollars, hit the update button, and it will immediately tell you how much silver, or silver and gold, you need to pay that dollar amount.

Before too long, you won't even need that website calculator. At first you'll be making those calculations in your head, then you'll stop thinking in US dollars altogether and begin thinking in silver and gold.

Then you and your neighbours can keep your wealth at home and circulating in your own local economy, blessing and enriching one another.

From there, political secession is the natural next step. Ω