Chapter
8, Omnibus Reform
There
are no tyrants among men; there are only tyrannies, and the mother of
tyrannies is money monopoly.
The
launching of a nonpolitical, universal monetary system will mark the
beginning of a revolution in its most consummate sense. Figuratively
speaking, it will reverse the world upon its axis. Just as the
political monetary system trends power toward the state, so the
system based on true money will release the natural forces that trend
society toward private initiative, enterprise and democracy. Pending
this fundamental reversal, all resistance to statism is futile. As
long as the only available monetary system is political, exchange,
that process by which the social order functions, will never
accomplish its natural purpose, the development of prosperity and
freedom.
To
rely on education to reverse the present trend toward statism shows a
want of comprehension of the naturalness of personal enterprise. No
one needs to be educated in private initiative and enterprise. These
qualities arise spontaneously. All that is needed is that the
counterfeiting power of the state, which robs productive effort and
rewards parasitism, be removed. The various educational efforts to
propagate personal enterprise are worse than wasted, because they
imply that but for propaganda and indoctrination, personal enterprise
would be overwhelmed by state-sponsored systems. In reality, it is
the tax-supported institutions that are artificial and that must,
therefore, conduct crusades to proselytize supporters to their cause.
Under the present political monetary system, personal enterprise
cannot be saved by propaganda. Freed from the perversion of that
system, it will need none.
The
appeal of the welfare state lies in its seductive promise of wealth
with the least possible effort. That, under the illusory system of
the welfare state, the benefits to some are the loot of others, is
beside the point. The beneficiaries may not realize this, or,
realizing it, may argue that it operates in their favor rather than
against them. We cannot stop this pernicious robbery of the
industrious and reward of the indolent by attacking it on the reward
side. Every beneficiary is aware of his benefits and is grateful for
them. As for those robbed, there is complete bewilderment as to the
cause of their loss. However, we would not accomplish anything but
rebellion against the state if we made it clear to all the Peters
that they are being robbed for the benefit of the Pauls. The cause of
the injustice is political, but the remedy is not.
The
trouble has arisen from the failure of personal enterprisers to
provide a sound monetary system of, by, and for personal enterprise.
In their default, the state has contrived a socialized system. We are
neither grounded in the philosophy of personal enterprise nor
intelligently opposed to socialism, if we do not realize that a
socialized monetary system must generate socialism. If, realizing it,
we continue to tolerate it, we forfeit our right to complain against
the inevitable trend toward statism. But even if we are opposed to
the mother of socialism as well as her whelps, it is not words, but
works, that are called for. Sooner or later we must institute a
nonpolitical monetary system.
Through
its deficit spending policy, the state has begun its acquisition of
control. Unless this be halted, all reform is useless, all idealizing
vain. Indeed, so subverted have men's minds become under the
influence of the state's seemingly unlimited power that reformers
almost universally turn to political rather than economic means of
reform. Thus their reform efforts effected through political action,
actually salute and strengthen the generator of the evils against
which the reforms are directed.
Vindicating
the Democratic Ideal
No
reform that invokes the power of the state can be predicated on
democracy. The state's profession of being an instrument of democracy
is pure sham. It is inherently exploitative and autocratic, because
it has no means of invoking support by appeal to voluntary patronage.
It lives by taxation and functions by edict: To regard the state as
the implement of democracy, when it is itself anti-democratic, is
surely the most consummate delusion of man. This delusion deepens as
the state expands its means of robbing industry through the insidious
process of issuing counterfeit money, which gives the state the
appearance of being a generator of wealth, provider of welfare, and
guarantor of security. Conversely, as the state's prestige is
increased by this deceptive device, that of personal enterprise
declines, and business becomes the culprit for all the ills of
society. The extent to which this idea of the benign state and the
malign business community prevails among would-be reformers can be
seen in the frequent "pass-a-law" provisions that occur in
their proposals. These laws are usually directed against business and
prosecuted by the presumed defender of justice, government. Let us
have done with the idea that democracy can reside in, or operate
through, the state; nothing can be democratic that is not dependent
upon voluntary patronage.
Instead
of expanding state activities, they must be contracted. To what
extent the state should be reduced cannot be determined in theory. We
must first free personal enterprise through a nonpolitical monetary
system and give it an opportunity to show how far it can go in taking
over the activities of local, state, and national governments. In
this way will the activities of the various governmental entities be
brought from a tax-supported basis into the sphere of personal
enterprise, with its attendant competition and voluntary payment for
services rendered.
Thus
the ultimate domestication of government will be accomplished only
as, and in the degree to which, personal enterprise is prepared to
render community services on an optional basis and at competitive
prices. For there is profit in rendering service, and the boundaries
of private and public service are not fixed. The extent to which
private enterprise may absorb so-called public services depends
solely upon the vision and initiative of enterprisers. There is
already in existence an impressive body of thought, developed by
Spencer Heath, which is directed toward just such ends. Such worthy
aims, however, await the liberation of personal enterprise from the
political monetary system. Only then shall we be able to reverse the
present trend and begin whittling down the sphere of the state by
enlarging that of personal enterprise.
The
state presently renders disservices as well as services, and the
citizen must pay for both, either by open taxation or by hidden
taxation in the inflated prices he pays for the things he buys. Once
the state is denied its power to impose taxes by watering the money
stream and is confronted with an aggressive personal enterprise
movement that will take over services for which there is actual
demand, its disservices will be recognized as such simply because
personal enterprise will make no bid for them. Public
resistance to taxation will then dispose of them.
Exchange,
served by a true monetary system, is a constant reform mechanism. It
is the sifter of proposals and projects, the natural mechanism
whereby all undertakings are measured for public approval. Its
constituency votes early and often, making change and progress
facile. Served by an unbiased monetary system, it will be the perfect
instrument of democracy. Here will democracy function, vindicating
its ideal.
Chapter
9, Economic Democracy
Rising
from tiny springs of rebellion in the consciousness of primitive men,
democracy, like an ever expanding river, deepening and widening, has
swept aside all the ancient forms of political government, and with
them their pretenses of divine power and aristocratic preference. Its
traditional service to humanity, however, has been only that of a
negator of tyranny and presumption in the political sphere. In the
future, it will be recognized and acclaimed for its more positive
service in the economic sphere.
Under
the constant challenge of democracy, the modern state has abandoned
its former attitude of arrogance and now cloaks its undertakings in
such flattering phrases as "democratic government," "rule
of the people," "equality," "welfare state,"
and so on. These pretenses have been forced upon the state by the
very failure of democracy as yet to assume a positive role in the
affairs of mankind. The state is a positive organ and, as such,
retains the initiative and leadership to which the people must turn
for the "remedy" of this ill or that. Though the state is
impotent to do more than change one economic ill for another, we
cannot blame the demagogy of politicians for promising salvation from
all the ills of mankind. This must continue, and the people must go
on suffering under the delusion that they can resort to the political
means of salvation, until an agency functioning through the economic
means is supplied.
The
ultimate accomplishment of democracy in the political sphere is the
perfection of the rule of the majority. If this be all that democracy
can deliver to society, the game is not worth the candle. It is
little comfort to the individual, striving to express his
personality, to know that democracy has wrested government from the
hands of a few and placed it in the hands of a majority. Human
aspirations for freedom can never be gratified as long as there is a
veto power over self expression, whether imposed by a man on
horseback or by means of the ballot box.
Yet
the democratic state has no means of functioning other than by
popular elections. That being so, the functions of the state must be
limited to those public services which are desired by all. Consider
the folly of undertaking to express the people's will in all human
affairs by an occasional election at which, in one confused shout, we
sound our yeas and nays on a multitude of questions. At the same
time, we select representatives to guess what it all means, and to
divine from it how to execute our will on hundreds of issues that
arise after we have given our confused "mandate." Is not
our boasted political equality but the equality of frustration? Can
we have self-government, and at the same time delegate the power to
govern? Are we indeed fit for self-government if we accept these
delusive exercises as the processes of democracy? Can democracy offer
nothing better?
Turn,
now, from this sham democratic process offered by the state, with all
its trappings of majesty, power, ritualism and futility, to a sphere
in which real democratic expression obtains - so far as the state
does not stultify it. This sphere of democracy has a true balloting
system, whereunder every ballot is the clear and irrevocable mandate
of the buyer through which he expresses his will, his aspirations,
his freedom, and his personality. In this balloting system, elections
are held every hour of every day. Its voting booths are the market
places of the world, its candidates, the goods and services offered
by competing vendors. In this balloting system there is no tyranny by
the majority. Every voter wins the election. Whether he chooses the
blue label, or the red, or the green, no one is denied his choice.
Here every man is a king, and the economic constituency is made up of
sovereigns in cooperation.
This
voting system is the elective process over which the house of
economic democracy must assert its exclusive sovereignty. It
dispenses with the legislative process, for it is governed not by
man-made laws but by a natural law that cannot be broken or biased by
any man. This law, which provides absolute equity, is the natural law
of competition, or, better, the law of cooperation, since it
automatically rewards him who cooperates and withholds rewards from
him who does not. The house of economic democracy requires no
constitution and no executive or judicial mechanisms. These powers
reside in the buyer, who exercises them by the simple criterion of
self interest. As the whole consists of its parts, so the exercise of
these powers by buyers in endless variety and circumstance compounds
the social order in perfection.
Every
power of the state must arise either by delegation from the citizen,
or by usurpation. If we but give the matter a little independent
thought, we can see that the money power can neither be delegated to
the state as agent, nor exerted by it as principal. It can reside
only in the same place where resides the productive power, and can be
exerted only in association with the bargaining power. These powers
belong not to the government, but to the individual, for he alone can
produce wealth, and he alone can express selectivity and exercise
bargaining power in the market place. Professed money springing from
any other source is pure counterfeit. It is a menace to the social
order, which is utterly dependent upon the functioning of true money.
We
all know that the rise in men's living standards from primitive times
to the present has come about through the specialization of labor,
which is made possible by exchange, and that this in turn has been
facilitated by the use of money. But do we realize that, without the
guidance of the money-pricing system, we would lack all cue as to
what products we should apply our specialized labors to? Production
and exchange constitute a vast cooperative system wherein the
cooperators are mostly strangers and usually remote from one another.
Most of civilized man's energies are devoted to the production of
things for which he as an individual has no direct use. His only way
of knowing that some other individuals have use for his product is by
the reaction of the market to his product in the form of a money
price. The money-pricing system is the antenna of exchange,
constantly keeping the cooperative mechanism responsive to demand and
supply, by bringing together those buyers and sellers who at any
given moment have mutual interests-and in the process regrouping and
realigning those interests.
As
we pass money from hand to hand, we give little thought to the
delicate precision with which it preserves the equity of economic
democracy and advances the social order. Every transfer of money
registers an impulse on the market that changes the price of some
commodity or commodities. These registered prices give the signal for
more or less production of the commodities affected, thus keeping
human energy, which is the generator of all values, intelligently
applied. This readjustment is in progress every moment of the day and
night. This is the dynamics of social progress, constantly rewarding
the efforts of those who conserve human energy and remain responsive
to the buyer's will, and punishing those who do not. If there can be
omniscience on earth, here it abides, and it is this all-seeing eye
that political planners would sacrifice for the blind directions of
bureaucracies.
It
is through the preservation and perfection of the monetary system
that economic democracy will demonstrate its potential for human
welfare. In this way it will avert the disaster that is now
threatened by the attempt of the state to exercise a power it cannot
command. The challenge is by no means difficult if we ignore the
jumble of complexities that have been written about money. Let us
forget the false premise of political money power. Let us endeavor
neither to reconcile the irreconcilable, nor by some protective
device to legitimize the illegitimate. The establishment of a
nonpolitical monetary system is but an undertaking in accountancy.
In
renouncing the political money idea, we abandon the idea of monetary
nationalism. Trade is homogeneous; it knows no nationality, race,
color, creed, or caste. Moreover, a truth is universal. Once a
monetary science develops, it will no more be localized or
nationalized than mathematics is today. There opens before the mind,
therefore, the prospect of a universal monetary unit and system that
will operate without regard for political boundaries. It will have no
nationality or politics. None will be coerced to participate. None
will be barred. There will be but one monetary language for the
world, and a democratic monetary system will unite people everywhere
in the universal freedom of exchange.
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