#57.14: Perspective - Toward a Manifesto

This stream is like the natural flow of money, from a source of issue, down particular streams where it benefits all that take nutrients from it, thence eventually being lost whenever anything is sold for less than it was purchased for, which is depreciation of assets and the death of all money.  The tokens may be a plenty or limited, but who owns them?  All the money is in accounts on books not in floating tokens.  The commodity theory of money, beloved of the loathsome speculator class, who often never work an honest day of their miserable lives, disputes this obvious reality and condemn all who rely upon it to plunder, confusion and financial oblivion. 

Here we are in 2019. This blog has over 90,000 visits. There are new posts in the works, but I thought it a good time to summarize the objectives of this blog and its proposal for a supplementary monetary system that is actually owned and operated by and for we the people.

A manifesto, a public declaration of policy and aims, is perhaps not too dissimilar to a prospectus, a printed document that advertises or describes a school, commercial enterprise, forthcoming book, etc., in order to attract or inform clients, members, buyers, or investors. The statements made on whichever document, would also indicate why such a venture is worthy of any attention whatsoever. We might begin with certain statements that we all agree to, such as the following: 

1. All the money that has ever been in use and is still being concocted as cryptocurrencies, etc. belongs to those that issued it. NONE of it actually belongs to us because we did not individually issue any of it. As far as precious metals go, their prices are controlled by the same group that owns the rest of the money. These people also own and control all the mines, mints and markets for all precious metals worldwide. 

2. Anyone who relies only on THEIR money is an economic slave to THEM. THEIR control over everyone and everything rests on debt to THEM in THEIR money. The rent of THEIR money deemed interest, is always demanded from uncreated money, thereby ensuring a perpetual scarcity of money and a loss of assets at various times to those who did not conquer, develop, invent or produce. THER “musical chairs” economics is an intended result of these practices. We regard these practices, described as usury, as theft! 

3. THEY, the owners of THEIR money, also get to do things that we also regard as fraud and theft. THEY get to loan money THEY do not have and charge rent for it from unissued (uncreated) money. THEY also demand and claim that any money in someone's account with THEM is subject to confiscation if THEIR institutions' debts require settlement. THEIR system requires deposit insurance. 

4. ALL of THEIR money can be summarized as a commodity subject to speculation. Speculators contribute NOTHING to any economy. They make money on THEIR money without work (the frank definition of capitalism) and economies of exchange in ALL THEIR money rests in the hands of those few who make these speculative adjustments. The purpose of money was to supply a standard and relatively unchanging medium of exchange to measure value in any split barter transaction. The numbers on its instruments allow one to measure the value of one thing against another almost exactly as one would use a ruler to measure inches or millimeters. Speculation allows the various distances on the ruler of value to fluctuate, so rendering any accounting value in ANY of THEIR money is like attempting to build a house using a different ruler every day. It's actually worse than that as follows:

NOTE: Intrinsic value of money or money as a holder of intrinsic value. This is probably the oldest SCAM involved with THEIR money, because speculation on precious metals goes all the way back to the beginning of their use as money a few thousand years ago, always by FORCE of arms not freely chosen! So, pay no attention to any attempts to convince you that this intrinsic value of monetary tokens is an important attribute of money from the “Austrians” or anyone else. It's all lies. THEY control ALL the prices for ALL of THEIR money and can decide to make it literally anything THEY like and you have nothing to do with any of it. Yet, precisely because we must slay two or three dragons, not just one, precious metals come into our proposal as the only means of direct exchange and valuation between our system and THEIRS. This allows us to have a means to determine what our fixed point of purchasing power is in comparison to ANY of THEIR money worldwide. Yes, this proposal implies a universal standard of measure for value which could be adopted by anyone as a complementary money to all of THEIRS.

5. Not only do we want our own money that actually belongs to us, that can't be influenced by any of THEM and doesn't allow some of THEIR frauds and thefts upon any who use THEIR money, but we want certain safeguards against the flight of our money and we want to have a way to engage in some needful capitalism, chiefly finance. We want more local control but we want a unified single ledger to prevent fraud. We also want a clear separation between the accounting of our accounts holding our money and any and all finance involving the loaning of our money.

From the last few statements, we have proposed a new international standard value unit or Valun, the name chosen by the man whose name heads this blog, E. C. Riegel. The proposed Valun came into existence on 11/2/11 at $2.16 per Valun. It was based on a bid price for an ounce of gold bullion of $2,160 divided by a thousand. A comparable number of Valuns would be purchased by an ounce of silver bullion.

Each local area, in the United States bounded by the usual limits of cities, counties, etc. would be afforded the opportunity of forming what we have called an exchange. These would not be banks. Specifically none of these proposed businesses would ever lend anyone money. All they would do is handle accounting, while other businesses, who would have to acquire the money to lend, would engage in as various kinds of finance as the market would bear. We refuse the use of usury by insisting that all rent for money would have to be paid up front out of already existing money and various forms of compounding of rent for money are eliminated and forbidden. We don't mind if you want to rent out your money for profit, but the rent will come out of money that already exists. 

We also have an 80% rule regarding finance; Anyone engaging in finance must lend 80% within the boundaries of the exchange in which it holds accounts. Of course all financial businesses within an exchange area will hold accounts in that local exchange. 

It takes some pools of liquidity to get something like this off the ground, the spark that gets the engine running. Each new A member will get an account with two hundred Valuns in it. We call this the “pass go and collect V200” rule. In addition, if one is receiving any pension, social security, etc. and might have been receiving regular payments back to Valun inception, one might have a lot more Valuns on opening an account. 

So who are among the first to recruit for our proposal? The first to get behind us are those who have often been misused and abused more than any other groups in our society, those who were supposedly hired to defend us; police, military, veterans. Who are the next group to get behind us? Their grandmothers. If we had most if not all of the local sheriffs behind us as well as their grandmothers, we would have a pretty good chance of success. The rest would follow in due course. 

It's quite obvious that character matters. It's one reason why we have the sponsorship rule: each A member is sponsored by two other A members. We are looking for original thinkers, original producers, original service providers, people who care about what they are doing and want to do it well. We're looking for people who are good at what they do and want to get paid more for it. We know that it's commonplace these days to suppose that one can just figure out ways to make money on money without work, seek monopolistic rent opportunities, hatch any number of scams to take from the general public what they mistakenly believe has belonged to them. In these scenarios, criminals and worse get to be “players” who get to buy up and profit from any number of original ventures that may or may not become fortune making home runs. We say that not all great businesses are those capable of providing an income for some absentee investor/owner. We're interested in bringing back businesses to scale everywhere, so that a family business that ran for 30 or 40 years can continue to do so. 

In considering all this, it's cruel to have to say it, but the first awareness one comes to as one awakens from THEIR imposed slumber, is that literally none of the money in use anywhere actually belongs to the people who use it every day. We're describing what it would take for us to have our own money and with that eventually more that is actually ours.

To begin with, a membership position in a supplementary monetary system is a kind of insurance against not if but when THEIR system tanks and takes most of the monetary assets along with it. What then? Are we really going to rely on THEM or might we really exercise our Constitutional rights, including our right to contract, which the whole proposal rests on, and finally say, “too late, we've seen through your frauds and thefts and we have our own money now and wont need YOURS.”

Well, of course we WILL need THEIRS. Taxes must be paid and paid in THEIR money. We'll just intend as well as we can to do with less and less of it. “Come out of her, my people” is still the message. We will also need to collect dues, yes in THEIR money, because we are not yet free of THEM, but the dues will be kept purposely low so everyone eligible can participate. 

Dues of V1 per year in THEIR money will be required of all A members. B member businesses don't pay membership dues. Instead, they buy advertising which appears on the backs of our cash instruments, the Valun V-Checks. These attractive paper instruments, our cash, will be issued in denominations of one half Valun, One Valun, Five Valuns and Ten Valuns to begin with. At present fair exchange value of the unchanging Valun at $2.54, ten Valuns would be $25.40. The half Valun at $1.27 would still be legal to circulate as its nominal value is above $1 and all V-Checks would have an expiration date six months from issue, to fulfill current law. Yes, V-Checks would be similar to travelers checks. They would all bear numbers to prevent counterfeiting and their designs would change regularly enough to discourage anyone from attempting to float bad checks. Every independent exchange would have its own set of designs so the numbers of them, despite how similar they might be in size and other characteristics, the range of designs would further mitigate against counterfeiting. 

Each A member (individual eligible natural person) would have a piece in the ownership of their local exchange and a piece in the ownership of the International Valun Exchange Society or IVES. This key component is not centralized control or a board of governors as is common among THEIR institutions. It would provide certain functions to serve all the local exchanges. IVES becomes a B member of all exchanges and it is required that IVES be established along with the first exchanges.

IVES determines what the day to day fluctuations in THEIR money amount to in ours. Right now, July 25^th, 2019, with the recent upsurge in the prices of precious metals, the Valun falls in exchange value back toward its inception of $2.16 but no lower. Would gold breach our $2,160 mark, a new inception point for the Valun is recognized by IVES and applies to all Valuns. Should gold go to $2,800 the ounce, the new inception is $2.80 and when gold falls, the Valun rises. The Valun is intended to beat both THEIR dragons over the long haul, both the one made of precious metals and the stolen fiat variety used to pay our taxes. Once a Valun inception point is chosen, it can never be lowered. The Valun achieves protection of purchasing power over ANY of THEIR money and becomes over time the more reliable measure of value. IVES also gets a record of ALL designs for V-Checks as well as the numbers that are associated with the blanks, since no V-Check becomes money without an expiration date stamped on it or into it. Any valid V-Checks that are expired can be exchanged for newer V-Checks or deposited into an account.

6. We need our own money as a supplementary source of income because we have skills that do not pay in THEIR money or THEIR means of exchange for what we are worth. Who determines that? Several things actually. Income taxes first come to mind. Can't avoid them. Therefore participation in this proposal would incur further income taxes that must of course be paid in THEIR money. It wouldn't matter whether one was participating in the trade of some of THEIR cryptocurrencies, someone else's local supplementary money, Berkshares, Ithica Hours, etc., if there is taxable income in any of them, Uncle Sam is going to want his share in his own money of course, which is why anyone involved in anything like this needs to be able to hold back as much of THEIR money as is needed to pay those taxes. Our design makes determination of income in our system very easy. In The United States, under current applicable law, each A member would get a 1099 to file along with the rest of their remittances for each tax year. We can also pretty much determine what anyone's tax liability will be based on the size of the labor contracts they enter into. Most Valun issuance will result from labor contracts.

An example: We have an A member named Dan who is a policeman. Dan's employer cannot be a B member, so Dan's contract is with his local exchange itself. Dan determines that he can put by taxes enough to cover payment over the coming year of an extra $10,000 payable in Valuns. It can be summarized any number of ways, but the usual method would be to divide the $10,000 by twelve months giving $833.33 and at the beginning of each month, Dan would issue the number of Valuns equal to $833.33 to the exchange, which would then pay Dan back his Valuns. This would be done the same payday for Dan. He issues the Valuns, he hasn't been bought, the exchange in leu of a B member business pays Dan back the Valuns he issues and those Valuns are backed by what Dan gets paid to do.

This procedure works for any public employee since their employers cannot be B members. We have another example:

Sally is an A member who works for a store called Frank's that is a local B member business. Sally has determined that she can pay the taxes for an extra $5,000 in income. In her case, Sally issues however many Valuns make $5,000 on the first day of the contract with Frank's. As part of the contract Sally has with Frank's, Frank's pays Sally back 1/12^th of the Valuns Sally issued until they are all paid back to Sally. During the interim, Frank's gets the extra Valuns on float without rent or interest of any kind.

But there's another thing that limits how many Valuns one can issue, to pay oneself for one's work, the time out of the rest of your life devoted to earning money. It's our 80% rule regarding how many Valuns a B member business may hold in escrow, where all these contracts are negotiated. The money in an escrow balance cannot exceed 80% of the combined other two balances. For an individual A member, the issuance balance plus the income balance are 100% and the escrow balance cannot rise above 80% of this number. For a B member business their equity balance plus income balance are the 100% and their escrow balance cannot exceed 80% of this number.

Now in the beginning we're going to do something like what Riegel suggested which is to have each business determine what its hypothetical equity and income balances are expected to be. As hazardous a course as this may seem, it's still the best way to proceed. We'd like to say that a business was up and running and earning a profit for at least the previous six months in order to get a close estimate.

There are three balances recorded for each account, and for B member business accounts they are Equity, Income and Escrow. Escrow balances involve recurring debt including all payroll. All Valuns issued to B businesses by A members pass into the B member's Escrow balance. 

Sally wants $5,000 more in income in Valuns. On July 25^th, 2019 that's V1,968.50 and let's say that each 25^th day forward for a year, is a payday. So Sally's next payday is August, 25^th and so on. Her contract with Frank's says that Frank's gets Sally's V1,968.50 on July 25^th which is for this contract Sally's first day of work, even if Sally had previously worked for Frank's for years. Her contract will end in a year with the possibility of renewal. From August 25^th, 2019 to July 25^th, 2020, Sally gets V164.04 deposited into her income balance and the exchange makes note of these and presents them to Sally at the end of each tax year for her verification before issuing her a 1099 for her taxes.

Notice that in both these cases, the money issued is backed by work. The extra income in Valuns is still subject to taxes in THEIR money and all involved must understand this responsibility. Our supplementary monetary system is not a tax dodge. 

The retired on pensions will have many more Valuns they can issue and may want to earn income on their Valuns. They can lend Valuns to a financial business within the local exchange and such institutions will have to pay this rent up front. 

Another example: Ken is an A member who is retired from regular business. He has V35,000 in his issuance balance. KG's, a B member, is a local outfit that sells used and reconditioned equipment and finances its sales in Valuns. Ken is willing to lend KG's V10,000 and wants V500 per year as rent. That's 5% per year in case you were wondering. He could have agreed to V300 or 3% per year. It will depend on what KG's can afford to pay Ken. No one will set rents for money, so the market for this kind of funding will determine the rents. Ken pays his V10,000 into KG's escrow balance and KG's pays Ken his V500 into his income balance. When KG's no longer wants Ken's V10,000, it is returned into his issuance balance. The terms are all described in a simple single page credit contract between Ken and KG's. The contract may or may not be renewable, the same terms and conditions are usually offered for successive years should KG's and Ken agree to it. How did Ken find out about KG's need to borrow Valuns? From an ad put up at their local exchange. 

What does anyone get for fulfilling a contract? If it's a labor contract, it indicates that the worker has completed whatever work and has been paid in his own money for all the split barter among other Valun exchange members. Fulfillment of more contracts with Valuns attached to them indicates the likely remunerations for labor in Valuns and builds a good work record for future employers. Fulfillment of more credit contracts with Valuns attached to them builds credit worthiness. Unlike similar services in THEIR system, all records concerning contract fulfillment are available upon request from the local exchange for perhaps a very nominal fee but more likely for free. But we will seek input on these points from the seriously interested. 

There are a whole range of occupations and practices that have traditionally been “not for profit” organizations and sometimes this worked to their benefit. But we see far enough ahead to see that all these arrangements hinge ultimately on the availability and general flow through society of THEIR money. We advocate for free PRIVATE enterprise and see many of these activities as profitable within a for profit framework using Valuns as the means and THEIR money to pay taxes and other expenses that must be paid in THEIR money. A complementary monetary system allows this extra financial means where THEIRS is lacking or going away. Under B membership, these groups would become self-sustaining, requiring less and less of THEIR money and promoting the use of more of our money. 

There are a number of producers that operate better when they can remain the size that maximizes profit and limits liabilities and risks. We called agricultural entrepreneurs “pocket farmers” in other places, people who with limited investments in materials to provide a limited crop. Add a few dozen with similar inclinations and one has a fresh food market that could be run almost entirely on Valuns with enough of THEIR money to pay taxes. Remember, we are about “coming out of her, my people” rather than seeking any accommodation from our known enemies.

Yes, we always capitalize THEM and we always capitalize FORCE. We have already identified THEM as a phalanx of globalists, bankers, elitists, technocrats, satanists, pedophiles, scribes and Pharisees and THEY always use FORCE and have done so successfully for thousands of years. It's amazing that something so important as money should have just been left to …. well, to its owners. Yes, all of it is THEIR money, stupid! So Cass Sunstein and others were in fact telling you nicely and politely as possible that you should all shut up, do as you're told by THEM, think as you are told by THEM, certainly pay all required of you to pay THEM in THEIR money of course. Why haven't you fully awakened to your situation? Because it's so much easier not to rock THEIR boat, which is sinking. Well, you've been led along by people with the most unsavory characters in the world. It is THEY who have beaten the drums of “progressivism” or whatever masked form of tyranny THEY have always had in THEIR minds. None of us can ever get completely off THEIR sinking ship unless and until we organize and band together to actually own our own money and the means to account for it and to enable it to spread around the world among the real owners of the wealth, we ourselves. 

To wrap this one up, wealth is not just a bunch of depreciating or abandoned stuff. To us wealth must produce an income or it isn't wealth. A working natural person earning money is doing so based on their own individual wealth; they are paid to do something within a certain pay scale that matches in some way the material contribution each worker makes to the enterprise. Labor is the first instance of all wealth. With capital tools enhancement, most businesses can produce more up to a point of diminishing returns to scale. Most businesses adapt slowly to changes in production and offerings for sale and may experience cyclical or periodic ups and downs. Such things are normal in today's economy using THEIR money. But our own money makes things a lot easier, especially for the small guy who always intends on staying small in order to operate within normal capabilities to provide the best products and services. So having an alternative money to THEIRS is intended as a way to build and enhance wealth. 

Thanks and best 

David Burton

dpbmss@mail.com