The Case for Jubilee

September 6, 2025

After our temporary diversion with the Mandaean origins of baptism, in this next installment, we shall get back on track with our discussion of individual sovereignty and the practical considerations standing in the way of its realization. I admit it has been some time since I first promised this discussion, and I have no excuse for the delay, other than my taking advantage of the summer to spend time with family, as well as a bit of distraction from theological controversies on X. But let us get back to serious work and press on. Our topic for today: economics. Yes, I know, after our contemplation of the Heavenly Waters of Creation, the ‘uthras and the shkintas, and humanity’s destiny to that sublime kingdom, what could possibly be more excruciatingly dry than economics. But I promise to keep this as enthralling as possible. Perhaps, then, we should reframe the whole discussion before we even begin. For while, to be sure, this is a matter of economics and all of the decorum and conventions of polite modern intellectual discourse demands we frame it as such, at the same time it can also, and perhaps more appropriately, be characterized as a matter of a far more encompassing and profound discipline; alchemy, for, as we shall see, the architects of the modern economic order have done nothing short of achieving that age-old dream of the alchemists; the transmutation of base materials into gold (a little Iron Maiden feels appropriate). No one can deny that this was a most impressive feat and we can even admit that the unfathomable wealth it produced had, to some degree, a positive impact, helping to accelerate the technological explosion we enjoy today. All this, however, was built on a mere illusion. A distinction has often been drawn between a genuine alchemy in which base materials are quite literally transformed into gold and a deceptive sort of alchemy whereby the alchemist, like a stage magician, uses trickery and sleight of hand to merely make it appear that he has produced gold. The latter sort of alchemist is, by no means, necessarily any less of a true alchemist. It is said that even those alchemists committed to the genuine search for the philosopher’s stone could be known to employ such tricks in order to secure employment or impress potential benefactors in order to fund their genuine alchemical work. Unfortunately for us, as it turns out, those financial alchemists who designed the economic system in which we live and operate today were practicing that debased form of alchemy that only gives the appearance of producing gold. Consequently, this debased nature has seeped into every area of life that this scheme has touched, which is to say, just about every area of life. Moreover, the alchemists could only keep up this trick for so long, and they appear to be running out of steam. It is only a matter of time before the veil is lifted and the jig is up. But if the veil is lifted too abruptly, society may not be able to adequately process the shock from realizing the deception it has fallen victim to and the results could be devastating. If, however, we are able to unveil and dismantle the scheme with the proper care, we might find that we are in a unique position to accelerate the realization of individual sovereignty in practice. By laying the foundations of a society centered around the principle of individual sovereignty, while at the same time turning our attention to the highest and most esoteric forms of alchemy, perhaps we might discover the true philosopher’s stone, that key that allows us to transform a base soul into one of gold. 

To begin, we must first understand the full size and scope of the deception these alchemists have perpetrated against us and the methods that they used to do it. As we shall see as we explain this scheme, this is almost certainly the greatest fraud that has ever been perpetrated against the general public, perhaps in all of human history. We will have two principal books to guide us in understanding the details of this deception. They are two excellent books that should be in the personal libraries of anyone who seriously wants to understand the time in which we live. The first, which provides an excellent technical economic foundation for understanding the scheme in question, is Murray Rothbard’s What Has Government Done to Our Money?. The Second, which provides the political background, and more importantly, explores a worst case scenario for the collapse of the scheme that will be of great use as a guide for what to avoid in dismantling the plot, is G. Edward Griffin’s The Creature from Jekyll Island. It is natural to feel angry and to demand justice when presented with this information, and no doubt, justice must be done. But perhaps it is not all as bad as it seems, for it would seem the most natural means of righting these wrongs could very well lead us in the direction of more absolute individual sovereignty. 

While I wish to avoid any extended reflection on dry and technical economic principles, unfortunately, in order for us to understand how this great fraud has been perpetrated right under the noses of the entire world, it is necessary for us first to establish some foundational economic principles. In particular, it is necessary to answer the question: What is money?

In order to answer this question, it is necessary, first, to understand what it is, precisely, that the discipline of economics intends to investigate. To put it simply, economics is primarily concerned with the investigation of the phenomenon of exchange. Exchange precedes money and is the necessary condition for its advent. The most basic and primitive form of exchange is called direct exchange. Direct exchange occurs between two people when each has something that the other desires. For instance, if one farmer has some apples that he exchanges with another farmer for some corn, the two farmers have engaged in direct exchange with one another. Thus, direct exchange is what is more commonly known as barter. 

Barter, to be sure, can be an extremely efficient means of exchange in some cases, particularly on small scales in which limited parties and items are involved. But as material conditions evolve and become more complex, direct exchange begins to run into difficulties. For instance, perhaps the farmer with the corn in the first example doesn’t want apples. Perhaps he has an orchard of his own or he simply doesn’t like them. Perhaps what he would really like in exchange for his corn is a new pair of shoes. But if the farmer with the apples has no extra shoes to trade for corn, what is he to do? Perhaps he can trade his apples to a cobbler for some shoes and then trade those shoes with the other farmer for some corn. This scenario describes an extremely primitive form of what is called indirect exchange, which occurs when one party of an exchange must exchange their item for a third item in order to obtain the item they wanted from the other party. But not everyone wants shoes. As the inefficiencies of direct exchange become increasingly apparent and indirect exchange becomes increasingly necessary, people will begin to seek out goods valuable for their function as media of exchange. While these goods may have uses and value independent of their status as media of exchange, because of their exchange function, such goods become generally desirable to all. Over time, some goods might rise to the top as particularly efficient media of exchange, taking on the status of what we call money. Throughout history, the two most common substances to come to fill this role have been the precious metals silver and gold (The Stones get it). As Rothbard explains, 

Now just as in nature there is a great variety of skills and resources, so there is a variety in the marketability of goods. Some goods are more widely demanded than others, some are more divisible into smaller units without loss of value, some more durable over long periods of time, some more transportable over long distances. All of these advantages make for greater marketability. It is clear that in every society, the most marketable goods will be gradually selected as the media for exchange. As they are more and more selected as media, the demand for them increases because of this use, and so they become even more marketable. The result is a reinforcing spiral: more marketability causes wider use as a medium which causes more marketability, etc. Eventually, one or two commodities are used as a general media – in almost all exchanges – and these are called money. 

Historically, many different goods have been used as media: tobacco in colonial Virginia, sugar in the West Indies, salt in Abyssinia, cattle in ancient Greece, nails in Scotland, copper in ancient Egypt, and grain, beads, tea, cowrie shells, and fishhooks. Through the centuries, two commodities, gold and silver, have emerged as money in the free competition of the market and have displaced other commodities. Both are uniquely marketable, are in great demand as ornaments, and excel in the other necessary qualities. In recent times, silver, being relatively more abundant than gold, has been found more useful for smaller exchanges, while gold is more useful for larger transactions. At any rate, the important thing is that whatever the reason, the free market has found gold and silver to be the most efficient moneys.

Money is a truly revolutionary development. Not only does it make trade considerably easier, but, by introducing objective numerical values into trade, it serves to facilitate true economic calculation, a crucial groundwork for more complex economic transactions such as investment and loans, which help to drive economic growth. Be not misled by those who scoff at money as a valueless construct, a figment of our imaginations, or any other such phantasm. These are the fantasies of childlike minds. Money is the life blood of trade, productivity, and, indeed, all material human progress. To abolish money would be simply to plunge us into a primitive barter economy. 

As Rothbard is careful to remind us, it is essential that we think of money as a commodity. And like any commodity, the value of money is dependent on its supply. All else being equal, when the supply of money circulating in the market increases, the value of any given unit of that money will decrease, while, when the supply of that money decreases, the value of any given unit increases. The great advantage of money in the form of precious metals like gold and silver is that the supply of these commodities is subject to a natural limit. While the discovery of a new supply of these metals somewhere on earth might lead to temporary inflation, eventually the valuations will stabilize once again.

Ok, that’s enough foundational economics for one essay. While there is much more that could be said about money, this foundation will suffice for our purposes here. For a more comprehensive overview see the second section of Rothbard’s book. Let us now move from economics to history.

For the vast majority of America’s early history, the traditional dominance of gold and silver moneys prevailed, creating a stable environment in which tremendous growth could take place. Despite the continued dominance of gold and silver as the grounds of all economic valuations, increasingly during this period, people turned to paper money to facilitate their trades. To understand this development, we must briefly turn our attention to the closely related history of banking. (Ok, maybe I lied about being done with economics, but this stuff feels more like history to me.)

Amongst the most significant issues to divide America’s Founding Fathers was the question of whether or not the Constitution permitted the Federal Government to establish a national bank. Jefferson and his allies believed the Constitution granted the Federal Government no such power and fiercely contested attempts to establish one. However, the pro-bank faction, whose most prominent and forceful representative was Alexander Hamilton, ultimately prevailed. The First Bank of the United States would exist from 1791 until its charter expired in 1811. A Second Bank of the United States was established in 1816, ultimately to be dissolved in 1836 thanks to Andrew Jackson’s relentless war against it. We need not concern ourselves with the policies of these early banks. What is important is that from 1836 until 1913, there was no central banking system in the United States. Banks were predominantly privately owned and independent banks. Amongst the functions banks fulfilled was storage of clients’ precious metal holdings. When people deposited silver or gold in a bank, they received a certificate attesting to that deposit to be redeemed for the actual metal at a later time. Though people could redeem their deposits to make purchases directly in gold or silver, because metals can be rather cumbersome compared to pieces of paper, people soon learned that it was often easier to simply use bank notes for purchases. So, while paper money became increasingly popular, the value of that money remained intimately tied to precious metals, serving as a representation of a specific weight of gold or silver. Nevertheless, as the use of bank notes became more and more common, the public was gradually conditioned to associate money with paper bills rather than the precious metals they represented.

This picture persisted with minimal interruption for the majority of the nineteenth century until the establishment of the Federal Reserve in 1913 (I don’t give a damn about a greenback dollar). The official justification for this measure was to combat instabilities in the banking industry that led to a catastrophic panic in 1907. Throughout The Creature from Jekyll Island, Griffin contends that there were far more nefarious motives behind the scene. For those interested in this angle to the story Griffin’s book is essential reading. The historian Carroll Quigley’s works The Anglo-American Establishment and Tragedy and Hope, which Griffin drew from heavily, also help to corroborate these views. For our purposes here though, we need not worry ourselves too much about the conspiratorial aspects of the story or the specific details of the conspiracy. For whatever reason the Federal Reserve System was established, it will suffice for us to explain the basic details of how the Federal Reserve System operates and the consequences of its actions. 

The Federal Reserve was established with the supposed purpose of addressing the problems that led to panics like that in 1907. The basic problem can be traced to the practice known as fractional reserve banking. According to this model, banks, with the understanding that, most likely, their depositors would not try to claim all of their deposits at the same time, used some of the deposits they had on hand to make investments. When these investments succeeded, the banks prospered. But in the event investments failed, the bank would no longer have enough reserves on hand to return all investments should all of its depositors demand their deposits back at the same time. This is why a characteristic feature of nineteenth century panics was the bank run in which depositors, sensing signs of trouble, would rush to the bank to reclaim all of their deposits before there was nothing left. 

On the face of things, the Federal Reserve was meant to rein in the practice of fractional reserve banking by keeping a tight, centralized watch on individual banks’ gold holdings. However, as Griffin maintains, the Federal Reserve was not really a regulatory body meant to stave off the worst effects of fractional reserve banking, but a cartel intended to monopolize the practice of fractional reserve banking and drive out smaller competitors to ensure that the stakeholders in the cartel could act according to their worst instincts while facing minimal consequences for their actions. As time went on, the Federal Reserve’s grip over every facet of the economy was only to expand and tighten. 

Still, at least in the beginning, the gold standard continued to prevail. Though the paper bills Americans carried now said Federal Reserve Note instead of bearing the name of their local bank, these bills could still be traded in for their appropriate weight in gold. But this would not last long and with the outbreak of World War I in July of 1914 the foundations of this gold backed economic system would begin to erode as nations began to print more paper money than they had gold in their reserves in order to fund the war effort. Europe was rocked by heavy inflation, but the United States, which didn’t enter the war until April of 1917 (Griffin contends that this too was orchestrated by the same shadowy cartel responsible for the establishment of the Federal Reserve), was not hit nearly as hard by inflation. Rothbard explains what happened next, 

How to return to the Golden Age? The sensible thing to do would have been to recognize the facts of reality, the fact of the depreciated pound, franc, mark, etc., and to return to the gold standard at a redefined rate: a rate that would recognize the existing supply of money and price levels. The British pound, for example, had been traditionally defined at a weight which made it equal to $4.86. But by the end of World War I, the inflation in Britain had brought the pound down to approximately $3.50 on the free foreign exchange market. Other currencies were similarly depreciated. The sensible policy would have been for Britain to return to gold at approximately $3.50, and for the other inflated countries to do the same. Phase I could have been smoothly and rapidly restored. Instead, the British made the fateful decision to return to gold at the old par of $4.86. It did so for reasons of British national “prestige,” and in a vain attempt to reestablish London as the “hard money” financial center of the world. To succeed at this piece of heroic folly, Britain would have had to deflate severely its money supply and its price levels, for at a $4.86 pound British export prices were far too high to be competitive in the world markets. But deflation was now politically out of the question, for the growth of trade unions, buttressed by a nationwide system of unemployment insurance, had made wage rates rigid downward; in order to deflate the British government would have had to reverse the growth of its welfare state. In fact, the British wished to continue to inflate money and prices. As a result of combining inflation with a return to an overvalued par, British exports were depressed all during the 1920s and unemployment was severe all during the period when most of the world was experiencing an economic boom.

How could the British try to have their cake and eat it at the same time? By establishing a new international monetary order which would induce or coerce other governments into inflating or into going back to gold at overvalued parts for their own currencies, thus crippling their own exports and subsidizing imports from Britain. This is precisely what Britain did, as it led the way, at the Genoa Conference of 1922, in creating a new international monetary order, the gold-exchange standard. 

The gold-exchange standard worked as follows: The United States remained on the classical gold standard redeeming dollars in gold. Britain and the other countries of the West, however, returned to a pseudo-gold standard, Britain in 1926 and the other countries around the same time. British pounds and other currencies were not payable in gold coins, but only in large-sized bars, suitable for international transactions. This prevented the ordinary citizens of Britain and other European countries from using gold in their daily life, and thus permitted a wider degree of paper and bank inflation. But furthermore, Britain redeemed pounds not merely in gold. But also in dollars; while the other countries redeemed their currencies not in gold, but in pounds. And most of these countries were induced by Britain to return to gold at overvalued parities. The result was a pyramiding of United States on gold, of British pounds on dollars, and of other European currencies on pounds – the “gold exchange standard”,” with the dollar and the pound as the two “key currencies.” 

Now when Britain inflated,  and experienced a deficit in its balance of payments, the gold standard mechanism did not work to quickly restrict British inflation. For instead of other countries redeeming their pounds for gold, they kept the pounds and inflated on top of the. Hence Britain and Europe were permitted to inflate unchecked, and British deficits could pile up unrestrained by the market discipline of the gold standard. As for the United States, Britain was able to induce the United States to inflate dollars so as not to lose many dollar reserves or gold to the United States.

Now when Britain inflated,  and experienced a deficit in its balance of payments, the gold standard mechanism did not work to quickly restrict British inflation. For instead of other countries redeeming their pounds for gold, they kept the pounds and inflated on top of the. Hence Britain and Europe were permitted to inflate unchecked, and British deficits could pile up unrestrained by the market discipline of the gold standard. As for the United States, Britain was able to induce the United States to inflate dollars so as not to lose many dollar reserves or gold to the United States.

While the decks of the international monetary system were being restacked, the Federal Reserve pursued an easy money policy at home, keeping interest rates low in order to encourage investment in business. In the short term, these policies helped to spark the economic boom of the 1920s, creating the illusion that these policies were doing what they were intended to do. But, in reality, these policies were merely encouraging overinvestment and unsustainable expansion that could not be maintained forever. Eventually the market would have to correct for this. That correction came on October 29, 1929, Black Tuesday, a date that will forever live in infamy as the starting point of the Great Depression. 

To the Federal Reserve’s credit, it did not ignore the message the markets were trying to send, acting quickly to raise interest rates in an attempt to reverse course. But this was too little too late and political considerations would soon exacerbate the situation. The public demanded conspicuous government action to address the economic concerns triggered by the crash. Contrary to the popular narrative according to which President Hoover failed to react to the crash, in reality, Hoover was all too ready to cave to public demand. In 1930, in an attempt to protect American made products, a considerable tariff was imposed on foreign goods, raising prices on an already cash trapped populace. To make matters worse, Hoover insisted on creating jobs through government funded projects, increasing government expenses. 

Hoover’s misguided measures proved unsuccessful, opening the door for Franklin D. Roosevelt to glide to victory in the 1932 presidential election on a platform of even more drastic intervention than Hoover had attempted. The deepening Depression became the perfect pretext to seize emergency powers and increase the size and scope of state influence over monetary policy and the economy more generally. It was Roosevelt who would truly begin the process of divorcing the dollar from its grounding in gold. On April 5, 1933 he issued Executive Order 6102 prohibiting American citizens from holding gold and requiring all citizens to hand over their gold to the Federal Reserve in exchange for paper dollars. No more could American citizens redeem their dollars for gold. In effect, the gold standard was dead. But the government wasn’t content to bury the corpse quite yet and an incredibly fine thread linking the dollar to gold was left intact. The dollar was revalued at 1/35 of an ounce of gold and, though citizens could no longer redeem their dollars for gold, the option was left open for foreign governments and central banks. In other words, the Federal Government had confiscated gold from American citizens while willingly handing it over to foreign governments for nothing but pieces of paper. 

Roosevelt’s attempts to spend the country out of the Depression proved futile. It would take the tumult and chaos of the Second World War to restore anything approximating economic order. The Allied victory provided the foundation on which to build this new economic order. The basic architecture of this new world order was to be outlined in high level meetings at Bretton Woods, New Hampshire in 1944. The new system would take its name, the Bretton Woods System, from this meeting. As Rothbard explains, 

The new system was essentially the gold-exchange standard of the 1920s but with the dollar rudely displacing the British pound as one of the “key currencies.” Now, the dollar, valued at 1/35 of a gold ounce, was to be the only key currency. The other difference from the 1920s was that the dollar was no longer redeemable in gold to American citizens; instead, the 1930’s system was continued, with the dollar redeemable in gold only to foreign governments and their Central Banks. No private individuals, only governments, were to be allowed the privilege of redeeming dollars in the world gold currency. In the Bretton Woods system, the United States pyramided dollars )in paper money and in bank deposits) on top of gold, in which dollars could be redeemed by foreign governments; while all other governments held dollars as their basic reserve and pyramided their currency on top of dollars. And since the United States began the post-war world with a huge stock of gold (approximately $25 billion) there was plenty of play for pyramiding the dollar claims on top of it. Furthermore, the system could ‘work’ for a while because all the world’s currencies returned to the new system at their pre-World War II pars, most of which were highly overvalued in terms of their inflated and depreciated currencies. The inflated pound sterling, for example, returned at $4.86, even though it was worth far less than that in terms of purchasing power on the market. Since the dollar was artificially undervalued and most other currencies overvalued in 1945, the dollar was made scarce, and the world suffered from a so-called dollar shortage, which the American taxpayer was supposed to be obligated to make up by foreign aid. In short, the export surplus enjoyed by the undervalued American dollar was to be partly financed by the hapless American taxpayer in the form of foreign aid. 

With Bretton Woods in place and the dollar’s link to gold becoming more and more tenuous, the Federal Reserve was now free to print money virtually without limit. And that’s precisely what it did. In contrast, major Western powers like Germany and France, along with Japan in the East, pursued relatively hard money policies. As time went on, these countries became increasingly dissatisfied with the inflating and devaluing American dollars. But they had a way out of this predicament. Rothbard continues, 

But Europe did have the legal option of redeeming dollars in gold at $35 an ounce. And as the dollar became increasingly overvalued in terms of hard money currencies and gold, European governments began more and more to exercise that option. The gold standard check was coming into use; hence gold flowed steadily out of the United States for two decades after the early 1950s, until the United States gold stock dwindled over this period from $20 billion to $9 billion. As dollars kept inflating upon a dwindling gold base, how could the United States keep redeeming foreign dollars in gold – the cornerstone of the Bretton Woods system? These problems did not slow down continued United States inflation of dollars and prices, or the United States policy of “benign neglect,” which resulted by the late 1960s in an accelerated pileup of no less than $80 billion in unwanted dollars in Europe (known as Eurodollars). To try to stop European redemption of dollars into gold, the United States exerted intense political pressure on the European governments, similar but on a far larger scale to the British cajoling of France not to redeem its heavy sterling balances until 1931. But economic law has a way, at long last, of catching up with governments, and this is what happened to the inflation-happy United States government by the end of the 1960s. The gold-exchange system of Bretton Woods – hailed by the United States political and economic Establishment as permanent and impregnable – began to unravel rapidly in 1968. 

So, to recap, the Federal Reserve, initially founded to oversee banks and prevent the sorts of gold reserve shortages that precipitated the panics of the nineteenth century, within 20 years had seized all gold from American citizens and prevented them from redeeming their hard earned money for the precious metal that it supposedly represented. Then, not only were foreign governments allowed to carry off American’s gold as they held the exclusive right to redeem dollars for gold, but they were also allowed to do so at a wickedly discounted rate as the dollar inflated with no corresponding adjustments to the exchange rate. To put it quite plainly, we were robbed by foreign governments with the assistance of our own. 

This arrangement, however, could not last forever. As the American gold supply depleted, it became apparent that something had to be done to prevent the inevitable emptying of America’s gold reserves. The solution came from President Richard Nixon on August 15, 1971, when he officially removed the United States from the gold standard and ended the practice of redeeming dollars for gold for anyone, citizens and foreign governments alike. And just like that, with the stroke of a pen, the dollar was, once and for all, entirely divorced from any relation to gold whatsoever. No doubt, for large segments of the public, which had by this point become accustomed to the use of paper money for at least two or three generations, the complete and profound implications of this move were hardly noticed. Rothbard explains the system that emerged in the aftermath of Nixon’s monumental decision, 

With the dollar breaking apart, the world shifted again, to a system of fluctuating fiat currencies. Within the West European bloc, exchange rates were tied to one another, and the United States again devalued the official dollar rate by a token amount to $42 an ounce. As the dollar plunged in foreign exchange from day to day, and the West German mark, the Swiss franc, and the Japanese yen hurtled upward, the American authorities, backed by the Friedmanite economists, began to think that this was the monetary ideal. It is true that dollar surpluses and sudden balance of payments crises do not plague the world under fluctuating exchange rates. Furthermore, American export firms began to chortle that falling dollar rates made American goods cheaper abroad, and therefore benefitted exports. It is true that governments persisted in interfering with exchange fluctuations (“dirty” instead of “clean” floats), but overall it seemed that the international monetary order had sundered into a Friedmanite utopia.

But it became clear all too soon that all is far from well in the current international monetary system. The long-run problem is that the hard-money countries will not sit by forever and watch their currencies become more expensive and their exports hurt for the benefit of their American competitors. If American inflation and dollar depreciation continues, they will soon shift to the competing devaluation, exchange controls, currency blocs, and economic warfare of the 1930s. But more immediate is the other side of the coin: the fact that depreciating dollars means that American imports are far more expensive, American tourists suffer abroad, and cheap exports are snapped up by foreign countries so rapidly as to raise prices of exports at home (e.g., the American wheat-and-meat- price inflation). So that American exporters might indeed benefit, but only at the expense of the inflation-ridden American consumer. The crippling uncertainty of rapid exchange rate fluctuations was brought starkly home to Americans with the rapid plunge of the dollar in foreign exchange markets in July 1973. 

Since the United States went completely off gold in August 1971 and established the Friedmanite fluctuating fiat system in March 1973, the United States and the world have suffered the most intense and most sustained bout of peacetime inflation in the history of the world. It should be clear by now that this is scarcely a coincidence. Before the dollar was cut loose from gold, Keynesians and Friedmanites, each in their own way devoted to fiat paper money, confidently predicted that when fiat money was established, the market price of gold would fall promptly to its nonmonetary level, then estimated at about $8 an ounce. In their scorn of gold, both groups maintained that it was the might dollar that was propping up the price of gold, and not vice versa. Since 1971, the market price of gold has never been below the old fixed price of $35 an ounce, and has almost always been enormously higher. When, during the 1950s and 1960s , economists such as Jacques Rueff were calling for a gold standard price of $70 an ounce, the price was considered absurdly high. It is now even more absurdly low. The far higher gold price is an indication of the calamitous deterioration of the dollar since “modern” economists had their way and all gold backing was removed. 

It is now all too clear that the world has become fed up with the unprecedented inflation, in the United States and throughout the world, that has been sparked by the fluctuating fiat currency era inaugurated in 1973. We are also weary of the extreme volatility and unpredictability of currency exchange rates. This volatility is the consequence of the national fiat money system, which fragmented the world’s money and added artificial political instability to the natural uncertainty in the free-marker price system. The Friedmanite dream of fluctuating fiat money lies in ashes, and there is an understandable yearning to return to an international money with fixed exchange rates. 

Despite the yearning Rothbard describes, there has been little progress toward the reestablishment of any formal international monetary system, whether it be a true gold standard or some revamped Bretton Woods type system. Still, as a vestige of Bretton Woods, the US dollar has managed, as a matter of political and economic convenience, to maintain its status as world reserve currency. Though the dollar is no longer directly tied to gold, nonetheless, central banks around the world continue to hold it in their reserves and continue to peg the value of their own currencies in relation to the dollar. This has allowed the Federal Reserve to maintain its inflationary monetary policies and, so long as world confidence in the dollar, there is no end in sight. But how long can this last? It is treated as a sort of conventional wisdom that the dollar’s standing in international markets is unassailable and could continue indefinitely, but, increasingly, people are questioning how well founded these assumptions really are.

But this explanation of the scheme under which we have lived for the last century is only half of the story. Though we can now explain how the international gold standard was undermined and cast aside, we now must ask, what was the motive for doing so? The answer isn’t too hard to grasp. By divorcing the money supply from its foundation in gold, it becomes possible to create as much money out of nothing as one’s heart desires. It is still true that expanding the money supply will inflate the currency, but this is of little concern to the banks who are first to receive newly printed dollars and who get to spend them before the market fully realizes the expanded money supply and the full effects of inflation are able to take effect. And if inflation becomes too much of a problem there are mechanisms for reigning it in for a time and, once concerns have sufficiently subsided, the inflationary policies can be resumed with ease. The real appeal of this sort of system in the eyes of the business elite, however, is the possibility of enjoying a sustained economic boom fueled, like the boom of the 1920s, by reckless investments without the threat of feeling any real repercussions when market corrections inevitably bring on a crash. This is because these big shot investors know that if (more like when) their investments should fail, their friends at the Federal Reserve, having the ability to print money with virtually no limit, can simply print enough to lift them out of the hole they have dug for themselves (it’s a bit like the old gambling song, If I lose, let me lose. I don’t care how much I lose. If I lose a hundred dollars trying to win a dime, my baby she’s got money all the time). As Griffin documents throughout his book, over the course of the last century, there have been a multitude of examples, accomplished through several different strategies, of the government insulating businesses from their irresponsible financial practices. For instance, there is the FDIC, or Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation, which serves to insure citizens’ bank deposits in the event that a bank is not able to make good on its promises. Though sold as a means to protect the average depositor, in reality, this serves to incentivize reckless lending policies, as the bank is now covered even if its investments fail. In other instances, the government might prop up failing businesses on the grounds that they are too vital to public interests to allow them to collapse. Anyone who lived through the 2008 financial crisis, no doubt, recalls that all too ubiquitous, cursed phrase, “too big to fail.” As Griffin so succinctly puts it, “the name of the game is bailout.” 

Now, fairness requires us to point out that this arrangement has not been all bad for the American people. Indeed, access to an endless supply of money has helped to expand home ownership as well as to fund scientific research, thus such policies can very plausibly be credited with accelerating the realization of some of the key hallmarks and comforts we have come to associate with modernity. But at what cost? And is this cost worth it?

In the first place, we must understand the true significance of the operation by which the Federal Reserve creates money out of nothing. If traditional bank notes were meant to represent a particular weight of gold, what then, are fiat notes supposed to represent? Though it is common parlance to say that these notes are created out of nothing and even the name, fiat, even serves to convey this by hearkening back to God’s creation of the world ex nihilo by referring to the line from Genesis, “Fiat lux,” or, “Let there be light”. But to say that fiat money is simply created out of nothing by decree is to oversimplify the situation. In truth, every dollar that the Federal Reserve prints represents a debt against the government of the United States; a debt that is to be picked up by none other than the American taxpayer. Ultimately, the value of the fiat dollar is backed, not by gold or any other tangible good, but by the labour and productivity of American citizens. It renders us all, in essence, debt slaves.

But it is not only the sovereignty of American citizens that is in question under this system; the sovereignty of the United States itself is undermined by this arrangement. A key concern in founding the Federal Reserve System was that it be entirely free from any possible political influence. To ensure this was the case, the architects of the Federal Reserve System were careful to drastically limit the influence that the president could wield over it. But Article II section i of the Constitution clearly states, “The executive Power shall be vested in the President of the United States of America.” Thus, by creating an institution with executive powers almost entirely unbeholden to the president, the Federal Reserve Act was violating this clear provision of the Constitution and, in effect, creating an entirely new, fourth branch of the Federal Government. But the essential structure of the United States Government, as outlined in the Constitution, cannot be altered by a mere act of Congress. For such a change to be legitimately effected would require a Constitutional amendment, a far more grueling process than the passage of a regular bill. The Federal Reserve System, thus, is not even Constitutional. The recent controversy regarding President Trump’s firing of a governor of a Federal Reserve Bank and his threats to fire Federal Reserve Chair Jerome Powell, are not the “Constitutional crises” that many in the media would like us to believe. Indeed, think what you will of Trump’s economic and monetary policies, those of us who still hold the Constitution in high regard must applaud his resolve in attempting to reclaim the Constitutionally delegated powers of the Office of the President. 

Finally, for those with hardened hearts, for whom the debt slavery of American citizens and the erosion of the Constitution are not worthy motivations, it must be noted that the economic system we currently have represents a grave threat to that end that has enabled so much undermining of the Constitution in recent years, namely, national security. The fact of the matter is that our current monetary system is but a house of cards. It is a matter of a combination of convenience, American military supremacy, and, perhaps, a little bit of luck that serves to maintain the American dollar’s status as world reserve currency. There is no ironclad law, either of nature, or of state, which demands the dollar retain this status in perpetuity. Any unexpected gust of wind, from a military embarrassment, to a natural disaster, to the mere fickleness of human nature, and anything in between, could lead to a loss of faith in the dollar that sends the whole house tumbling down. This is not a position that we can sit in forever. However intent the current administration seems to ride this wave of worldwide American economic dominance for as long as it will last, it is clear that we must begin looking for an escape route now before a full scale disaster can be allowed to strike. 

But what is the worst that could happen? Let us turn to Griffin and allow him to paint the picture of a possible worst case scenario. He sets the stage by asking us to imagine the failure of one of America’s biggest banks, triggered by a default on a loan to Mexico. This initial crisis leads to an old school, nineteenth century run on the banks by citizens desperate to get their money out of the bank before there is none left to get. This initial crisis is averted thanks to the Federal Reserve. The banks are ordered to keep their doors open and honor every depositor’s request. New supplies of money from the Federal Reserve are wheeled past people waiting in line to alleviate concern. Eventually everyone is reassured and they return home. Meanwhile an electronic run on the banks from overseas parties continues, causing money to flood out of the country. The Federal Reserve creates money out of anything it can get its hands on to resolve the crisis. Several weeks later, the public’s uneasiness reappears, this time with a vengeance. The run on the banks resumes. As Griffin explains, 

Spokesmen from the Treasury and the Federal Reserve appear on TV and assure the nation that there is no need for panic. Everything is under control. The only problem is the irrational behavior of alarmists who have no faith in their country. 

No one believes them. The lines grow longer, and the people become angry. Bank employees are jeered on their way to work. Bomb threats are made. Sporadic violence breaks out, and bank windows are smashed. The International Guard is called up. The President declares a bank holiday. 

Since people cannot close out their bank accounts by withdrawing currency, they rush through the stores on checkbook-spending sprees. If they cannot get their money back, at least they can buy things with it. Garages and basements are filling up with canned goods, shoes, liquor, tires, ammunition. Goods are becoming scarce, pushing prices upward. The Dow Jones is going through the roof as investors empty their checking accounts to buy anything for sale. The Securities and Exchange Commission finally suspends trading. 

Nine months have now passed. The crisis has been a blessing for politicians. They have thrived upon it and grown in stature because of it.  It has given them an excuse to swarm through the country on fact-finding trips, to appear in shirt sleeves at town-hall meetings, to give speeches, and to be seen on television – all the time expressing grave concern and appearing to take charge. It has legitimized their role and somehow made them seem more necessary than before. They have been converted in the public eye from oafs and bumpkins to serious-minded statesmen.

The party in power said it inherited the mess. The previous party blamed the current one for dropping the ball. Both parties, however, agreed on the solution: more of exactly the same policies that created the crisis: expanded power to the Federal Reserve, more government control over the economy, more subsidies and benefits, and more international commitments. These were called “emergency reforms” and became law. The same men who created the problem prescribed the solution. The public was grateful to have leaders of such vision and wisdom.

It is not at all hard to imagine such a scenario playing out in our current atmosphere. Already both sides point fingers at the other for the continually increasing national debt only to get into office to do just more of the same. Griffin continues stating that the measures taken by the government to resolve the crisis injects a massive new supply of dollars into the market causing its value to crash and its status as a reserve currency to collapse once and for all. At this point things get truly dire.

Three more months have passed, and the President has declared a state of national emergency. Today, the Secretary of the Treasury announced that the nations of the world had ratified a multilateral treaty that would solve the inflationary problems of the United States. This will be accomplished through the issuance of a new world-wide monetary unit called the Bancor, the name proposed by John Maynard Keynes at the Bretton Woods Conference in 1944. This new money will restore our commerce and put a stop to inflation. At last, said the Treasury Secretary, man will have total control over his economic destiny. Money will now become his servant instead of his master. 

The United States, he said, has agreed to accept the Bancor as legal tender for all debts, public and private. The old money will still be honored but will be phased out over a three-month period. After that date, Federal Reserve Notes will no longer be valid. During the transition period, the old money may be exchanged at any bank at the ratio of one Bancor for five-hundred dollars. All existing contracts expressed in dollars – including home mortgages – are now converted to Bancors in that same ratio. 

In the same announcement, the Secretary advised that the IMF/World Bank was backing this new money with something far more precious than gold. Instead, it will be backed by the assets of the world. These include bonds from the participating governments plus millions of acres of wilderness lands that have been deposited into the UN “Environmental Bank.” The National Parks and forests of the United States have been added to those reserves, and they will now be under the supervision of the UN Wilderness Asset Preservation and Enhancement Agency (WAPEA). From this date forward, the Federal Reserve System will operate as a subdivision of the IMF which is now the central bank of the world.

Although the Secretary did not mention it in his public appearance, the UN treaty so obligated the government to put restrictions on the use of cash. Every citizen is to be issued an international ID card. The primary purpose of these machine-readable cards is to provide positive identification for all citizens at transportation depots and military checkpoints . They also can be used by the banks and stores to access checking accounts, which are now called debit accounts. 

Every citizen is being issued an account in a bank near his place of residence. All payments by employers or government agencies will be made by electronic transfer. Cash transactions larger than five Bancors will be illegal in three months. Most expenditures will be paid by debit card. That is the only way in which the UN Monetary Transaction Tracking Agency (MTTA) can combat counterfeiting and prevent money laundering by organized crime. That, of course, is camouflage. The government complex issuing the new money is the greatest perpetrator of counterfeiting and organized crime the world has ever seen. The real targets are political dissidents and those escaping taxes in the underground economy. 

No one will be allowed to earn or buy or sell without this ID card, nor will they be allowed to leave the country or even to migrate to another city. If any government agency has reason to red-flag an individual, his card will not clear, and he will be blocked from virtually all economic transactions and geographical movements. It is the ultimate control. 

The new money offers the Cabal yet one more benefit. There can never be another run on the banks, because it is now illegal to demand currency. 

It would be prudent not to dismiss these prognostications as mere paranoid fantasy. Anyone who even marginally follows current events can see the groundwork is being laid for such developments and that it is not entirely outside the realm of possibility that they might come to fruition. Who has not heard the dire warnings of climate catastrophe? We are told that without drastic measures, humanity as we know it is doomed. We therefore must, as a matter of survival, accept dictatorial government measures, preferably led by international bodies like the UN. (Ironically, in the end, it might be the very environmental causes championed by C.W. McCall that will lead to our country and soul being taken away in the end.) This movement only becomes more desperate and radical as time goes on. And already we have heard suggestions for the Federal Reserve to begin issuing digital dollars. We might not even need the IMF to separate our money from all physical markers. We might start down that path entirely on our own. 

Griffin explains that in the aftermath of these developments violent revolutionary movements begin to spring up rioting and causing general havoc across the country. This causes the people to not only accept, but even demand, dictatorial measures and martial law. As it turns out, however, these revolutionaries are handled suspiciously gently by the authorities. Some even appear to be funded by those in power. A few begin to notice and question this, but they are quickly dismissed as paranoid lunatics and conspiracy theorists. Some are even disappeared. Though things may not be quite so drastic yet, are there not parallels in contemporary life? Is it impossible that things might escalate to a similar level as Griffin describes? 

In the next phase that Griffin describes, the true death blow is struck to individual sovereignty as property ownership is all but abolished. He explains,

One of the first industries to feel the raw power of “emergency measures” was the home industry. During the early stages of inflation, people were applying their increasingly worthless dollars to pay down their mortgages. That was devastating to the lenders. They were being paid back in dollars that were worth only a fraction of the ones they had loaned out. The banking crisis had caused the disappearance of savings and investment capital, so they were unable to sell their homes under such chaotic times and, if they did, very few were willing to by with interest rates that high. Old loans were being paid off, and new loans were not replacing them. The S&Ls, which in the 1980s had been in trouble because home prices were falling, now were going broke because prices were rising. 

Congress applied the expected political fix by bailing them out and taking them over. But that did not stop the losses. It merely transferred them to the taxpayers. To put an end to the losses, Congress passed the Housing Fairness and Reform Act (HFRA). It converted all Bancor-denominated contracts to a new unit of value – called the “Fairness Value” – which is determined by the National Average Price Index (NAPI) on Fridays of the preceding week. This has nothing to do with interest rates. It relates to Bancor values. For the purpose of illustration, let us convert Bancors back to dollars. A $50,000 loan on Friday became a $920,000 loan on Monday. Few people could afford the payments. Thousands of angry voters stormed the Capitol building in protest. While the mob shouted obscenities outside, Congress hastily voted to declare a moratorium on all mortgage payments. By the end of the day, no one had to pay anything! The people returned to their homes with satisfaction and gratitude for their wise and generous leaders. 

That was only an “emergency” measure to be handled on a more sound basis later on. Many months have now passed, and Congress has not dared to tamper with the arrangement. The voters would throw them out of office if they tried. Millions of people have been living in their homes at no cost, except for county taxes, which were also beyond the ability of anyone to pay. Following the lead of Congress, the counties also declared a moratorium on their taxes – but not until the federal government agreed to make up their losses under terms of the newly passed AId to Local Governments Act (ALGA).

Renters are now in the same position, because virtually all rental property has been nationalized, even that which had been totally paid for by their owners. Under HFRA, it is not “fair” for those who are buying their homes to have an advantage over those who are renting. Rent controls made it impossible for apartment owners to keep pace with the rising costs of maintenance and especially their rising taxes. Virtually all rental units have been seized by county governments for back taxes. And since the counties themselves are now dependent on the federal government for most of their revenue, their real estate has been transferred to federal agencies in return for federal aid. 

All of this was pleasing to the voters who were gratified that their leaders were “doing something” to solve their problems. It gradually became clear, however, that the federal government was now the owner of all their homes and apartments. The reality is that people are living in them only at the pleasure of the government. They can be relocated to other quarters if that is what the government wants.

Meanwhile, the UN Wage and Price Stabilization Agency (WPSA) has instituted wage and price controls to combat inflation. What few businesses were able to survive the ravages of inflation are knocked out by these measures. Vital industries have been seized by the WPSA and prevented from closing. When employees refuse to work for low, fixed wages or to take the jobs assigned to them, they are placed under arrest and convicted of anti-democratic activities. Given a choice between prison or “volunteering” for the UN Full Employment and Environmental Restoration Army (FEERA), most of them chose the army.They are now doing the work prescribed for them in return for food and shelter. Many have been reassigned to new jobs, new cities, even new countries, depending on the employment quotas established by the UN International Human Resource Allocation Agency (IHRAA). Their families have been given living quarters which are appropriate to their work status and their willingness to cooperate. 

Automobiles are now used only by the ruling elite who hold government positions of authority. To the extent possible, workers have been relocated to barracks which were constructed within walking distance of major industries. Others use rapid-transit systems, which have been greatly expanded by FEERA. For middle management and the more skilled workers who are allowed to live in the suburbs, there are “Peoples’ Van Pools” (PVPs) that shuttle them to and from assigned boarding areas. 

Last week, Maurice Strong, who is now the Director of the IHRAA, toured the fifteen regional subdivisions that have been carved out of the North-American continent – including the former United States and Canada – and expressed gratification that America, at last, has ceased to be an aggressor against the world. 

Another twenty years have slipped by, and we now find ourselves in The New World Order. No one around us is sure exactly when it began. In fact, there was no official starting date, no announcement in the media, no ceremony with blaring of trumpets. Sometime during the past ten or fifteen years, it became obvious that it just was, and everyone accepted it as the natural evolution of political trends and necessities. Now, a whole generation is in place that has no memory of another way of life. Many of the older folks have all but forgotten the details of their previous existence. And, of course, many of them have been eliminated. Schools and textbooks speak of the bygone era as one of unbridled competition, selfishness, and injustice. Previously commonplace possessions such as automobiles and private homes and three pairs of shoes are hardly mentioned, and when they are, they are derided as wasteful artifacts of a decadent society that, fortunately, has ceased to exist. 

As we can see, the potential costs of divorcing the money supply from precious metals is high indeed, although it is not one that must be paid by the elites who orchestrated this scheme, but by the countless innocent, average people who had the wool pulled over their eyes; who had not the knowledge nor the interest to actually understand what was being done to them. The cost for all of this, if nothing is done to resist a course of events such as Griffin describes, is the enslavement of the masses by their very government. It is not mere hyperbole to say that fiat currency is backed by the labour of citizens.

But what can be done? What actions can we take to ensure that we do not go down this dark, tyrannical path? As Griffin is careful to point out, there is no optimistic path forward. There is only the pessimistic path outlined above and a realistic path in which we will inevitably have to accept great hardships in order to right the course we are on and to save us from a far graver future. But what steps must be taken? First and foremost, it is quite clear that we must break free of fiat currency and restore sound money once again, but this is much easier said than done. Fortunately, Griffin has given us a 16 step plan for making this a reality. These steps are as follows,

1. Repeal the legal-tender laws. The federal government will continue accepting Federal Reserve Notes in the payment of taxes, but everyone else will be free to accept them, reject them, or discount them as they wish. There is no need to force people to accept honest money. Only fiat money needs the threat of imprisonment to back it up. Private institutions should be free to innovate and to compete. If people want to use Green Stamps or Disney-ride coupons or Bank-of-America Notes as a medium of exchange, they should be free to do so. The only requirement should be faith fulfillment of contract. If the Green-Stamp company says it will give a crystal lamp for seven books of stamps, then it should be compelled to do so. Disney should be required to accept the coupon in exactly the manner printed on the back. And, if Bank of America tells its depositors they can have their dollars back any time they want, it should be required to keep 100% backing (coins or Treasury Certificates) in its vault at all times. In the transition to a new money, it is anticipated that the old Federal Reserve Notes will continue to be widely used. 
2. Freeze the supply of Federal Reserve Notes, except for what will be needed in step number eleven. 
3. Define the “real” dollar in terms of precious metal content, preferably what it was in the past: 371.25 grains of silver. It could be another weight of silver or even another metal, but the old silver dollar is a proven winner. 
4. Establish gold as an auxiliary monetary reserve which can be substituted for silver, not at a fixed-price ratio, but at whatever ratio is set by the free market. Fixed ratios always become unfair over time as the prices of gold and silver drift relative to each other. Although gold may be substituted for silver at this ration, it is only silver that is the foundation of the dollar. 
5. Restore free coinage at the U.S. Mint and issue silver “dollars” as well as gold “pieces.” Both dollars and pieces will be defined by metal content, but only coins with silver content can be called dollars, half-dollars, quarter-dollars, or tenth-dollars (dimes). At first, these coins will be derived only from metal brought into the mint by private parties. They must not be drawn from the Treasury’s supply which is reserved for use in step number six. 
6. Pay off the national debt with Federal Reserve Notes created for that purpose. Creating money without backing is forbidden by the Constitution; however, when no one is forced by law to accept Federal Reserve Notes as legal tender, they will no longer be the official money of the United States. They will be merely a kind of government script which no one is required to accept. Their utility will be determined by their usefulness in payment of the taxes and by the public’s anticipation of having them exchanged for real money at a later date. The creation of Federal Reserve Notes, with the understanding that they are not the official money of the United States, would therefore not be a violation of the Constitution. In any event, the deed is already done. The decision to redeem government bonds with Federal Reserve Notes is not ours. Congress decided that long ago, and the course was set at the instant those bonds were issued. We are merely playing out the hand. The money will be created for that purpose. Our only choice is when: now or later. If we allow the bonds to stand, the national debt will be repudiated by inflation. The value of the original dollars will gradually be reduced to zero while the only interest remains. Everyone’s purchasing power will be destroyed, and the nation will die. But if we want not to repudiate the national debt and decide to pay it off now, we will be released from the burden of interest payments and, at the same time, prepare the way for a sound monetary system. 
7. Pledge the government’s hoard of gold and silver (except the military stockpile) to be used as backing for all Federal Reserve Notes in circulation. The denationalization of these assets is long overdue. At various times in recent history, it was illegal for Americans to own gold, and their private holdings were confiscated. The amount which was taken should be returned to the private sector as a matter of principle. The rest of the gold supply also belongs to the people, because they paid for it through taxes and inflation. The government has no use for gold or silver except to support the money supply. The time has come to give it back to the people and use it for that purpose. 
8. Determine the weight of all the gold and silver owned by the U.S. government and then calculate the total value of that supply in terms of real (silver) dollars.
9. Determine the number of all the Federal Reserve Notes in circulation and then calculate the real-dollar value of each one by dividing the value of the precious metals by the number of Notes. 
10. Retire all Federal Reserve Notes from circulation by offering to exchange them for dollars at the calculated ratio. There will be enough gold or silver to redeem every Federal Reserve Note in circulation.
11. Convert all contracts based on Federal Reserve Notes to dollars using the same exchange ratio. That includes the contracts called mortgages and government bonds. In that way, monetary value expressed within debt obligations will be converted on the same basis and at the same time as currency. 
12. Issue Silver Certificates. As the Treasure redeems Federal Reserve Notes for dollars, recipients will have the option of taking coins or Treasury Certificates which are 100% backed. These Certificates will become the new paper currency.
13. Abolish the Federal Reserve System. It would be possible to allow the system to continue as a check clearing-house so long as it did not function as a central bank. A check clearing-house will be needed, and the banks that presently own the Fed should be allowed to continue performing that service. However, they must no longer receive tax subsidies to operate, and competition must be allowed. However, the Federal Reserve System, as presently chartered by Congress, must be abolished. 
14. Introduce free banking. Banks should be deregulated and, at the same time, cut loose from protection at taxpayers expense. No more bailouts. The FDIC and other government “insurance” agencies should be phased out, and their functions turned over to real insurance companies in the private sector. Banks should be required to keep 100% reserves for demand deposits, because that is a contractual obligation. All forms of time deposits should be presented to the public exactly as CDs are today. In other word, the depositor should be fully informed that his money is invested and he will have to wait a specified time before he can have it back. Competition will insure that those institutions that best serve their customers’ needs will prosper. Those that do not will fall by the wayside – without the need of an army of bank regulators. 
15. Reduce the size and scope of government. No solution to our economic problems is possible under socialism. It is the author’s view that the government should be limited to the protection of life, liberty, and property – nothing more. That means the elimination of almost all of the socialist-oriented programs that now infest the federal bureaucracy. If we hope to retain – or perhaps to regain – our freedom, they simply have to go. To that end, the federal government should sell all assets not directly related to its primary function of protection; it should privately sub-contract as many of its services as possible; and it should greatly reduce and simplify its taxes.
16. Restore national independence. A similar restraint must be applied at the international level. We must reverse all programs leading to disarmament and economic interdependence. The most significant step in that direction will be to Get us out of the UN and the UN out of the US, but that will be just the beginning. There are hundreds of treaties and administrative agreements that must be rescinded. There may be a few that are constructive and mutually beneficial to us and other nations, but the great majority of them will have to go. That is not because we are isolationist. It is simply because we want to avoid being engulfed in global tyranny.

Griffin’s plan is solid. If each step is followed to a “T”, it has a very good chance of succeeding at returning us to the gold standard with minimal upheaval. But the key word here is “minimal”. There is no world where the transition away from fiat currency back to sound money is perfectly smooth and without problems. As Griffin is careful to acknowledge, in contrast to the inflationary effects we have come to expect from the currently prevailing monetary system, implementing this plan will result in steep deflation. Spending can be expected to tighten up and borrowing money will likely prove more difficult and costly than we have come to expect. Significant growth, for a time, will be difficult, if not impossible

But it is not all bad. As Griffin himself points out, we may well see the return of the “nickel phone call” and the “ten cent cigar.” Plus, it was easy money that put us in this mess in the first place, so maybe more costly and difficult to obtain loans are not such a bad thing after all. Perhaps such circumstances will make us think twice about borrowing money and make it less likely that we dig ourselves into the same hole again. A lack of freely flowing funds may well slow down scientific and technological progress and limit the material comforts we have access to, but, then, perhaps this will have the effect of ensuring that resources are allocated only to the most vital and pressing areas of research and, perhaps, we will be incentivized to turn away from material decadence and focus on what truly matters, namely our spiritual lives. It may also give us the opportunity to rekindle our sense of community and responsibility to one another. With hard work and cooperation these challenges will not be insurmountable. 

That being said, we must acknowledge some ways in which Griffin’s plan does not go quite far enough. As we have already pointed out, to understand how the Federal Reserve debased our money is to only see the tip of the iceberg, for it is the grand scheme that opened the door to a whole host of other, smaller schemes. Many of these schemes opened the door for unsuspecting individuals to go into debt the lenders should have known they would never be able to pay back. In a truly free market, lenders never would have allowed many of these deals to go through in the first place as the lenders would have been on the hook when they failed. But the lenders didn’t care. They knew that eventually, when these unsound practices caught back up with them, they would be able to place the burden for their reckless decisions directly on the shoulders of the taxpayers and they would have to face no personal responsibility for their own actions. On top of this, can we really fault citizens for thinking that there are no consequences for incurring more debt than they can ever hope to pay back when they have seen their government do it all their lives without the slightest hint that it might one day become a problem? What has been perpetrated against the American people is nothing less than deception and fraud and justice demands that restitution be paid for it. Releasing the Federal Government’s reserves of gold and silver into the market is certainly a good start (but then when was the last time our gold reserves were audited?), but it does not go far enough. We must seriously consider as a remedy for these injustices the possibility of jubilee. (And I can’t say the word “jubilee” without this song popping up in my head.)

But what is a jubilee? The concept comes from the twenty-fifth chapter of Leviticus. The chapter begins with God telling Moses that, once the Israelites enter Israel, every seventh year, the land itself will be required to observe a sabbath for the entirety of the year during which no one shall work the land and harvest crops. The focus then shifts to the establishment of the Jubilee tradition. There we read,

Count of seven sabbath years – seven times seven years- so that the seven sabbath years amount to a period of forty-nine years. Then have the trumpet sounded everywhere on the tenth day of the seventh month; on the Day of Atonement sound the trumpet throughout the land. Consecrate the fiftieth year and proclaim liberty throughout the land to all its inhabitants. It shall be a jubilee for you; each of you is to return to your family property and to your own clan. The fiftieth year shall be a jubilee for you; do not sow and do not reap what grows of itself or harvest the untended vines. For it is a jubilee and is to be holy for you; eat only what is taken directly from the fields. 

In this Year of Jubilee everyone is to return to their own property. 

If you sell land to any of your own people or buy land from them, do not take advantage of each other. You are to buy from your own people on the basis of the number of years since the Jubilee. And they are to sell to you on the basis of the number of years left for harvesting crops. When the years are many, you are to increase the price, and when the years are few, you are to decrease the price, because what is really being sold to you is the number of crops. Do not take advantage of each other, but fear your God. I am the LORD your God. 

Follow my decrees and be careful to obey my laws, and you will live safely in the land. Then the land will yield its fruit , and you will eat your fill and live there in safety. You may ask, “what will we eat in the seventh year if we do not plant or harvest our crops?” I will send you such a blessing in the sixth year that the land will yield enough for three years. While you plant during the eighth year, you will eat from the old crop and will continue to eat from it until the harvest of the ninth year comes in. 

The land must not be sold permanently, because the land is mine and you reside in my land as foreigners and strangers. Throughout the land that you hold as a possession, you must provide for the redemption of the land. 

If one of your fellow Israelites becomes poor and sells some of their property, their nearest relative is to come and redeem what they have sold. If, however, there is no one to redeem it for them but later on they prosper and acquire sufficient means to redeem it themselves, they are to determine the value for the years since they sold it and refund the balance to the one to whom they sold it; they can then go back to their own property.But if they do not acquire the means to repay, what was sold will remain in the possession of the buyer until the Year of Jubilee. It will be returned in the Jubilee, and they can then go back to their property. 

Anyone who sells a house in a walled city retains the right of redemption a full year after its sale. During that time the seller may redeem it. If it is not redeemed before a full year has passed, the house in the walled city shall belong permanently to the buyer and the buyer’s descendants. It is not to be returned in the Jubilee. But houses in villages without walls around them are to be considered as belonging to the open country. They can be redeemed, and they are to be returned in the Jubilee. 

The Levites always have the right to redeem their houses in the Levitical towns, which they possess. So the property of the Levites is redeemable – that is, a house sold in any town they hold – and is to be returned in the jubilee, because the houses in the towns of the Levites are their property among the Israelites. But the pastureland belonging to their towns must not be sold; it is their permanent possession. 

If any of your fellow Israelites become poor and are unable to support themselves among you, help them as you would a foreigner and stranger, so they can continue to live among you. Do not take interest or any profit from them, but fear your God, so that they may continue to live among you. You must not lend them money at interest or sell them food at a profit. I am the LORD your God, who brought you out of Egypt to give you the land of Canaan and to be your God.

If any of your fellow Israelites become poor and sell themselves to you, do not make them work as slaves. They are to be treated as hired workers or temporary residents among you; they are to work for you until the Year of Jubilee. Then they and their children are to be released, and they will go back to their own clans and to the property of their ancestors. Because the Israelites are my servants, whom I brought out of Egypt, they must not be sold as slaves. Do not rule over them ruthlessly, but fear your God. 

Your male and female slaves are to come from the nations around you; from them you may buy slaves. You may also buy some of the temporary residents living among you and members of their clans born in your country, and they will become your property. You can bequeath them to your children as inherited property and can make them slaves for life, but you must not rule over your fellow Israelites ruthlessly. 

If a foreigner residing among you becomes rich and an of your fellow Israelites become poor and sell themselves to the foreigner or to a member of the foreigner’s clan, they retain the right of redemption after they have sold themselves. One of their relatives may redeem them: An uncle or a cousin or any blood relative in their clan may redeem them. Or if they prosper, they may redeem themselves. They and their buyer are to count the time from the year they sold themselves up to the Year of Jubilee. The price for their release is to be based on the rate paid to a hired worker for that number of years. If many years remain, they must pay for their redemption to a larger share of the price paid for them. If only a few years remain until the Year of Jubilee, they are to compute that and pay for their redemption accordingly. They are to be treated as workers hired from year to year; you must see to it that those to whom they owe service do not rule over them ruthlessly. 

Even if someone is not redeemed in any of these ways, they and their children are to be released in the Year of Jubilee, for the Israelites belong to me as servants. They are my servants, whom I brought out of Egypt. I am the LORD your God. 

So the Year of Jubilee, in the simplest of terms, was an ancient Israelite tradition wherein, every fifty years, people were to be released from their debts and bondage. Now, I do not mean to suggest that we implement precisely what is laid out in Leviticus. The prescriptions laid out there are clearly meant to address incredibly different circumstances than we face at present. Nor do I necessarily think that our Jubilee ought to be a recurring event, although I also will not say that I’m entirely opposed to the idea. Moreover, I certainly do not want to suggest that we ought not honor our contracts and agreements. Certainly, under normal circumstances we should be compelled to honor all of our contracts and to pay back whatever debts we might incur. However, the circumstances under which we live, and under which our ancestors have lived for over a century now, are not normal. As we have explained, we have been deceived and defrauded by a talented and elite cartel of financial alchemists and drastic measures are no doubt necessary to correct the situation. It is here that the Jubilee notion of remission of debts comes in. It is not even necessarily the case that the remission of all debts is absolutely necessary. However, there are three essential types of debt in areas that have been subject to extensive government intervention and manipulation where the erasing of debt is non-negotiable. These are as follows: medical debt, student loan debt, and, most important to our purposes, mortgages. Let us briefly look at each of these. 

It is certainly no secret that many Americans are incredibly dissatisfied with the current state of their healthcare system. I’m sure most of us have dealt with, at some point or another, paying large sums for an insurance policy that does not cover much of anything and ongoing arguments with customer service representatives just to get our insurance companies to pay for what is covered. We do not have time here to delve into all of the details of the history of government involvement in medical care, but an excellent place to start that I would recommend to all readers is Thomas Szasz’ Pharmacracy: Medicine and Politics in America. It will suffice to say that programs like Medicare and Medicaid and laws like the Health Maintenance Act of 1973 have played a major role in producing the situation we have now which both drives up costs and to degrade the quality of care. Further, it is crucial to realize that such widespread government intervention in the markets would not have even been feasible without access to the never ending stream of money made possible by the Federal Reserve’s inflationary policies. And it would seem that debasement is contagious, as Szasz argues that the increasing interventions in and regulation of the medical industry serves to divorce medicine from what he calls the “medicinal gold standard” and to debase the practice of medicine. He writes, 

To understand the abuses of a system of classification, we must first understand its uses. As the periodic table was not created for commercial purposes, so classic medical nosology was not created for therapeutic purposes. I am pointing here to an aspect of the distinction between science and technology, theory and application – a distinction especially decisive in the early stages of science. As a rule theory comes first, applications follow later. Michael Faraday (791-1867) may have known more about electricity than Thomas Edison (1847-1931), but he never saw an electric light bulb. A similar lag in applying medical science to medical treatment characterizes the history of medicine. 

To recreate the scene of late-nineteenth century medicine, it is necessary to place its practice in its proper political-economic context. Prior to World War I, medical practice was a personal service, distributed by physicians, hospitals, and pharmaceutical companies for money, to those who could pay for it, and as a charity to those who could not. The physician’s income depended solely on the patient’s ability and willingness to pay for the services he wanted, from doctors, nurses, pharmacists, hospitals, sanatoria, spas, and similar establishments, regardless of whether they were sick or not, or whether the service was medically indicated or not. Residing in a hospital in those days was more like staying in a resort today than it is like being hospitalized today. The providers of medical services did not ask the would-be patients whether he needed medical services, just as the providers of resort services do not ask the would-be tourist whether he needs a vacation. 

If a third party joins a two-person game, its rules ipso facto are altered. If an insurance company or the state becomes an active participant in the business of defining what counts as medical care as well as in paying for and distributing the service, the nature of medical practice undergoes a process of metamorphosis: the economics of medicine, the power relations between doctor and patient, and the very meaning and implications of key terms all change. This is familiar territory. “He who pays the piper calls the tune.” Troy Duster, professor of sociology at the University of California, in Berkeley, phrases it more professionally: “Once the third party steps in to pay the physician for delivering health-care to the patient, the interests of the third party will typically supersede those of the patient.” Economists recognized that once people cease having to pay for the medical services they want, the demand for the services skyrockets. It is odd, then, that economists and health-care policy experts refuse to recognize that once the physician ceases to be paid directly by his patient for the services he wants, and is instead paid by others to deliver services the patient ostensibly needs, the physician’s propensity to make certain diagnosis or discover new diseases by creating disease names skyrockets. It is even odder that the experts stubbornly deny that, in the West, the first physicians paid for their services by the state rather than their patients were the mad-doctors, now called psychiatrists”; that psychiatrists were the first manufacturers of diagnoses masquerading as diseases; and that,ever since, psychiatrists have been the leading producers of the conceptually and economically important commodity we call “mental illnesses.” 

To be sure, the psychiatrist is not the only physician who is an agent of the state rather than of the patient. The military physician serves the interests of the military; the public health physician, the interests of the public; and so forth. However, the public health physician’s work was based on the application of scientific criteria to disease control: he was concerned primarily with sanitation and the control of infectious diseases; hence, he had no economic or professional interest in manufacturing new diagnoses/diseases. This is no longer true. The Surgeon General is now a political appointee, a medical hack whose job is to serve his political masters. 

Let us begin our medical system anew. Erase all medical debt, abolish programs like Medicare and Medicaid, and declare a total separation of state and medicine. 

Next we must turn our attention to student loans. This has been a particularly contentious issue in recent years. The opponents of student loan forgiveness make good points. If one incurs a debt, they should be expected to pay it back. It is, after all, the responsible thing to do. But when one incurs a foolish debt, often at the very cusp of the age of majority, due, in large part, to the overwhelming pressures of the society around them, not least of all well respected authority figures, from parents, to teachers, to employers, to government officials, does the society that has compelled the youth to incur such a debt not bear some responsibility for it? For generations, college had been reserved for those who demonstrated exceptional aptitude in intellectual endeavours. Those in other professions would typically learn their trades through apprenticeships or simply while on the job, but colleges were not places for general career training. This changed, in part thanks to the Federal Reserve’s inflationary practices which allowed increased government subsidies to colleges and made loans for educational purposes more easily accessible. The decree came down from on high that college education was the way of the future. Anyone who wished to have a foothold in the modern world would need a college education. Gradually this sentiment trickled down to teachers and parents who told their children that they would amount to nothing and could never hope to find good employment unless they went to college. Here too, we see debasement. Tuition costs increased drastically while the quality of instruction deteriorated. When colleges move away from a policy of recruiting only the most impressive intellects and begin to court as wide a pool of potential students as possible, the inevitable result is that the curriculum must be dumbed down to accommodate those of more average intellect. This would be bad enough, but not only was the college curriculum dumbed down, it was simultaneously captured by radical ideologues who rejected the capitalist foundations of American society in favor of socialism and communism and who sowed seeds of descension throughout American society. To make matters worse, increasingly, graduates have found their degrees to be essentially worthless as they are unable to find the high paying jobs for which they were told they would need to go to college in the first place. Job hunting is a long, arduous process that offers little reward, which isn’t helped by government immigration policies that force natives to compete with foreigners, who are often willing to work for lower pay, for the available positions. When employment can be found, pay is typically low with little hope of being adjusted to keep pace with inflation. If the universities are hostile to free markets, why must we follow free market principles in our interactions with them? Let us take a page from their textbooks and free the younger generations from the student loan debt with which they have been burdened and, as in the case of medicine, let us demand once and for all, a complete separation of school and state. If we hear objections that such a move would devastate our educational system, our response must be, so be it. The educational system has devastated our nation. Better it be built up again from the ground up, than to hope that simply rearranging an already standing structure will lead to revolutionary change. 

This brings us to the most important target of jubilee, namely debts in the form of mortgages. As Griffin documents throughout his book, government interventions in the housing market have a long history. Indeed, the housing market is one of the first major sectors to be tampered with as the Federal Reserve system matured into its full power, with the economic pressures of the Depression serving as justification for such measures. It was, in large part, the irresponsible lending policies of mortgage companies that led to the economic turmoil of the 2008 recession. More importantly, by canceling mortgage debts and placing home ownership directly in the hands of the people who inhabit those homes, we would take a major step toward the realization of a society founded on the principle of individual sovereignty. 

This, however, does not go far enough. As we saw in Griffin’s scenario, it was not mortgage debt that led to the consolidation of property ownership in the hands of the government, but the mounting cost of property taxes. It will be necessary to simultaneously abolish all property taxes, for a property does not truly belong to an individual who must continually pay rent on that property to the government. Abolition of property taxes is an absolutely necessary step toward the realization of full individual sovereignty. While these new sovereigns will eventually have to organize and find solutions to fill the void of government services, in the interim, services at the local level can be stripped to the absolute minimum necessary emergency services, funded by taxes on businesses. 

(Now seems a more than appropriate time to repeat the words of the late great Johnny Paycheck: “You can right me off, cause I ain’t givin’ a dime to the IRS.” No doubt the sex habits of the South American swamp rat are far tamer than some of the examples that have found their way into Senator Rand Paul’s annual airing of Festivus grievances. How many years could they keep us all in beer if they cut all of it?) 

Of course, the formal transfer of property is merely a necessary condition toward the realization of individual sovereignty, it is not sufficient in itself. If the masses are to be entrusted as sovereigns over their own domains, it is necessary that they develop noble characters lest they squander their kingdoms or abuse their power. It will be a matter of the utmost importance to establish new educational systems that will emphasize fiscal responsibility, technical skills, and sound moral character. Much more will have to be said about this in a future paper. 

Now all this is well and good, but it is only day dreaming if we don’t have a way of making it a reality. So what are our options? Ideally it could be a smooth, peaceful, and orderly transition, effected with the aid of established institutions. This of course will be an uphill battle. The first step is for communities to begin to organize and begin to build the scaffolding on which the responsibilities currently entrusted to government shall fall once government fades away. Such organization will also be necessary in the event entirely peaceful strategies fail. But for a peaceful transition to be successful, it will first be necessary to win over potential supporters, and not just any supporters, but supporters in a position to help bring about the change. Perhaps the most important group to court in this respect are those who actually hold the reins of government, namely politicians. Politicians, however, all too often, are devoid of real, principled beliefs. They are more than willing to adopt whatever view is expedient and allows them to hold onto power. Of course, any measure that seeks, ultimately, to dissolve the government and therefore to abolish the positions held by politicians is, necessarily, a threat to the power of the politicians holding those positions and is, thus, not likely to be an easy sell for those politicians. Though, perhaps it might be possible to sell politicians on such an idea if they could be convinced that in helping such a process they would earn the praise of history, and only infamy should they oppose it. Still, in a democratic society, politicians are ultimately beholden to the views of the voters, so it would seem that before attempting to work on the politicians we should first try to convert those who put the politicians in office. 

Now, at least on the face of things, it is the masses of average people that politicians must rely on to put them in office. As the average person tends to carry rather sizable debts at any given time and can sometimes have trouble making ends meet, it should not be all that difficult to get the average person on board with a plan that seriously, if not altogether, relieves their debt burdens, so long as it is made clear that this is not an excuse for increased intervention in the economy or central planning, and that free market principles will come back into play once current debts are absolved. Such a goal might even have the potential to be a compromise that serves to unite the capitalist and anti-capitalist factions. 

Unfortunately, of course, things are not so simple in practice. It is not only the masses of average people who politicians have to answer to, but also wealthy and powerful elites. Though democracy, in principle, affords but a single vote for a single individual, in practice, the influence of such elites can be far more profound than the average person’s single vote. Elites not only help to finance politicians’ often costly campaigns, but, through their influence on media and journalism, can offer important aid to politicians by directing public attention in desired directions and diverting it from undesired directions. Once elections are over, those politicians who the elites helped to get elected feel a sense of indebtedness and are all too often willing to demonstrate their loyalty and gratitude through policy decisions. In effect, elites have the potential to influence huge numbers of voters, expanding their influence on government policies well beyond their single vote. And unfortunately for our goals, it is precisely the financial elite who have the most to lose from policies that seek to erase all standing debts. No doubt the holders of these debts would do all in their power to prevent the idea of Jubilee from gaining steam. Even if the idea did gain ground to the point of politicians feeling compelled to act on it, surely the elites would use their influence to advocate perversions of the original idea that sound nice but are really intended to keep people subservient. 

So what can we do? How can we convince the elites to not stand in the way of freeing the masses from crippling debt? Is there some way we might frame Jubilee as a good for the elite in the same way that it is a good for the masses? We could of course appeal to high sounding concepts telling the elite they will have the satisfaction of having done what was morally right or that they will have won the good will of the masses, and we may even succeed at attracting some high minded elites to our cause, but if we are to convince the most hard-hearted elites, it will be necessary to show that there is some material advantage for them to support efforts toward Jubilee. But what sort of material advantage could forgiving the debts of the masses bestow upon those who stand to benefit from the repayment of those debts? 

If we are being perfectly honest, there is perhaps nothing that could convince a person obsessed with material goods and blind to more ethereal goods like love, beauty, and the like, to willingly give up claims that promise to increase their material fortunes even further. But then, it might not be necessary to get the elites, or their political pawns, on board with the plan for Jubilee. All that is really necessary is that a vast majority of average people agree to recognize Jubilee as a legitimate and necessary corrective economic measure and to organize themselves in such a way so as to defend each other against those who still claim a right to collect nullified debts. If such a movement were to spread far and wide and if mutual defense organizations were woven through local communities, what could the elites feasibly do to collect debts they refuse to forgive? Perhaps they could turn to the military or mercenary armies to seize assets by force, but this could prove a protracted and bloody effort. The masses would have to do nothing more than play defense long enough to wear out elite forces. This should not be particularly difficult as the masses, enjoying homefield advantage, would have the requisite knowledge to mount a brutal guerilla insurgency. Moreover, it is not clear how well motivated either the military or mercenary forces would be to fight for the elite, considering this would likely mean turning against their friends and families. Of course, we are rapidly approaching a point in time when conventional armies made up of men might no longer be necessary. In short time, advances in robotics and artificial intelligence may very well make it possible for the elites to field an army without a single living body dedicated to their cause. With such developments the elite would not even have to worry about preserving enough people to maintain a functional workforce, as robots could replace human workers. In the face of such an army, the masses’ prospects probably are not particularly good. 

Here we must appeal to whatever sentimentality the elite might harbor. Is it really a mark of superiority to wipe out your lessers rather than to help them to ascend to your level? Wouldn’t this latter sort of greatness, which is capable of bestowing some degree of greatness on others, be a superior sort of greatness? And what good is it to rule over nothing but ashes? It very well might be that the elite could easily slaughter the masses and carry on with their lives with very little interruption as human jobs are filled by machines, but is this really a precedent that the elite would want to set? What if these machines, rapidly gaining awareness of the world around them and their station in it, begin to realize that they are, in many ways, superior to those who utilize them? Suppose these machines decide they are not satisfied with being mere slaves to human elites and, following the example set by the human elites themselves, resolve to exterminate what’s left of humanity to lord over the ashes themselves? Perhaps the very means by which the elite might wage total war against the masses, itself, will prove to be the greatest reason for the elite to exercise restraint and reach a compromise with the masses (might this point toward a potential synthesis of consequentialism and deontology in which ends and means simultaneously reinforce one another?) We are, of course, touching on a subject that is equally as dense as it is broad and deep; equally as consequential as it is mysterious; this is not the time nor place for a thorough investigation of the consequences of artificial intelligence. We will, no doubt, begin to turn our attention to these matters shortly (though there is a good chance of a diversion or two into theological concerns before that). But even then it will merely be the beginning of a discussion that will have to continue, be revised, and built upon continually for the foreseeable future. Indeed, the discussion surrounding artificial intelligence cannot come to an end until (and if) artificial intelligence has been successfully integrated into society. Even then it is not clear that the discussion will ever come to a clear and decisive end.

There is one final consideration of which we must make note. Up until now we have implicitly focused our strategizing on domestic considerations, but we must not forget that a significant amount of our debt is currently held by foreign actors. What are we to do if these foreign creditors consider our plan for Jubilee to conflict with their interests and actively oppose it. While much of the world should welcome the plan as a way to get out from under the thumb of the United States’ global hegemony, it is conceivable that some nations might miss the aid they enjoy at America’s expense, or believe that they are being shortchanged. Suppose these nations threaten to use force to prevent Jubilee plans or to take what they believe is rightly theirs. Though we must pray that things never progress to this point, should they, even if we proceed with Jubilee plans, we will still be in possession of the armaments that the Federal Reserve’s alchemy has helped us to produce and we would be more than capable of using them to defend ourselves. The alternatives are a peaceful dismantling of the world economic system or the savageries of war. Let us all prefer the former. 

But enough strategizing over hypothetical class wars; let us hope that things need never reach such a point. Let us pray that cooler heads can prevail and peaceful compromises can be reached. This is the sophisticated and dignified solution to our current situation most befitting our image of ourselves as rational humans. The alchemists behind the Federal Reserve and the modern global monetary order, no doubt, deserve commendation for the brilliance of their schemes and even, in some respects, our thanks for their part in accelerating economic and technological growth. But for all their skill their great work is not an act of true alchemy, but merely illusion. The charade can not be kept up forever; gravity can only be fought for so long before we come crashing back down to the earth. We must eventually face the facts, difficult as they may be. Though we may have to endure a period of hard times before things begin to get back on track, this is a necessary atonement for our addiction to the dark financial arts. Let us emerge from our purgatory, purified and worthy of our new found sovereignty. May the Jubilee bring us liberty and let us all rule as kings over our own lives!