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The following is the
preface to my forthcoming book, The Jolly Roger Dollar: An Introduction to
Monetary Piracy, which will soon be available on Amazon.
Money and banking should be permanently divorced from the State.
Mankind should be divorced from the state but that’s going well
beyond the scope of this little book. For now, at least, our goal should be
to kill central banking wherever it exists and open up the market to
alternative moneys - alternatives to the fiat paper issued by central banks.
Market participants should be free to choose what they wish to use for money
without government interference. Legal tender laws, since they constitute
invasions of private property, should be repealed. For the same reason,
banking should lose the legal privileges that protect the practice of
fractional reserve lending. What is needed is freedom - freedom to conduct
our monetary and banking affairs regulated only by private property rights
and economic law.
The cover of this book was created to remind readers that the monetary and
banking system we have is fundamentally an act of theft. It is monetary piracy
because the currencies we swap for real goods and property titles are
hijacked versions of the real thing. What constitutes the real thing, who did
the hijacking, when, for what purpose, and the results it has brought are
discussed in the remainder of this work.
The money we now carry in our pockets or checking accounts serves the purpose
of providing a medium of exchange. If it didn’t banks would be in the
wallpaper business. But it also serves to transfer wealth from those
unconnected to the money creation process to those closely associated with
it. This is why monetary policy is more accurately thought of as monetary
piracy.
In 2010, Federal Reserve officials celebrated the centennial founding of the
Fed at Jekyll Island, Georgia. The institution that was finally passed into
law in 1913 was supposed to make financial crises and bad money virtual
impossibilities. It has instead made crises and bad money permanent
conditions. If freedom is not allowed to work its curative powers, the Fed
and its currency-on-demand machine will continue to harm us.
Liberty is always on the defensive, having to bargain and plead with a state-backed ruling elite. We should not have to
justify human freedom. The free market, centered as it is around consumer
preferences, open competition, and private property rights, will keep us
honest, to borrow an expression from my father’s era. If there is to be
a ruling elite, let them rise to their positions
naturally, as entrepreneurs on a free market. Only in such an environment
will those on top be on permanent probation, forever subject to the
market’s approval, because the customers who put them there always have
the option of removing them when they fail to deliver.
For the most part this book is based on articles I wrote over the past
decade. I have redacted some of the material to clarify certain points or
update sources. If the same thoughts reappear now and again, I offer this
explanation: the subject of money and banking is so corrupted with myth,
misinformation, and half-truths that repetition is a necessary corrective. It
strikes me as incontestable that, as Goethe is said to have observed,
Truth has to be repeated constantly,
because Error also is being preached all the time, and not just by a few, but
by the multitude.
George
F. Smith
Read
his book : The Flight of the Barbarous Relic
Visit his website
Read
his blog
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