This may or may not be relevant:
::: Flaxscrip & Hempscrip :::
by Robert Shea & Robert Anton Wilson
Flaxscrip was first introduced into Discordian groups by
the mysterious Malaclypse the Younger, K.S.C., in 1968.
Hempscrip followed the year after, issued by Dr. Mordecai
Malignatus, K.N.S. (In the novel, taking one of our few
liberties with historical truth, we move these coinages
backward in time and attribute hempscrip to the Justified
Ancients of Mummu.)
The *idea* behind flaxscrip, of course, is as old as history;
there was private money long before there was government
money. The first revolutionary (or reformist) use of this
idea, as a check against galloping usury and high interest
rates, was the foundation of "Banks of Piety" by the
Dominican order of the Catholic Church in the late middle
ages. (See Tawney, _Religion and the Rise of Capitalism_.)
The Dominicans, having discovered that preaching against
usury did not deter the usurer, founded their own banks
and provided loans without interest; this "ethical competition"
(as Josiah Warren later called it) drove the commercial banks
out of the areas where the Dominicans practiced it. Similar
private currency, loaned at a low rate of interest (but not
at no interest), was provided by Scots banks until the British
government, acting on behalf of the monopoly of the Bank of
England, stopped this exercise of free enterprise. (See Muellen,
_Free Banking_.) The same idea was tried successfully in the
American colonies before the Revolution, and again was
suppressed by the British government, which some heretical
historians regard as a more direct cause of the American
Revolution than the taxes mentioned in most schoolbooks.
(See Ezra Pound, _Impact_, and additional sources cited
therein.)
During the nineteenth century many anarchists and individualists
attempted to issue low-interest or no-interest private
currencies. _Mutual Banking_, by Colonel William Greene, and
_True Civilization_, by Josiah Warren, are records of two such
attempts, by their instigators. Lysander Spooner, an anarchist
who was also a constitutional lawyer, argued at length that
Congress had no authority to suppress such private currencies
(see his _Our Financiers: Their Ignorance, Usurpations and
Frauds_). A general overview of such efforts at free enterprise,
soon crushed by the Capitalist State, is given by James M.
Martin in his _Men Against the State_, and by Rudolph Rocker in
_Pioneers of American Freedom_ (an ironic title, since his
pioneers all lost their major battles). Lawrence Labadie, of
Suffern, N.Y., has collected (but not yet published) records of
1,000 such experiments; one of the present authors, Robert Anton
Wilson, unearthed in 1962 the tale of a no-interest currency,
privately issued, in Yellow Springs, Ohio, during the 1930s
depression. (This was an emergency measure by certain local
businessmen, who did not fully appreciate the principle involved,
and was abandoned as soon as the "tight-money" squeeze ended and
Roosevelt began flooding us all with Federal Reserve notes.)
It is traditional among liberal historians to dismiss such
endeavors as "funny-money schemes." They have never explained
why government money is any less hilarious. (That used in the
U.S. now [1975], for instance, is actually worth 47 percent of
its "declared" face value). All money is funny, if you stop to
think about it, but no private currency, competing on a free
market, could ever be quite so comical (and tragic) as the notes
now bearing the magic imprint of Uncle Same -- and backed only
by his promise (or threat) that, come hell or high water, by God
he'll make it good by taxing our descendants into the infinite
generation to pay the interest on it. The National Debt, so
called, is of course, nothing else but the debt we owe the
bankers who "loaned" this money to Uncle after he kindly gave
them the credit which enabled them to make this loan. Hempscrip
or even acidscrip or peyotescrip could never be quite so clownish
as this system, which only the Illuminati (if they really exist)
could have dreamed up. The system has but one advantage: It makes
bankers richer every year. Nobody else, from the industrial
capitalist or "captain of industry" to the coal-miner, profits
from it in any way, and all pay the taxes, which become the
interest payments, which makes the bankers richer. If the
Illuminati did not exist, it would be necessary to invent them --
such a system can be explained in no other way, except by those
cynics who hold that human stupidity is infinite.
The idea behind hempscrip is more radical than the notion of
private-enterprise currency per se. Hempscrip, as employed in
the novel, depreciates; it is, thus, not merely a *no-interest*
currency, but a *negative-interest* currency. The lender literally
pays the borrower to take it away for a while. It was invented by
German business-economist Silvio Gesell, and is described in his
_Natural Economic Order_ and in professor Irving Fisher's _Stamp
Script_.
Gresham's Law, like most of the "laws" taught in State-sup****ted
public schools, is not quite true (at least, not in the form in
which it is usually taught). *"Bad money drives out good" holds
only in authoritarian societies, not in libertarian societies.*
(Gresham was clear-minded enough to state explicitly that he was
only describing authoritarian societies: *his* formulation of his
own "Law" begins with the words "If the king issueth two moneys ...,"
thereby implying the State must exist if the "Law" is to operate.)
*In a libertarian society, good money will drive out the bad.*
This Utopian proposition -- which the sane reader will regard with
acute skepticism -- has been seen to be sound by a rigorously
logical demonstration, based on the axioms of economics, in _The
Cause of Business Depressions_ by Hugo Bilgrim and Edward Levy.
[footnote]
Economists can "prove" all sorts of things from axioms and few of
them turn out to be true. Yes. We saved for a footnote the
information that at least four empirical demonstrations of the
reverse of Gresham's Law are on record. Three of them, employing
small volunteer communities in frontier U.S.A. circa 1830-1860,
are recorded in Josiah Warren's _True Civilization_. The fourth,
employing contem****ary college students in a psychology laboratory,
is the subject of a recent Master's thesis by associate professor
Don Werkheiser of Central State College, Wilberforce, Ohio.
[Appendix Vau of The Illuminatus! Trilogy]
--
Dan Clore
My collected fiction, _The Unspeakable and Others_:
http://tinyurl.com/3akhhr
Lord We˙rdgliffe & Necronomicon Page:
http://tinyurl.com/292yz9
News & Views for Anarchists & Activists:
http://groups.yahoo.com/group/smygo
Strange pleasures are known to him who flaunts the
immarcescible purple of poetry before the color-blind.
-- Clark Ashton Smith, "Epigrams and Apothegms"
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