The Illuminatus! Trilogy

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, 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 Sam-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 unto 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 make 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-supported 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 that 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.*

* 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 contemporary 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 ZAIN: PROPERTY AND PRIVILEGE

Property is theft

–P. J. PROUDHON

Property is liberty.

–P. J. PROUDHON

Property is impossible.

–P. J. PROUDHON

Consistency is the hobgoblin of small minds.

–RALPH WALDO EMERSON

Proudhon, by piling up his contradictions this way, was not merely being French; he was trying to indicate that the abstraction "property" covers a variety of phenomena, some pernicious and some beneficial. Let us borrow a device from the semanticists and examine his triad with subscripts attached for maximum clarity.

"Property₁ is theft" means that property_1, created by the artificial laws of feudal, capitalist, and other authoritarian societies, is based on armed robbery. Land titles, for instance, are clear examples of property₁; swords and shot were the original coins of transaction.

"Property₂ is liberty" means that property₂, that which will be voluntarily honored in a voluntary (anarchist) society, is the foundation of the liberty in that society. The more people's interests are comingled and confused, as in collectivism, the more they will be stepping on each other's toes; only when the rules of the game declare clearly "This is mine and this is thine," and the game is voluntarily accepted as worthwhile by all parties to it, can true independence be achieved.