::: Flaxscrip & Hempscrip :::
Dan Clore
http://groups.yahoo.com/group/smygo
::: 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 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 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-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 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 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 Vau of The Illuminatus! Trilogy]
http://www.amazon.com/o/ASIN/0440539811/ref=nosim/thedanclorenecro
--
Dan Clore
My collected fiction, _The Unspeakable and Others_:
http://tinyurl.com/2gcoqt
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"