2015 May 24 What is Money: Physical or Just Defined

From: Thomas Lee Abshier, ND < drthomas@naturedox.com >
Date: Sun, May 17, 2015 at 11:25 AM
Subject: The The key to resolving our disagreement lies in the Definition of Money
To: John Forster < honestmeasures@gmail.com >

John, I read the entire 22 page document; I think I understand your objection/argument.

• Sorry to disappoint you, but one of us is not understanding. Thanks for spending the time to give feedback so I have a chance to clarify what I am trying communicate with careful definitions of words. Part of our problem is the truth we are trying to wrap our heads around is exasperatingly simple, yet so preposterous it is defying belief.

   

In short, you do not consider anything to be money if it does not have a substance that you can concretely identify by very objective/tangible/physical measures.

• There has to be a WHAT on both sides of the trade, whether you call it money or not.. I’ve tried to explain that tangible/physical is not essential. All we need in the Substance part of QMS is a Definition. We have used the example of hours of service, or even a describable result. When you make a covenant with a Taxi Driver, the Substance he is giving you is (however he manages to do it) depositing you at a particular location in a reasonable time. This is not a tangible/physical substance you can hold in your hand and measure with a scale, but it is a definition. It answers the “What” that he is giving you. Or I might hire my neighbor to work on mowing my field on my tractor. I don’t know how much grass he will get mowed down, or how long he will spend unclogging the mower, but we agree he will work on it with reasonable effect for 3 hours. This is not a tangible/physical substance you can hold in your hand but it can be measured in hours, and reasonably defined.

• Also, whatever we are trading, if it is real, if it exists, it will be a creation of the Trinity. If we – or any other man – is regarded as speaking into existence something that is not part of the creation of the God of our Bible, we are on very dangerous ground.

   

You have taken a collage of datapoints to justify your argument.   1) The Constitutional power of only Congress to issue money.

• Not sure where you got this. The Constitution prohibits States from coining money, and reserves that to the authority of the Treasury. But coining is very different than the “issuing” of money that is happening under the Federal Reserve Act. Back in the day, anyone could bring refined silver or gold to the Treasury, and they would melt it down and form it into their standardized coins, taking out a slight cut for their labor in doing so. The standardization of alloy % of silver/gold, and the overall weight of the coin, and the official pattern was an aid to honesty in trade, because it provided a trustworthy substance, measurement, and quantity definition of what it was they were trading on the money-side of the trade. Better not to confuse the “issuing” with the idea of “coining” because they mean different things in late 1900’s than they did in the early 1800’s. Lots of other people had the power to coin gold/silver coins or medallions, though some men had decided that only Congress had the legal authority to make them a certain size, weight, alloy, and stamped design. Don’t violate the copyright. But this last was beginning to part ways from the Biblical requirement for honesty. There is no principle that says the king should have any exclusive right to control anything used as money. The right to manufacture coinage or anything else used as trade (whether regarded as money or not) belongs to the stewardship of the family under Christ, just like all property. Government just enforces contracts and punishes theft through deceit by requiring double-or-more restitution. I deny that Congress has exclusive authority to issue money, or have any kind of monopoly on it. I deny that Congress has any power to speak into existence that which did never exist. I deny that Congress has any power to confer any authority or power upon any other man or men to speak into existence that which did never exist, nor will ever exist. And neither can any other believer in Jesus Christ.

2) the 1792 coinage act, defining a dollar as a given amount of silver as the only valid definition of the dollar,

>The dollar was defined in terms of silver at that time, then redefined in 1900 in terms of gold plus minor changes in the measures of precious metals at different times. There were also changes in what is required for taxes 1873, and the prohibition for anyone besides banks to even have money after 1933, and in 1971 banks defaulted altogether and made the dollar undefinable. Some kind of definition is required in order to function, and if a change in definition steals, by government or anyone else, they would be responsible before God for the changes they make. All I was requiring was having a definition at all, and that the definition does not facilitate stealing. I did not at all mean 1792 was the only valid definition or that dollar, or anything else that the government favors needs to be considered as the only valid money. You could even have a contract to borrow something and pay something back after a defined period of time and the contract could specify that you must do a defined thing with that something that you borrowed or else be put to death by a soldier or policeman, if you want – but, regardless – the contract will be a laughing-stock unless you are borrowing SOME THING, and paying SOME THING , and using that THING in trade - between the start and end dates of the contract. In our Day, no nation of the world is using ANY thing as money.

3) There are references to gold and silver in the Bible as being owned by God; and references to trading in terms of quantities of gold for goods,

>Hopefully, I was pointing out that all things, and all people belong to God, and to the human on the throne of the universe since the Ascension (celebrated last Sunday, the anniversary of my excommunication) besides owning all things because He created them out of nothing by His word, also owns them by Purchase, by gift/inheritance, and by winning in a fair fight (overcome). There is nothing unique about money. It is just one more item in the Property class, all of which the individual or Family can own in direct stewardship to the Lord Jesus Christ. The Bible does acknowledge that men favored gold and silver on one side of many trades (first major one is the 400 shekels of silver when Abe bought the burial plot for Sarah, Gen 22:?). Men have favored gold and silver on one side of trades from the beginning down thru the 20th century. In the last half is where it went crazy. For the first time in human history the nations stopped using silver as money. It helps to understand World War II in this light. You should read, “The Silver Stealers” by Charles Savoie, or his recent updates, “The Silver Squelchers”. They will burn your soul.

4) You have taken a definition extracted from somewhere (probably a book on economics) that said that money must have quantity, measure, and substance to be used as a good medium of exchange (i.e. money).

>I may have run across a few authors (not many) who have used the same combination of words (QMS) that I keep hammering home. Probably my formula is due to a love and fascinations with languages and meaning-of-words, and it is distilled down from the massive amount of audio/video and print that I have pored over through the years. I can remember reading and thinking about money and the economy in 1971, and seeing that our standard of living was jeopardized by the wrong things that were being done by banks and government. Did I understand it very deeply? No, but the writer’s describing the scenarios had good logic. They still do, those that speak the same line today. It matches the principles I can match up in the Bible – but the main vindication is the confirmation from studying a massive amount of history (including the money and banking elements). I recommend this for you, as well. You time would be spent better on getting accurate history, than in just thinking about it all out from your own head, or trying to debate with me. The more history you have under your belt, I think, the better you will be able to realistically project how your proposed ideas would play out. Remember how I could “see” that your plan to maintain overall prices stable would be impossible, unaffordable, and necessitate profound violations of privacy, civil, and property rights of the Family. If my “seeing” was valid, it was built up because of a grasp of Biblical, European, Reformation, and American history.

But more than just my latching on to a definition, I would defend that my overall idea resonates with many authors and speakers I have learned from over the years. I can point to the guys that talk a good fight, speak compatibly with Biblical economics and historical traces. I can rattle off names and titles for a good while, just from memory. What do you draw from outside your own head? I don’t remember you citing other sources or books that have influence your thinking. Are you thinking in a vacuum?

You have taken that description of the basic characteristics that make a substance a good medium of exchange, and turned it into a law that you then use to prove that anything that does not meet these criteria in a physically tangible way is not money.

> I have understood, that anything you are going to measure or count, has to be defined or identified in such a way that does not make a mockery of measuring, counting, verifying or falsifying. I am not turning anything into law, I am recognizing the law of non-contradiction without which we cannot think or prove or utilize criteria about anything, including money. Do you want to use nothing for money, or would you rather use something? Something can be defined and compared and distinguished from other things.

In particular, you have used a description of the characteristics of a good medium of exchange, to prove that notes representing contracts cannot be money (because notes are not tangible/universal/objective).

>This is where plot thickens.

[notes representing contracts]

First of all, I think I recall that one of the technical definitions of a note (in our context) is a record (a commitment) that some party will pay certain quantities of defined measures of some defined “what” that is being measured – at a certain time – by a certain party. Anyone can issue a note to another person, there is no magic about the concept. The meaning is not limited to something the Treasury or the Federal Reserve is doing or printing. It is not limited to being about money on either side of the trade, though, like most other trades, it will typically be on one side of the trade. The core meaning of using the note is the oath of promise, which is a “thing” and definable, though unseen and intangible. The physical paper bill is used as a token, a reminder, and representative of the oath of promise. The old silver and gold certificates were examples of this, as I understand it, though we called them certificates instead of notes. Even when we used those special-paper, physical bills that fit in our wallet – before 1968 – in one sense we used them as money, but in another sense they were not the money, but only represented the money, which in most cases was safe in a bank somewhere. This picture is complicated by the gold/silver situation, in that, back in the day before my beard grew out, I was using these notes as money, but even the silver dollar and lesser 90% coins they represented was, itself, only token coins, since the dollar was defined as gold and not silver. Legally, silver coins could be refused as payment for anything over $10. That law, I think dated back before the turn of the century. Gold replaced silver as the official determiner of what Dollar meant, and then after 1933, we had to be satisfied that, in our business with the banks, they would only say they owed us gold-dollars (or we owed them), but we could never have them or handle them outside the banks.

[notes are not tangible/universal/objective]

>It is true, that the oath of promise written on the note is not physical/touchable/tangible, but the idea, the terms are definitely real, if they speak of true things that – themselves – are real, definable, verifiable, falsifiable. A note certainly can be used as money, and in true and righteous trading, where men are being honest about what they are trading, notes and many other representative communication helps would and should be used to facilitate money-trade. But the righteousness and honesty will fail if the note does not speak of true and real things, but is in itself dishonest in what it promises.

When a note promises to re-pay borrowed Post-1971-Dollars on a definite schedule by a definite party to a definite party – nothing can make this note workable, because of the inability to define and validate anything called a Post-1971-Banking-Dollar. The absence of the dollar prevents the note from being valid, honest, and functional. It necessarily introduces what Rushdoony calls “..corruption and a radical evil” into all of society’s transactions. So the problem is not the note, nor the tangibility of the note, nor the function of the note doing a good job of representing something else. The problem is strictly that there is nothing there for the note to represent.

You have cobbled together this collage of datapoints describing aspects of money, used them as premises, and argued, to prove, your theory that “money” can only be that which meets the standard of being tangible/physical/objective, valuable by itself, ordained by God, and established by congress as money.

>As above, [money or note] does not need to be tangible/physical, just needs to be real, true, definable, verifiable, falsifiable, and measurable. Is it asking to much to be able to discover if “it” is there or isn’t there? Paid or hasn’t been paid? And it doesn’t have to be valuable by itself, since our current experience is that we do not even have to have a “thing” for people to value it. People value the Post-1971-Banking-Dollar even though there is nothing there to have any inherent value, yet people still put value on it, valuing the lie. A note that fulfills the definition of a note, and promises something definable, verifiable, falsifiable – could function just fine and be valued by people. It needs no special ordination by God, although He does require honesty, and no theft / property violation in the mechanics of the trades involved. Neither does it have to have anything to do with Congress, Treasury, or the Fed to function truly in trade. It just needs to define, not lie, and not steal by deceit.

In particular, money is NOT a valid/right/correct/acceptable medium of exchange if it is a representation of a contract to produce value (debt).

>Dr. Tom – this is where you go off in the weeds where I have never heard anyone go before and have never understood since we began to talk about it. You think there is some kind of magic justification for the counterfeiters/faux-creators to plunder the nations by manipulating the money supply just because the borrower is going to do some special class of activity with the borrowed money. I have never been able to understand how the activity makes any difference to the moral realities of manipulating money quantities, or to the nature of money. I see a complete disconnect and let me try to explain why.

>In these scenarios, we are going to talk through the two opposite types of money, and we will contrast the opposite scenarios:

First case: Let’s use an honest-money situation. We use something as money, we measure it and count the measures. Hobson wants to borrow some, and Gibson wants to loan him some. Gibson loses the use of his defined, honest money during the time Hobson is renting it, and can only have and use that defined, honest money after Hobson pays him back the principle. How they work out what they trade for the “rent”/interest on the loan is fairly immaterial for our purposes. The global money supply has neither increased nor decreased. The national money stock has neither increased nor decreased. How much money is deposited in any particular bank may be changing, the amount of money in any one community might change temporarily, but all these can return to equilibrium over time. Even if Hobson defaults on the debt, the money supply has not changed, even though Gibson’s wealth will be diminished. God’s law has not been violated by the essentials of this trade. It would not make a material difference if the loaner was an institution, a corporation, a bank, or a government entity (assuming no laws of God were harmed by these other constructs – not in our view at the moment – we are just discussing the money-part of the loaning).

>Now, let’s assume the scenario above and add in that the loan/rent contract includes a stipulation that Hobson has to do something with the money he borrows. Perhaps the loaner Gibson or the greater society wants something done with that money that Hobson borrows. Perhaps in addition to paying the money back to Gibson with interest, they would desire Hobson to destroy the NY WTC and blame it on jihadists so that the country would have the excuse to more easily profit from the oil fields of Iraq, or the heroin imports from Afghanistan. It is here that Gibson and Hobson might get indignant, and accuse us of interfering in their free trade. What business is it of theirs why Gibson and Hobson want to trade use of some money for the rent of said money. Gibson is huffed because he wants that rent, and he doesn’t want you requiring anything additional from Hobson besides just getting the money paid back lest Hobson abandon his offer, because he doesn’t mind paying the interest, but he is too lazy to figure out how to dustify the tallest skyscrapers in Manhattan and try to wrestle the media to cover it up and blame it on some polygamist in a cave on the other side of the world. Hobson doesn’t want you snooping around looking over his shoulder and prying into his personal affairs about what he is going to do with his money. All he wants is to use that money for awhile and not to have to pay much interest. I supposed you could have a clause that said they would fine you or throw you in jail if you borrowed money and didn’t do such and so with that borrowed money, but it is hard to understand why any loaner or borrower operating honestly would want such interference with their trading.

>Next scenario is more creative. Guy named Morgan gets a great idea. This is too obvious where you are really using something real and definable that is a positive something that can only be in one place at one time, and has to be acquired, and then collected and paid back – boy ! a lot can go wrong. Let’s try a new thing. So Hobson comes along and wants to borrow some more money and he won’t tell us what for, but he wants to see if Morgan will give him a cheaper interest rate than Gibson. Morgan tries a new thing, He sets up a network all across the country to help him and he says, “sure thing, Hobson, if Gibson is trying to gouge you with a 8% interest rate, how about we offer you 4%?”. Then what he does is he sets up two accounts in his cute nationwide system where all these other financial specialists have agreed to play along with a new game. In one account he is going to say, “I, Morgan, owe you, Hobson, 20,000”, (but I won’t pay you any interest on this I owe you). And to balance this out, he says over here in another account, “You Hobson, will owe me 20,000, and you will pay me 4% per annum rent on the unpaid principle”. Then he assures Hobson he can transfer his credit in his deposit account to any other office of his Association across the country, and any other business would also take transfer of that credit for goods or services. Morgan feels pretty good about himself because he has provided a cheaper service someone was needing, and it was as easy as just setting up two equal and opposing accounts that net out. He hasn’t created any money or committed any kind of fraud (so he thinks, conveniently forgetting that Gibson would go to jail for a long time if he tried to do that). All he has said, is that I and my association promise to honor that Owing we promised Hobson, and anyone who Hobson authorizes to have us switch the Owing to. In return, we are expecting Hobson to get some other branch or account in our system to transfer enough Owing back to us to cancel out the Owing we originally said we would Owe him in exchange for him promising to Owe us.

>Sounds harmless, doesn’t it? They are just creating harmless equal, opposing Owings. But the effect is, if you call this money, and attempt to use these owe-sayings as the money-side of trades, that it increases the MoneyStock of the World which, functionally, is bidding for the goods and services offered in the World. The “felt” quantity of money is not balanced-out and driven down by the debt-sides of these saw-owes-called-borrowing. In this way, Morgan and his system can adjust up or down the felt moneystocks of the world, so that the effective purchasing power of each unit on the accounts of money holder is adjusted outside of the holder’s power or permission.

We are undone, my dear sir, if legislation is still permitted which makes our money, much or little, real or imaginary, as the moneyed interests shall choose to make it.

Thomas Jefferson

As John Maynard Keynes famously said, "By a continuing process of inflation, government can confiscate, secretly and unobserved, an important part of the wealth of their citizens. The process engages all the hidden forces of economic law on the side of destruction, and does it in a manner which not one man in a million is able to diagnose."

"Whoever controls the volume of money in any country is absolute master of all industry and commerce." -- James A. Garfield, President of the United States

When they are doing this, they are using a set of mechanics so weird that they can safely outline them in official publications, secure in the assurance that only 1 man in a million will really understand them and their theological considerations, and even most of the men that begin to figure it out will more likely cast about for a way to turn the situation to their advantage and will be loathe to correct its immorality.

"The few who understand the system, will either be so interested from its profits or so dependent on its favors, that there will be no opposition from that class."

Rothschild Brothers of London, 1863

"When a society is sinking into moral decay, one of the traits of that decay is the inability to see what is happening. The social mind becomes so defective in the moral decadence that it doesn't have the categories or the framework to recognize evil for what it really is.
We do live in such a day."

- John Piper

[See part II]