Silvio Gesell - The NATURAL ECONOMIC ORDER
We shall now examine the condition under which capital-interest, crises and unemployment are produced, and we shall discuss the measures necessary for the removal of these evils. We are thus about to approach what is notoriously the most intricate of all economic problems. The reader need not, however, be alarmed, for the problem has been rendered perplexing only by pseudo-scientific methods of investigation; in reality the facts are rigorously co-ordinated; and we have only to begin at the right place to discover the co-ordination.
PART III. MONEY AS IT IS INTRODUCTION Metal money of the present day is in all essentials identical with the money that exchanged the products of antiquity. Gold money unearthed from the ruins of Athens, Rome or Carthage is universally acceptable and circulates freely with the money of modem Europe or America. Apart from possible differences in the fineness of the gold, a kilogram of coins with the stamp of a Roman emperor is equal to a kilogram of coins with the stamp of the German mint. Our money has all the characteristics of the money that Lycurgus banished from Sparta. Money is perhaps the only State-Institution that we have adopted unchanged from antiquity. But our knowledge of the nature of money is by no means proportionate to its great antiquity. Lycurgus recognised that money made of precious metal disrupts the State by dividing the people into rich and poor. We will not here discuss whether he did well in banishing money, in casting out the good with the bad. But even today we are as far from understanding the recognised evils of money as was Lycurgus. We can applaud Pythagoras for saying "Honour Lycurgus who banished gold and silver, the root of all evil" or sigh with Goethe "Nach Golde dr채ngt, am Golde h채ngt doch alles. Ach wir Armen!" - but we can go no further. The question, What is wrong with money ? Why is money a curse to mankind ? meets with silence. Even our economists are so perplexed by this problem that instead of investigating it they prefer simply to contradict Lycurgus and Pythagoras and to ascribe the alleged shortcomings of money to defective observation. The Spartan Moses is thus classed among tamperers with the monetary standard, and the great mathematician among moral fanatics. This failure of science is less due to defects of the human understanding than to certain external circumstances unfavourable to the scientific consideration of monetary theory. The subject itself repels investigators. Lofty idealists can easily find subjects of investigation more attractive than money. Religion, biology, astronomy, for example, are infinitely more edifying than an investigation of the nature of money. Only the prosaic man of figures feels attracted by this step-child of science. It is comprehensible, it does honour to human nature, that the investigators who have penetrated into the dark continent of monetary science can still be counted on the fingers. Again, the unfortunate methods hitherto employed. and the connection of the investigation with the now happily moribund doctrine of value, have increased the natural aversion to this branch of science. The pedantic obscurity with which monetary theory has been treated by scientists has caused the public to despise a subject which is nevertheless of vast importance to human development. (The forgotten literature of bimetallism is a praiseworthy exception). Even at the present day the monetary standard seems to the great majority of the public to be simply a certain weight of fine gold, and gold is for most men a substance of small importance. Since the object of monetary theory is held in low estimation, no one buys monetary literature, and the risk of publishing works on monetary theory is too great for most publishers. Much good writing about money has probably remained unpublished another circumstance that keeps investigators away from monetary problems. Only authors who can afford to publish at their own expense can occupy themselves with the problem of money. To the latter statement there are exceptions. The works of our university professors are at least bought by students and State libraries, and find publishers. But the exclusion of criticism of the existing order from university teaching prevents university professors from penetrating far into the nature of money. The probe of official science does not go deep, it recoils from the hard underlying layer of controversy. What is true of money is true also of the theories of rent, interest and wages. A university professor who ventured to investigate the controversial basis of these problems would convert his lecture-hall into a field of battle. Controversial matters, politics, theories of wages, rent, interest and money, are 58