The history of money is inseparably linked to the history of liberty. Money,in the hands of bad governments, has always been the first victim of abuse. The abuse of money has brought down governments and civilisations in the past; as historians have said, it was the abuse of money that weakened Roman rule. Monopoly, imposition, restrictions, debasement, clipping and privilege have all corrupted the most precious and most important of all commodities: money.

We live in times of so-called monetary crisis. The recent collapse of the pound, followed by other European currencies, not only has shown the fragility of the system but the controlling role of the speculators. The situation was very revealing. The British government was impotent in the defence of its own currency against the speculators. The few billion pounds spent by the government were useless against the 500 billion pounds that the currency markets trade every single day. The government lost to the speculators. A London newspaper wrote on the occasion: "The government is no longer sovereign", thus recognising that the currency is not in the hands of the government and admitting the enormous power wielded by an undefined financial system or method. This has also been interpreted by many as the end of a political cycle, that is, the end of the nation state.

The question of money is primarily a question of freedom. When people were free to choose they universally chose gold and silver as their medium of exchange. Now we are legally forced to accept the system of artificial money,whose value is determined by a complex mechanism of relationships between political and economic institutions. In this relationship the citizen has little to say, he is merely a trusting and passive receptor.

States have power to declare paper to be legal tender, but they do not have power to make that money trustworthy. As states more and more insist on paper alone serving as money, less and less trust is placed in it. People can be fooled for a while with artificial money, but it is inevitable that trust in the money - something absolutely required for it to serve as a medium of exchange - will be lost.

We propose to return to gold. Gold offers stability and order. Gold is the end of political money. Gold is the end of the manipulation of everyone's money by the political parties and pressure groups. There is no way paper-money can be 'improved' as money. Political money always fails because free people eventually reject it. For short periods individual countries can tell their citizens to use paper, but only at the sacrifice of personal and economic liberty. We have reached the end of that period. We want freedom to chose our medium of exchange. We want freedom to make all our payments in gold or silver, freedom to mint, buy, sell, lend, borrow, import or export any quantity of gold and to use it in any commercial exchange.

Go to Chapter 9

The Return of the Gold Dinar