Pizza for pesos, part two

Pizza Patrón has announced their intention to continue accepting the Mexican Peso at their stores. Good for them! I'm sure they are making a lot of money off of this service. Good for them! Unless somebody was using force to affect the transaction (for example, by pointing a gun at someone, or passing a law requiring authorities to point a gun at someone), such voluntary transactions mean that people were served, and society, on balance, advances. In general, they will prosper in proportion to the value of the service they provide.

Money liberty is a freedom we don't often think about. The authors of the United States Constitution intended American money to be limited to gold and silver. It is impossible for the government to inflate the supply of gold and silver. Inflation is a means of stealing some value from the entire money supply and using it to create new (stolen, counterfeit) money. It is a violation of Leviticus 19:35-36. Inflation does not add value to the total money supply; it merely redistributes the value that already exists. (And unlike other government programs, it usually doesn't make any pretense of redistributing the value to the poor. This value tends to go to bankers and other credit-driven industries like real estate.) After millenia of human existence, the free market had selected gold and silver as money, the medium of human exchange. Governments used force to confiscate gold from their citizens and force their populations to use paper money instead, giving government powers over the money supply, such as inflation. (They call this power "flexibility.")

The sole reason government insists on paper money is in order to have this power over the money supply. If left to the free market, trade would probably resume again in some commodity like gold or silver. Platinum has presented itself as a modern choice that some people think could be a good medium of exchange. In older times, some societies were known to trade in butter, cartwheels, and even cigarettes. But over time, gold and silver have always tended to win out as being the most convenient for trading.

If you own your property, you have the right to do whatever you want with it, including trade it to another property owner for whatever he is willing to trade for it. But we have decided that modern societies need to have limits on freedoms like this. We tell people they may keep their property, but then we limit what they may do with it. This is a violation of God's command that we honor private property: "Thou shalt not steal." If I tell you how to use your property, I've stolen it and left you as a mere custodian. On top of this fundamental abuse of freedom that occurred in order to bring about our present money situation, the whole reason for this system's existence is so that the government can create new dollars at will: in other words, so that the government can steal from every single dollar holder at once, any time it wishes. Is this a power that Christians should vote for?

The Constitution granted Congress the power to make coins out of gold and silver, and to establish their value. In its first act pertaining to money, the Congress declared the United States dollar would be equal to the amount of silver in a one ounce silver coin that was circulating at the time. This coin had a lengthy history: in the middle ages, some of the best silver coins came from the German area of Joachimsthal. The coins came to be known as the Joachimsthaler, or later the Thaler. If it's not obvious, this is where the name "dollar" came from. Eventually there were lots of sources for Thaler-sized coins, and they were all called Thalers or Dollars. It doesn't matter where an ounce of silver comes from as long as its the same weight as every other ounce.

Long before our modern paper money, the most popular coin for trade in America was a Thaler coin called the Spanish Milled Peso, or the Spanish Dollar. America's founders couldn't care less what was stamped on their silver and gold coins, as long as the coins were of the right valuable substance, and of the right weight. Even though America eventually started minting its own coins, Spanish Pesos and American Dollars circulated side by side for over a century. Nobody thought this was strange. Benjamin Franklin, George Washington, Alexander Hamilton, Thomas Jefferson -- all of them almost certainly traded in Spanish Pesos at some point in their lives, here in America.

Government came up with the idea that it should have a monopoly on coin production within its territory. It started teaching its people the idea that they should use only their own national coins, as a matter of national pride. Almost all governments did this. Eventually governments passed laws to try to require people to use their own national currencies in most day to day transactions. This was just a step on the road to currency the government could inflate. (If everybody can switch to gold or silver coins from another country or a private mint, then they will do so the minute the government starts issuing inflated coins with less gold or silver in them. Competition, the free market, protects people's interests far better than any government.) Search your Constitution -- you'll find the power to mint coins granted to the federal government, you'll find the power to mint coins and the power to issue paper money denied to the States, you'll find an amendment that says the federal government doesn't have any powers that aren't granted to it by the Constitution (this is in an Amendment because the original writers of the Constitution thought it was obvious). If you compare with the previous Articles of Confederation, you'll find that the phrase used to grant Congress the power to mint coins originally contained permission to issue paper money -- this was intentionally taken out when the sentence was moved to the Constitution. What you won't find in the Constitution is the right for the federal government to monopolize money. You won't find any sentence granting them the right to require people to use American coins. In 1920 it took an Amendment to the Constitution to give the federal government the right to outlaw alcohol. Why did it not take an Amendment to give Congress the power to monopolize money, or issue paper bills?

If you'll check this link, you can see how much value has been stolen from American dollars. Originally, a dollar was one ounce of silver, or one twentieth of an ounce of gold. How much silver is a dollar worth now? How much gold?

Given that America's founders used coins like the Spanish silver Peso interchangeably with American Dollars, and intended us to continue doing so, I find the uproar over Pizza Patrón's private business decision to take Mexican paper Pesos to be somewhat out of place. A more appropriate uproar would be one against the criminals in government who violated the Constitution and required us to start using fake paper dollars.

Like all the other nations

In I Samuel 8, the Israelites sinfully ask the prophet and judge Samuel to "appoint a king for us to judge us like all the nations." (8:5) Under the direction of the Lord, Samuel explains to them why this desire is not only sinful, but a bad idea, but "the people refused to listen to the voice of Samuel, and they said, "No, but there shall be a king over us, that we also may be like all the nations" (8:19-20) The result was disastrous in many ways, as any child with a mother can tell you that jumping off a bridge is still a bad idea even when all the other kids are doing it.

The United States was established after many years of improvement over the older model of government, monarchy. Under monarchy, a single human being ruled every citizen and had absolute power at whatever arbitrary level of detail he pleased. As we've seen, no such centralized authority can satisfy the needs of the whole society.

The United States was set up with certain restrictions on the power of its government. These may be seen in the Constitution. For example, no state was permitted to make anything but gold or silver a legal tender (and given that the Constitution strictly limits the powers of the federal government to those things explicitly included within it, and given that the Constitution permits the Congress to coin money, but not print it, the same is true of the Federal government as well. Unfortunately, while people of the early twentieth century correctly recognized that a Constitutional amendment was required in order to give the federal government the power to ban alcohol, nobody noticed when the government overstepped its bounds on this matter). The federal government was not permitted to pass laws restricting the freedom of speech, or of the press, or prohibiting the free exercise of religion. The Congress could not pass export taxes, or ex post facto laws. Titles of nobility could not be granted.

All of these restrictions on the power of the government were designed to preserve something that we can have only at the expense of the power and size of the government: freedom. Man's concept of government had evolved from the tyrannical monarch, with the power to do anything, no matter how cruel or selfish, to government as "a dangerous servant and a fearsome master" (according to George Washington). Its powers had to be sharply curtailed, or people could not be free. (And as we've seen, if people are not free, they cannot prosper.)

Unfortunately since the days of those wise but fallible men, much wisdom has been forgotten. The idea that government has any limits to its powers is out of vogue. The standard for judging what the nation is permitted to do is not the Constitution, nor any notions of morality, nor even any notions of what is best (Austrian economics has proved that what is best is for government to dissolve itself and get out of the way). Instead it is presumed that, as long as a vote is taken, the government may do anything any other "civilized" nation does.

Actually it didn't take long for people to forget (perhaps deliberately?) the limitations imposed by the Constitution. On your ten dollar bills is a man named Alexander Hamilton, who pressured the United States to establish a national bank, something not permitted. His rationale? All the other nations do it, so clearly this was something "necessary and proper" for a nation to do. He had a bunch of other schemes he wanted the government to enact as well, a philosophy called "The American System," which was really a system of mercantilism, or an early example of cronyism. (It had to be called the "American" system to distinguish it from the systems of all the other nations, upon which it was based.) You can read a bit more about The American System and find out who eventually enacted it with help from Google. By the way, Hamilton's image goes great on that ten dollar bill, which is an unconstitutional form of money specifically left out of the Constitution. And as any of the anti-Hamiltonian founding fathers could have told you, the results of Hamilton's actions is that ten dollars is worth a lot less than it used to be. (Ten dollars was originally defined as one-half of an ounce of gold. Use this link to check the current price of gold and see how much half an ounce is worth now. The gold isn't worth more; what's changed is that the dollar is worth less. All that value was plundered by the government.)

How about all the other great things that other nations do? Socialized health care? We want it. Why does it matter if the Constitution permits it or not? Compulsory education? That was based on the system Prussia had. Originally it had to be a matter for the states alone, because the federal government wasn't permitted to address it, as it was not in the Constitution. But after about two generations of state-level compulsory (socialized) education, nobody remembered why that mattered, and today we pass national education bills without ever consulting a judge or a lawyer or a literate person to see if the Constitution permits it.

In the early days of the U.S., the great desire of every man was to learn from the lessons of history and construct a government that was different from the others. Today, I'm afraid, we sound more like the Israelites. And if we don't ever ask, "Why didn't the founders include this in the Constitution, when other countries thought it was a great idea?" perhaps we, like they, deserve what we get.

Compulsory education is slavery

Texas state Representative Wayne Smith wants to make it illegal for parents to miss parent teacher conferences, in order to encourage more parental responsibility.

As homeschooling parents, we're not worried about missing any parent teacher conferences. (Though according to the old joke, if you talk to yourself you only have to worry about yourself answering back...)

In a free society, free citizens can never be told what to do, where to go, when to be there, etc. The only exception to this is when a free citizen steps outside the law, by violating another person's right, and thus loses his freedom to the extent to which he took it away from someone else. (In older times, the term "outlaw" meant someone who had literally been deemed outside the protection of the law because he had chosen not to abide by the law.)

If we're telling grown parents where to go and when to be there, aren't we taking away their freedom? Of course we are!

But we crossed that line long ago. We tell the children where to go, right? We force the parents to make their children go to school. We've been violating the liberties of parents and children through compulsory schooling for almost one hundred fifty years.

The founders of the United States knew that the free market (the organic institution you get when you respect God-given liberties) furnished the best possible education. Until about 1850, every one of them was privately schooled, either through a private institution or at home. Literacy was near universal, and love of liberty reigned. Then some people who wanted to take away liberty decided it would be a good idea to have a centralized, universal education system so that all children could be educated in the same values. The result is over a century of indoctrination, and a society that is less educated and less interested in liberty. In fact, amazingly, lots of people see forcing children to go to school as being essential for liberty. The founders would've disagreed.

A book you might like to read on this subject is John Taylor Gatto's The Underground History of American Education. You can buy the book, or read it for free online at the link provided. I promise it will open your eyes.

You might also like to know that Thomas Jefferson explicitly declared it to be wrong and inconceivable to violate the liberty of parents and children through compulsory schooling:

"It is better to tolerate the rare instance of a parent refusing to let his child be educated, than to shock the common feelings and ideas by the forcible asportation and education of the infant against the will of the father." (Note to Elementary School Act, 1817.)

Of course, in a free society, uninterfered with by criminal force (whether exercised by the state or others), people have natural incentives to see that their children receive the education they find to be most fitting. But the state has eliminated an enormous number of incentives for this. Chalk up Representative Smith's idea as yet another misguided attempt by the state to correct a problem caused by itself. The solution is less government, not more, Mr. Smith. Government IS the problem.

In earlier posts, I've proved that taxation is simply another name for stealing. Compulsory funding of education means robbing people to educate children. What kind of lessons does this teach? What kind of lessons does it teach when the children themselves and their parents and all of their neighbors have their liberty violated for the sake of this education? As an answer, think how many people (maybe even you, dear reader) will react negatively to this essay, asserting that the state (or society) does in fact have a claim to the lives of its citizens -- perhaps we should say its "subjects" -- and the right to violate their liberty in these ways. Yes, compulsory education teaches its lessons well.

Has God entrusted you with the authority to command other people what to do? I don't think so. Don't support the government doing so in your name.