The Monetary Philosophy of E. C. Riegel

1. The Monetary Philosophy ofE. C. Riegel Compiled by Thomas H. Greco, Jr.

2. 1. For a person to exert money power is natural and wholesome.For the state to exert money power is unnatural and perversive.

3. 2. Until the state acquired money power the state was at worst a parasite upon the economy; with the money power, it became a perverter of the economy. Men no longer merely tolerated it; they sought the exercise of its money power in their favor.

4. 3. Thus man’s attitude toward the state and the state’s power over man were completely altered.

5. 4. Out of man’s motive of winning monetary benefits from the state grew various political “ideologies” designed to screen the acquisitive purposes of their proponents.

6. 5. Thus the acquisition of the money power by the state marked a politico-economic revolution as it gave to the state the power through fiscal policy to control the economy and turned men’s minds from private enterprise to methods of its political control and perversion.

7. 6. Our present type of state should be identified as the monetary state and distinguished from the pre-monetary state.

8. 7. Money power exerted by the state is inescapably perverse; the monetary state is a frustrator of all aims of economic and political liberty.

9. 8. In the exercise of the money power, the state is driven inevitably from the libertarian forms of democracy and republicanism to the autarchic forms of fascism, socialism and communism.

10. 9. These are distinguished only by the manner in which the state’s money power is exercised but derive from one theory – that the exertion of money power is a function of the state.

11. 10. The grand issue is between the Monetary state of today and the De-monetized state of tomorrow wherein man will assert exclusive money power under the principle that only producers may create money.

12. 11. Thereafter the politico-economic issues that now exist will be no more, for the state will have lost its power to inflect the economy either to the right or to the left.

13. 12. The aim is not to pose a political revolution but to induce a revolution in thinking on money and an evolutionary movement through local non-political action to establish a private enterprise money system independent of the existing political money system.