GOD ON MONEY – PART 2<?xml:namespace prefix = o ns = "urn:schemas-microsoft-com:office:office" />
 
By Stephen Kovaka
 
 
HE WHO HOLDS THE GOLD AND SILVER, MAKES THE RULES
In Deuteronomy 17 we find:
14 When you enter the land the LORD your God is giving you and have taken possession of it and settled in it, and you say, "Let us set a king over us like all the nations around us," 15 be sure to appoint over you the king the LORD your God chooses. He must be from among your own brothers. Do not place a foreigner over you, one who is not a brother Israelite. 16 The king, moreover, must not acquire great numbers of horses for himself or make the people return to Egypt to get more of them, for the LORD has told you, "You are not to go back that way again." 17 He must not take many wives, or his heart will be led astray. He must not accumulate large amounts of silver and gold.
 Concentrated holdings of gold and silver equals concentrated power, and the poverty and subjugation of the people.  God warned the Israelites against this evil, and the warning is as valid for us today as it was for the Israelites.
 
Notice also that this passage prophetically described what would happen in the time of Samuel the prophet, over 300 years later.  It seems that some of the Israelites had been studying their scriptures, for they used the language of Deuteronomy to demand a king so they could be like everybody else (I Samuel 8:5).  But God was not pleased to see the prophecy fulfilled.  Here is God's further warning to them at that time:
11 He said, "This is what the king who will reign over you will do: He will take your sons and make them serve with his chariots and horses, and they will run in front of his chariots. 12 Some he will assign to be commanders of thousands and commanders of fifties, and others to plow his ground and reap his harvest, and still others to make weapons of war and equipment for his chariots. 13 He will take your daughters to be perfumers and cooks and bakers. 14 He will take the best of your fields and vineyards and olive groves and give them to his attendants. 15 He will take a tenth of your grain and of your vintage and give it to his officials and attendants. 16 Your menservants and maidservants and the best of your cattle [b] and donkeys he will take for his own use. 17 He will take a tenth of your flocks, and you yourselves will become his slaves. 18 When that day comes, you will cry out for relief from the king you have chosen, and the LORD will not answer you in that day."
We also know from scripture that by the time of King Solomon, sure enough, the King of Israel was already accumulating not only wives, but also horses, chariots, silver and gold (see I Kings 10:14-29).  And as scripture promised, his heart was led astray.  The prophecies of Moses and of Samuel had been fulfilled, and all but a remnant of Solomon's great kingdom was lost to his son Rehoboam.  So we see that God did not want his people subjected to rich and powerful kings operating kingdoms with high taxes and huge war machines.
      
Steven Pressfield has written a great historical novel, The Virtues of War, which chronicles Alexander the Great's conquest of the <?xml:namespace prefix = st1 ns = "urn:schemas-microsoft-com:office:smarttags" />Persian Empire in the 4th Century BC.  According to the story, when Alexander captured Babylon and Persepolis (the twin capitols of the empire), and the royal treasuries, he found thousands of tons of gold, and amounts of silver that nobody troubled to count.  They weren't even guarded - they just sat there, mostly unused.  The people were reduced to barter and homemade scrip money to facilitate their own exchanges, because gold and silver did not circulate any longer among the common people.  The Persian Empire was a tyranny so ingrained and all encompassing that even Alexander the Great, at the height of his power, found himself incapable of dismantling it and bringing freedom.  The central principle of life was, everyone pillages the people below in the power structure, and all is carried on the backs of the peasants in their grinding poverty.  (He also mentions that sexual debauchery was widespread, because it was the only area of "freedom" the people were allowed . . .)  Power flowed downward from the King's palace.  At the same time, a steady river of gold and silver flowed upward into the King's treasuries, a visible sign of the impoverishment and enslavement of the people. The concentration of gold and silver in the hands of rulers and their agents (viz., central banks) is both a symptom and a means of political tyranny and the subjugation of the people.  
 
Some might object that gold and silver in government hands are beside the point today.  After all, we live in an era of debt money.  Nevertheless, the principle is the same.  In Moses' day, gold and silver were money, and hoards of gold and silver made for powerful, big spending governments and impoverished people.  Ultimately, no amount of gold and silver could satisfy the craving of governments for unlimited spending.  Borrowing took the place of taxing and debt took the place of money.  Today, unlimited government spending is supported by unlimited debt creation, as explained in our previous article.
 
One modern development of interest is that no sooner was debt money firmly established (c. 1971), than governments began selling and leasing their hoards of gold and silver.  This was motivated, in part, by a desire to depress and control precious metals prices, thereby supporting the apparent "value" of debt money.  But in economics, low prices discourage production and result in scarcity, which ultimately causes prices to rise.  So today governments around the world find themselves in the strangely contradictory position of trying to enhance their wealth and power by dispersing their wealth of gold and silver into private hands and creating scarcity.  Thus do the wicked fall into their own nets and cooperate in their own undoing.  Clearly, this is not a good long-term strategy, but today's governments live only from election to election.
 
 
FREE COINAGE MAKES FOR FREE PEOPLE
 
The logical alternative to large accumulations of gold and silver in the hands of rulers is that they should be widely dispersed in the hands of the people and circulate freely as coin of the realm.  No wonder that the American Republic, whose government was to "[derive its] just powers from the consent of the governed", established a national money of circulating gold and silver coin as one way to distribute power to the people at large.
 
The founding fathers did three very important things:
1)      They established silver and gold coin as the money of the United States.
2)      They excluded fiat money. 
3)      They established a US Mint in 1792 for the free coinage of gold and silver.
 
It is worth noting that the US Constitution specified COINAGE, not printing, because the economic chaos and suffering caused by printed fiat money was a recent and painful memory.  They required a commodity money that could not be multiplied by the government at will.
 
Free coinage is another important feature.  The Coinage Act of 1792 specified that any person could bring gold or silver to the mint and have it coined into standard US coins at no charge, and returned to him, weight for weight.  This meant that the government did not control the money supply.  That was left up to the citizens at large.  The government merely provided the service of minting the people's gold and silver into standardized coins for them if they so desired. 
 
For Americans today who live under the hegemony of the Federal Reserve, this is almost unimaginable, but America prospered greatly under this most laissez faire of all monetary systems.  As these coins circulated they helped to prevent the centralization of power and the subjugation of the people.  Real money truly is "coined freedom".  How much harder to control and pillage an economy based on unregistered, self-authenticating monetary assets – gold and silver coins.  In a free country, the gold and silver belongs out on the streets, in circulation. This is why I recommend that people should make use of the opportunity to sell their FRNs (Federal Reserve Notes) and get their gold and silver back again, while it is still legal.  Already we are seeing long delivery delays in the gold and silver coin market, as supplies dry up.  It is sad that even at this late date, most Americans still value the "convenience" of debt money and credit cards more than they value liberty.  The way things are going, we will lose both.  Will the new motto for America be, "At least it's still the Home of the Brave"?
 
At this point, in my experience, most people will shake their heads and decide that the argument has gone beyond the bounds of common sense.  They believe that we have traveled so far from the daily use of gold and silver coins that we can never restore sound money.  They think it is impractical.  Impractical?  Compared to what?  Compared to a debt money system that is demolishing our economy and our children's future?  How "practical" is that?  "There is a way that seems right to a man, but its end is the way to death." (Proverbs 14:12 and 16:25).  If there truly is a better kind of money than gold and silver coin, then what is it?  Where and when has it been successfully used?    These are questions that remain unanswered.  Yes, the Bible is easy to ignore, it may seem old fashioned and impractical to some, but we ignore it at our peril.  God has allowed us to ignore what His word has to say about money, but the painful consequences are beginning to be felt, even now.