Fleeing is no longer possible

As mentioned earlier, I read The Limits of Growth in my late teens. Having hoped to live for another sixty years or so, I was informed by that book that a computer had calculated I would live to see the end. And who would argue with a computer, an entirely logical device? Time was ticking. Tic toc tic toc. As a child, I dreaded the future whenever the song Vluchten Kan Niet Meer (Fleeing Is No Longer Possible) was on the radio. It unnerved me profoundly, as it painted a dismal future in which nature would be gone. The ticking clock had made me run for cover as a toddler. That gloomy mood faded when I went to secondary school, and for a long time, the coming doom hardly crossed my mind.

That was until I read The Limits of Growth. It featured dreadful graphs showing decades in advance how resources would run out, and billions of people would die. Two decades had passed since then, and everyone had ignored it. It led me to join a local environmentalist group, Friends of the Earth, after finishing my studies. That was in 1993. My political affiliation had gradually trended to the centre-left. For a long time, I had believed that there was no alternative to capitalism, but gradually I realised that it also meant there was no alternative to doom. And so there had to be an alternative. It was impossible, but it was necessary. And that thought settled.

Friends of the Earth is an international organisation known in the Netherlands as Milieudefensie, with local activist groups, most notably in student towns like Groningen. We researched issues and tried to convince people. Friends of the Earth also lobbies with politicians and pressures corporations. We were a hodgepodge of students, people with jobs, unemployed, activists, and ordinary people, led by a woman in her thirties who acted like an Akela in the Boy Scouts. A 22-year-old student was her boyfriend.

We were not as militant as Greenpeace, but sometimes we protested. Once, we blocked the entrance of Groningen Airport to object to the government subsidies for the airport. The police came and told us to leave, which we did. It made me realise that activism wouldn’t solve the world’s problems. What could you do? If you went extreme and vandalised property, people would hate you for it, and it wouldn’t change the world. Starting a political party wouldn’t help. Think of what must be done and promise that you will do it. Few will vote for that. Even the most ‘extreme’ environmental party, the Green Party (GroenLinks), didn’t have what it takes, and they had only a few seats. That did not bode well.

And finally, if the Netherlands was going to do it, but no one else would, it wouldn’t help. And then there is the competition in the economy. Businesses will go bankrupt if they do more to save the environment than others. Their products would be more expensive, and we wouldn’t buy them, except for those who care enough for the environment to pay more. The group had about thirty active members and was divided into subgroups centred around specific issues such as vegetarianism, factory farms, air pollution, and economics. Economic issues caught my interest.

My mind was often grinding. It was like Hegelian dialectic, so trying ideas and looking for reasons why they would fail. You can ask hypothetical questions. Is it possible to make capitalism sustainable and just? Fat chance. Wasting is the essence of the system. If capitalism doesn’t solve these problems, then why not try socialism? Would that work? Probably not. People want more stuff. Democracy? Authoritarianism? Likely not. Can we make nature sacred? They will laugh at the idea. Money is sacred. All I got was an increasing pile of objections as to why ideas don’t work. I was too realistic to get carried away by any idea. History is full of examples of ideas going wrong. You can discard most ideas without even trying. That was the benefit of knowing history all too well.

No frivolous accounting

Friends of the Earth in Groningen was a small outfit, so compared to the art festival at the university campus, the yearly budget was negligible, about 6,000 guilders (€ 2,723). It covered the group’s activities. We were short of money. That changed once I became the treasurer. I took measures to make expenses match project income. Everything had to be accounted for. I eliminated the use of cash and required everyone to deliver receipts and state their purpose. I transferred the money via bank transfer, so it was clear where the money went. Yet, luck played a major role.

Each year, we received two grants of 2,500 guilders (€ 1,134), one from the province of Groningen and one from the municipality of Groningen. The provincial administration had just denied the allowance we had received in previous years. We could appeal to the decision at the Appeals Commission, which we did. Then I went to the Provincial House to discuss the issue with the official responsible for the grant. He explained that our request had been late and that the money jar was empty. I asked him whether there was any point to the appeal. He said no. It was a done deal.

So, after receiving an invitation to a hearing at the Appeals Commission, I decided not to waste my time going. After all, it was a done deal. One of the commissioners called me after the hearing to ask why we hadn’t shown up. And I told him. That probably touched a nerve, as it gave him the impression that no one took the Appeals Commission seriously. Our appeal was granted, and we received the subsidy. As I had made a budget that didn’t anticipate this money and had implemented budgetary discipline, we ended up with income exceeding expenses.

Once over a cliff, a cartoon character might clutch at a straw to save itself. Only in animated pictures does the straw hold. The Dutch saying ‘clutching at a straw’ means grasping at your last hope. On economic issues, the local group of Friends of the Earth worked together with Strohalm, or more precisely, Rinke. He lived in Groningen and was actively engaged in Strohalm and its ideology. He was on social benefits, and his career was working for Strohalm and Friends of the Earth. He was serious about his job and worked hard. The meaning of the Dutch word strohalm is straw.

The people of Strohalm claimed that the economy must grow to pay interest. Interest rates can’t go below zero, and if debts aren’t repaid with interest, the financial system collapses, so it is grow-or-die. And interest adds to the principal until infinity. To deal with that problem, I later figured that central banks print money to fill the gaps and aim for inflation, which is why it hadn’t collapsed. Sound accounting attracted me, so this made me think. And the idea of economic growth is frivolous accounting if you are the accountant of our planet’s resources. Many people worry about government deficits, but not about the overexploitation of the earth. And so, the cranks run the show in this world with insane planetary accounting schemes and delusions about growth. And the global economy and financial system create oceans of wealth and deserts of poverty, Srohalm argued.

Strohalm aimed to end interest by charging a holding fee on money. You don’t have to pay the fee if you lend your money. In this way, it could be attractive to lend money without interest. Natural Money as an idea thus already existed back then. Silvio Gesell introduced the holding fee in his 1916 book The Natural Economic Order. Strohalm also promoted local money. And Strohalm promoted local solutions to shield the local economy from international financial markets, such as local currencies.

When you buy groceries at your local supermarket, you have no clue where your money ends up and what it helps to accomplish. The supermarket chain may use it to build a new distribution centre. One of the contractors there might exploit immigrants. It is hard to do something about that, but it made me aware of the impact my money has on the planet and on other people. I moved most of my savings to an ethical bank, first ASN and later Triodos. Later, I also started buying Fair Trade products.

With local money, you could oversee what it accomplishes. And so, Strohalm began a LETS (Local Exchange Trading System) in Groningen. We exchanged goods and services using fictitious currency with a holding fee. It soon dawned upon me that LETS would accomplish very little. It was more of a tea party than a viable alternative for the regular economy. The exchange circle had a few hundred people, and many weren’t very active, so there were only a few products and services. And most weren’t things you needed. You might get a Reiki healer but not a handyman.

If your skills had market value, you wouldn’t exchange them in the LETS circle because you could get guilders you could spend everywhere. Thus, it was not only a matter of scale but also of commitment. The people in the exchange didn’t offer valuable skills or products, either because they didn’t have them or because they could fetch more in the market. You could say that people value money more than community, but you could also say that people tried to make money from their hobby, so they didn’t have to work for a living.

The people in such a scheme were mostly idealists who wanted to change things rather than people who would get things done. For a closed economy to work, the community needs scale to fulfil most of its needs. And it must produce tradeable goods and services to fulfil the remainder of its needs. Above all, building such a community requires commitment. Everyone must contribute, make themselves useful by acquiring new skills if needed, and accept a lower standard of living because they forgo the benefits of the division of labour in international markets. How can you achieve that?

Friends of the Earth Groningen once held a camp to work on our persuasion skills. Rinke was one of the organisers. He specifically praised me and called me an example for the others. That couldn’t be because of my communication skills. What set me apart was that I knew very well what other people were thinking and how they would react. My parents and some of my friends disapproved of my joining the environmentalists. And I didn’t try to convince others of my views, but merely tried to figure out how much they were willing to go along with them. Everyone knows that dumping garbage in nature is not okay. You can use that.

My parents found environmentalists a nuisance at best. When, in 2012, the socialists, led by Diederik Samsom, had a chance to win the elections, they were alarmed because Samson had been with Greenpeace as a student. A former environmentalist running the country was their worst nightmare. Perhaps you can see the irony of that. They considered voting for the conservative liberals (VVD) rather than the Christian Democrats (CDA), for which they had voted all their lives, to prevent that from happening. And so, there is no point in arguing. Did I ever convince anyone of my political views as a teenager? Probably not. That lesson I had learned already as a young man.

Few people are willing to change their lifestyles for the welfare of animals or future generations. Blocking roads would make people angry. People want to drive cars and don’t care about climate change. Strohalm proposed a tax on air travel because air travel is highly polluting and a luxury. Environmental taxes would raise prices and infuriate people. Taxes have caused revolutions. People aren’t willing to give up their right to murder their children. I didn’t give up on environmentalism just because we were heading for the apocalypse, but annoying people wasn’t the way to solve the problem. Only that wasn’t particularly satisfactory. If you accept doom, you might as well commit suicide right away. And so, there must be a way, even if there isn’t.

And there were issues with interest-free money. Why would you lend out money without interest if you could receive interest elsewhere? If you can borrow money at an interest rate of zero, you could borrow as much as you can and put it in a bank account at interest. That is not going to work. That was my grinding mind, looking for failures. It is an occupational hazard if you work in IT. A programme always has errors, and it is better to find the bugs before running it. Cleaning up the mess afterwards is far more work. Still, if interest is the root cause of social and environmental problems and can destroy human civilisation, we must make interest-free money work, even if it never will.

And perhaps it could work. During the Great Depression, a small Austrian town, Wörgl, had money featuring a holding fee. It was a stunning success. A similar money had existed in ancient Egypt for over a thousand years. The Egyptians used receipts for grain stored in the granaries as money. These receipts had a holding fee to cover storage and putrefaction. A Strohalm book related it to the biblical story of Joseph, who supposedly had introduced these granaries to weather seven lean years. If it can work for a thousand years, it can work forever. If only we could uncover the key to these successes. That was a reason not to let go of the idea. Maybe the impossible is possible.

In 1997, I moved to Sneek to live with my wife, Ingrid. Sneek had no local Friends of the Earth group, so I stopped being an active member, but I kept using public transport. Not owning a vehicle while working in IT consultancy for 10 years was a considerable sacrifice. Living in Groningen had made that possible. It was a remote corner of the country. My jobs were either in Groningen itself or so far away that I had to stay in a hotel. In Sneek, I could use Ingrid’s mother’s car if needed. Still, life without a car is quite uncomfortable. And my sacrifice was pointless. More and more people drove SUVs. They didn’t care. They figuratively gave me the middle finger, and their message was, ‘If you don’t ruin this planet, we double down our efforts.’ That was not what these people were thinking, but terrorists at least believed they were doing it for a good cause, and these SUV drivers must have known that they were doing something wrong, at least if they had a conscience.

If you can do an IT consultancy job for ten years without owning a car, few people really need one. But who will tell them to ditch their cars and move closer to their jobs, or cram into crowded buses and trains for a journey that lasts up to twice as long? We can replace vehicles with public transport, but few people would do that voluntarily. The Dutch nickname for the car is ‘Holy Cow’ for a reason. In 2003, Ingrid’s mother’s vehicle broke down, and she didn’t buy a new one. Having never aspired to higher moral standards than others, at least if they are pointless, I bought a car. It must help. Otherwise, you are just having a hard time, with nothing good coming of it. We used the car to go to my parents’ home in Nijverdal or the forest in Rijs, as there was no forest near Sneek.

Becoming your avatar

Between 1998 and 2002, I was a freelance IT specialist. Lots of money came in, so there was some capital to invest. My first investments were small and unprofitable because I believed that profits mattered. At the time, loss-making internet startups did well in the stock market, while profitable corporations did poorly. Understanding financial markets seemed challenging, which made me think I had to stay informed and join the IEX investment message board. At the time, I still occasionally said, ‘With SuperB***,’ when picking up the phone. That once led to a hilarious moment when I expected a call from Ingrid, but it turned out to be from Martien. And so, that name became my avatar. I also took the Financial Markets course at the Dutch Open University.

Later, I changed my avatar name after someone noted that SuperB*** sounded arrogant. From then on, I never answered the phone, saying, ‘With SuperB***.’ That was no longer needed to feel better. A strange thing about avatars is that you somehow become this person, SuperB***, on the message board. People don’t know you, only the avatar. Readers began to expect serious commentary and strong writing from SuperB***. And so, I introduced a few other avatars with fanciful names like IEKS! (a Dutch exclamation of shock that sounds like IEX) or Schaduwschaap (shadow sheep) to be someone else and have fun. And I wasn’t the only one. Others also came up with fanciful names like mooiepipo (beautiful clown), danger money, !@#$!@! (some curse) or Schraalhans (a Dutch joke). Some also used multiple avatars, so the message board became a playground for practical jokes.

Usually, the name had some witty meaning. It could be something like this, ‘Buy And Hold (BAH) is for sheep and sheep say bah and like to live a calm life in the shadows, hence shadow sheep.’ Walhalla Raaskalla, which means something like mad ravings in the heavens of the Viking gods, just sounded funny. And it rhymed. MMWOPS stood for ‘Making Money While Other People Sleep.’ It was the name of an American scam company defrauding the Dutch shipbuilder RSV, which went bankrupt in 1984 despite receiving two billion guilders in government support. Most of my avatars didn’t last long, except Dikkevettebeer (big fat bear), who believed the stock market would crash to zero and the gold price would rise to infinity. Bears believe that stocks go down, and the stock market went down at the time, so the bears grew fatter.

Some people were promoting certain stocks and hoped others would buy them, so they could profit. Some people were there to defraud others. And you couldn’t see each other face-to-face, which promoted paranoia. You see that on social media today. Can you trust other posters? Do they have a hidden agenda? There is a lot of misinformation. Some governments and corporations pay people to spread their propaganda. Some believe other posters who disagree with them get payment.

A colourful investment fund manager, Michael Kraland, ran the message board. He wrote entertaining commentaries. At the time, he rode the hype of the internet and telecom bubbles. His strategy was risky and not sound advice to inexperienced investors. It was even more irresponsible because his boasting made uninformed people invest in these crappy stocks. And because he was a boaster, he received nasty negative comments on the message board, including unproven accusations of wrongdoing. And perhaps also because he was a Jew, which seemed not accidental, as he worked in finance, and there are many Jews in finance. And even though, as far as I know, he never did anything illegal, I considered him a dubious character.

You could witness what Keynes called ‘animal spirits’ on the message board, experience the fear and greed of small investors, and become part of it. You hope your investments do well and fear they will not. I traded in stock options and made a few huge gains, but overall, I lost. Human emotions often drive the decisions people make about their investments. I was not much different. Those who had success imagined they were geniuses. And then they lost it all when the bubble collapsed. I wasn’t good at picking stocks or trading, but I didn’t take many risks.

Introduction to conspiracy thinking

After some time, a day trader named Cees joined the IEX message board. A day trader is someone who tries to make a living out of trading rather than investing. About 90% of the people aren’t successful in trading and lose money, including me, for I have tried trading stock options for a while. Cees began sharing conspiracy theories from US message boards and websites. One was about the Plunge Protection Team. If the markets were about to collapse, a secretive group called the Plunge Protection Team would come to the rescue. A stock market crash could undermine confidence in the financial system run by Wall Street. They couldn’t allow that to happen.

Many ridiculed Cees at first, but after the internet bubble had popped and even more so after 9/11, markets often miraculously recovered due to massive buying in the futures markets just before they crashed, so his credibility gradually rose. It probably wasn’t entirely true, as the stock markets declined dramatically between 2001 and 2003 during one of the most epic bear markets in recent history. Still, something fishy was definitely going on there. And the gold price regularly plummeted due to sudden selling at irregular hours when most markets were closed.

Cees believed central banks were orchestrating this to bolster confidence in their currencies. He wrote that if the gold price were to rise, the public would lose trust in central bank money. In times of thin trade, you can sell a bit of gold to make the price drop. The trick was to break a trend. Trend followers, called technical traders, would join the bandwagon and sell more gold, lowering the price further, in a manipulative cycle. The purpose of the trade was to bring the price down, which made sense because if a rational investor planned to sell gold, he would seek the best price. And these sales at quiet hours caused the price to crash. These kinds of intriguing posts kept the reader’s attention.

The gold market was rigged like most markets, but not in this spectacular manner, other pundits explained. They would look at traders’ positions in the Commitment of Traders (COT) report to predict price movements. So, if the category of small speculators had loaded up on precious metals, prices would probably go down. Gold mining corporations sell gold in advance on futures markets to make their budgets predictable and plan their operations. The bullion banks were the intermediaries. These banks sold that gold in futures markets to hedge their risk and played the market to enhance their profits. Successful traders exploit our emotions with deception. They spread false information about central banks selling gold to scare suckers on gold bug sites into selling. Once the bullion banks had sold all their inventory on the futures market, they might crash the price to repurchase it at a lower price. And so a veritable conspiracy theorist should have asked, ‘Who profits from these conspiracy theories?’ You can ask the same question about many other conspiracy theories. Who profits from undermining trust in society and its institutions?

Meanwhile, I found alarmist websites about Peak Oil, claiming that oil production was about to decline. There were also websites denying global warming. Most people wouldn’t take them seriously and believe what the scientists say, but I looked into them to see what they had to say. Having studied the philosophy of science, it was not hard for me to uncover the brazen lies, falsifications and misinterpretations of the facts in the climate change denial scene. And they claimed climate scientists committed fraud. People want to believe it. Like my sister once said, ‘I will believe in Santa Claus as long as he brings me presents.’ The benefit of denying climate change is having the comfortable feeling of not needing to change your excessive consumerist lifestyle. The Internet proved to be an ideal platform for cranks to spread their nonsense, making me think there would soon be, like Peak Oil, a time of Peak Bullshit, where the truth would have gone lost entirely. Only, I never thought of what would come after that. The name suggests that after reaching a peak, bullshit would decline.

There was reason to be suspicious. The United States was the centre of a global empire financed by the US dollar’s reserve status, so the Powers That Be (TPTB) would, in all likelihood, protect the financial system at all costs. A collapse could mean the end of their trade and usury empire and their insane profits. I had already bought gold for other reasons and didn’t trust financial markets or those who operate them. And so these stories intrigued me, and I began to visit the sites Cees mentioned. American gold and bear websites complained corporations pumped up profits with frivolous accounting, thereby abandoning the tedious Generally Accepted Accounting Principles or GAAP, which made me smile because GAAP is Dutch for yawn. For the record, a bear is an individual who believes markets will go down and invest accordingly, while a bull thinks markets will rise and invest accordingly.

Those running the financial markets might be pulling out every lever to keep the Ponzi scheme of interest-bearing debt going. Debts continued to grow, as did interest payments, so there could soon be a day of reckoning. I had read ‘The Limits of Growth,’ so I knew that collapse was inevitable. The bear websites reminded me of that. If the sky has come down on you once, as it did to me as a student, you worry it might happen again. It made me on edge concerning my investments, which wasn’t helpful for profits. Gold was a long-term investment, as owning gold could help weather a financial collapse, so I didn’t care much about gold price swings. I sometimes hoped that the corrupt system would collapse, but that was because I hadn’t fully considered the consequences. If you come to think of it, it is unlikely that something good would come out of it.

Back then, conspiracy websites appeared reasonable because they investigated issues that the mainstream financial press did not. But it is a slippery slope. There are all kinds of secret goings on, but the imagination of the conspiracy theorists has no limits. You can go nuts if you don’t perform a regular reality check. Your beliefs will get farther from reality. When I revisited these sites in the early 2020s, they had gone delusional, disseminating misinformation about vaccinations, global warming and the 2020 US elections. The Dutch would call them Wappies. They never ask themselves, who profits from our nuttery? But also, if you rationally look at reality, you might go insane as well. The world is insane.

In 1999, I had already bought my first gold. The gold price had reached historic lows. Gold mines were loss-making and closing, making me smell total apathy toward precious metals, suggesting a generational low point. It made me think that it could be the beginning of a long-term trend of rising gold and silver prices that might last a decade or more. And feeling that an apocalypse could come, it was an insurance. And so, I went to my bank to open a gold account. They sent an investment advisor to talk me out of it. He said, ‘No one does that anymore. I know a man who has had a silver account with us for two decades. Silver has gone nowhere all that time. Gold mines are making losses because the price of gold is only going down. You should invest in the stock market instead. Stock prices only go up.’ It reinforced my belief that it was the perfect time to buy gold, so I pressed on and opened a gold account. Perhaps the investment advisors at the bank office had a good laugh that day.

Nijverdal, where I lived as a child, was the scene of a gold rush in 1901. It was the only place in the Netherlands that ever had a gold mining operation. The rush was short-lived because the ore concentration was lower than previously thought. In Sneek, I bought a goldsmith’s home. That is an interesting set of coincidences. There are no precious metals accounts anymore. Today, precious metals ETFs are essentially the same. I had gold coins in a safe-deposit box at a bank to weather a possible financial collapse. Later, I also acquired silver bars and coins, about 75 kilogrammes in total, and stored most of them in a safe deposit box at another bank. I did this, fearing financial collapse due to reckless debt creation and humanity’s depletion of resources.

A thought that didn’t die

In 2001, after the Internet bubble had popped, I pitched interest-free money on the IEX message board. My lack of financial knowledge didn’t deter me. Everyone can participate in a debate on a message board, so you can exchange thoughts with people you wouldn’t meet otherwise. Others rebuked me time after time and pointed out my errors, so I gradually learned. Lengthy exchanges over several years resulted in unwieldy discussion threads. As these arguments proceeded, my knowledge of finance improved. If you are trying something new, you learn more from open discussions on the Internet than academic debates, often occurring in closed circles under rigorous standards that don’t allow you to speculate. Seeing the issue from different perspectives is more helpful than having in-depth knowledge of a narrow field. My persistence came from an unwavering belief in the insanity of ever-expanding debts and interest payments.

Interest payments destabilise the financial system because borrowers must return more than they borrowed. That money isn’t there, so someone must borrow the difference. If no one else borrows, the government or the central bank must borrow or print new money. Otherwise, a financial crisis and possibly an economic depression will ensue. That is why debts accumulate and why inflation happens. Interest-free money can be sound money because banning interest promotes responsible lending, stabilises the financial system and ends inflation. You don’t lend to someone you don’t trust if you receive no compensation for the risk of not returning the loan. You don’t need to incur more debt to pay off existing debts. That is the theory, but practical issues stood in the way. The market sets the interest rate. If you have money to invest and can receive interest, you won’t lend without interest. That is why economists never took interest-free money seriously. It was a domain of eccentrics like me.

The gold websites familiarised me with the Austrian School of Economics and their adherents, another eccentric bunch. Many were libertarians who saw government, rather than the love of money, as the root of evil. Usually, the private sector can produce a product or service more efficiently than the government, so they believe the government shouldn’t impose regulations or provide public services. They also had ideas about sound money and preventing irresponsible lending. They question banks’ money creation and dispute the need for central banks. Banks create money, which causes inflation. Central banks help banks in trouble, which promotes irresponsible lending. They hoped to limit money creation or return to a gold standard to enforce financial discipline.

They didn’t want governments or central banks to interfere with economic cycles, thereby accepting financial crises and economic hardship to cleanse the excesses. They argued that these corrections are necessary and beneficial as they would terminate poorly run businesses. And things would only worsen if you didn’t allow these natural cycles to run their course. They would argue that the central bank, the FED, had exacerbated the Great Depression and that its policies had contributed to the 2008 financial crisis, as its support for commercial banks had promoted reckless lending. They have little regard for mainstream economics, which underpins government and central bank actions to manage the economy, or what economists call fiscal and monetary policies, thus running government deficits, setting interest rates and printing money.

These issues troubled me as well, as did reckless lending. And so, we had a common ground. Paying interest on existing debts with new ones is fundamentally unsound. To me, funny accounting is an abomination and the basis of corruption. Banks profit from creating money. Inflation is the price we pay for their profits. Banks steal from us, most notably people with low incomes and those who don’t own stocks or real estate. If real estate values rise, so do rents, benefiting homeowners at the expense of renters. The underlying cause is usury, thus charging interest on money and debts, but few people notice. By their lending, banks create money and demand more in return, so we need more money to prevent the scheme from collapsing. And if the scheme collapses, like it nearly did in 2008, that could be the end of civilisation as we know it. For adherents of the Austrian School, charging a fee on currency and banning interest are out of the question, as they run counter to their view of ‘free’ markets. Those who accept a wage below subsistence level are free in their view, even when slaves have a better life.

They were a cult, with their own particular universe of facts. They believed the fairy tale that once the government had disappeared and markets were ‘free’, we would live in Paradise. Even though they were on opposite sides of the political spectrum, a comparison to communists is apt indeed. Both ideologies are like religions. Like communists have their prophets, such as Marx, Lenin, and Engels, libertarians have their own, such as Von Mises, Hayek, and Rand. Both have holy books. Communists have Marx’s Das Kapital or the Communist Manifesto, and libertarians have Rand’s Atlas Shrugged or Ludwig von Mises’s The Theory of Money and Credit. I didn’t read these books, but I have read several of their articles and had discussions with them, so over time, I learned about their beliefs. And perhaps that works better. You can better understand Islam by listening to the opinions of Muslims than by reading the Quran. That is my conclusion after reading the Quran and having had exchanges with Muslims on message boards. I also never read Karl Marx’s books.

If their ideology fails, communists blame the capitalists, while libertarians blame the government. The problem is that humans are unfit for communism, but also for free markets. Regardless of the system, people take advantage of each other’s weaknesses and the system itself. If you held alternative views like me, they accused you of being Keynesian, which seemed worse than being Satan himself. They would argue for ending minimum wages and sell it as a way to help the poor. So, if you can’t earn a subsistence-level income in the so-called ‘free’ market, letting you starve would help you.

If their ideology fails, communists blame the capitalists, while libertarians blame the government. The problem is that humans are unfit for both communism and free markets. Regardless of the system, people take advantage of each other’s weaknesses and the system itself. If you held alternative views like me, they accused you of being Keynesian, which seemed worse than being Satan himself. They would argue for ending minimum wages and sell it as a way to help the poor. So, if you can’t earn a subsistence-level income in the so-called ‘free’ market, letting you starve would help you. To illustrate the mood among these people, on 23 February 2026, someone posted on the Austrian Economics subreddit, ‘It’s time for welfare reform: Maybe food is so expensive because 42 million people get it for free.’ Letting people die of starvation will lower food demand, which might lower food prices. Letting poor people starve for lower food prices for the rich is their line of thinking.

These Austrians may come up with all kinds of charitable motives as to why poor people should starve to pay for the boob jobs of rich women. It is how free markets work. If they were to run the world with their 19th-century views on economics, we would end up in an Oliver Twist novel. They were preoccupied with money like me, but in a way as if only money mattered. From that narrow perspective, their views make sense. Like them, I looked for a sound monetary system, so their views had my interest. Yet, they are a gathering of Scrooges McDucks fearing rot in their money vaults. A funny coincidence is that their hero, after whom they named their website, is Ludwig von Mises. So Mises for misers. Wall Street may be much more evil than they are, but they represent money worship in its purest form. Something isn’t quite right about these people. Central bankers may be the high priests of the money religion, but the Austrians consider them heretics. They are the true faith of Mammon, that is. And the great thing about them was that they had an unparalleled religious zeal to prove me wrong in monetary matters.

They raised new arguments and brought to my attention every error in my thinking they could find. And so, my mind kept grinding. Whatever these people say, the root of frivolous accounting is charging interest on money and debts. It may not be possible to end it because if you do, lending might stop, and the economy might collapse. However, if you investigate a problem, you must at least correctly identify the root cause. Otherwise, the solution will remain out of sight. Charging interest leads to crises. Only you can’t tell Scrooge McDuck. He thinks there is no life after usury. And so, I learned as much from the Austrians as from Strohalm. And perhaps it is no coincidence that the miracle of Wörgl happened in Austria. The answer to the issue that kept the Austrians awake at night, sound money, had been quietly gathering dust in their backyard all along.

In this way, two opposing fringe ideas, which were interest-free money with a holding charge and the Austrian School view, challenged each other in my mind. It was Hegelian Dialectic at its finest. I wasn’t constantly brooding over this issue, but I couldn’t let it go either. In 2008, this resulted in the synthesis of Natural Money. In a gold standard, you need positive interest rates to get the economy going. As a result, you end up with debts you can never repay in gold. At some point, you must face collapse or leave the gold standard. The latter is the easy short-term solution, so you can leave the problem for future generations to solve. Like Keynes said, ‘In the long run, we’re all dead.’

When you do that, the sky is the limit, and debts escalate to infinity, which we have seen happening, most notably after the end of the last remnant of the gold standard. The long run is now over, and Keynes is dead. It is up to our generation to address the problem. Limiting the interest rate to zero can curb money creation and stop irresponsible lending. If the money supply is stable and the economy grows, prices, including the gold price, would drop. And so, a well-managed currency with a holding fee could be stronger than gold. The economy can perform better without interest, allowing interest-free money to yield better returns. That was the beginning of Natural Money. Over the following decade, I developed a more comprehensive theory using modern monetary economics.

Latest revision: 21 April 2026

Featured image: Arab farmer taking straw to his farm. Public domain.