The first two volumes of the CityCam trilogy asked what money is, who creates it, and who supervises the supervisors. Volume Three asks the fifth question: how do we take this power away?
Doing Direct - Apostates of Reason: Reformation Completion is the prophetic and practical conclusion of Roger G. Lewis's three-volume monetary history. It opens with Spinoza's excommunication from the Amsterdam Sephardic community in 1656 - the herem that specified four cubits as the distance the community must maintain from the expelled man - and uses those four cubits as the volume's organising metaphor. The heretic at four cubits is not isolated. The heretic at four cubits is visible, and the community is visible to the heretic. What is severed is the continuous exchange the community is constituted to maintain. What becomes possible, at that distance, is the work that could not be done inside.
The volume traces the lineage of dissent at four cubits across twelve chapters. Leibniz, in November 1676, made a secret visit to the lens-grinding heretic at his lodgings on the Paviljoensgracht in The Hague - the courtier who could not publicly endorse the position he had spent forty years privately absorbing. Blake and Paine were composing in Lambeth in the 1790s, at the same four cubits' distance from the institutional Reason of their time. Keynes brought his bancor proposal to Bretton Woods in 1944 and was defeated by Harry Dexter White in the service of the dollar-centred architecture that has governed the international monetary system ever since. Robert Triffin named the structural contradiction of that architecture in 1960 with the precision of a man who had understood it from the inside. The Riksbank Prize in Economics - awarded to Hayek in 1974 and Friedman in 1976 - is examined as the priestly-class validation mechanism for the Mont P�lerin settlement. The four contemporary pamphleteers - Roger Lewis, David Malone, Ranjan Balakumaran, and John Ward - are named as the current instance of the same continuous working operation.
The practical alternatives the volume proposes are not theoretical. The Bank of North Dakota, founded in 1919 by the Nonpartisan League, has been profitable in every year of its operation, protected the state's agricultural economy through the post-2008 crisis, and returned its profits to the public budget. The German Sparkassen and Volksbanken - locally-anchored cooperative savings banks operating under the Regionalprinzip since the 1820s - hold approximately forty per cent of German retail banking assets and have lent primarily to the productive Mittelstand economy for nearly two centuries. The Hampshire Community Bank is the contemporary British instance of the same institutional design. These are documented working alternatives to the chartered-private-monopoly-of-money-creation that Volumes One and Two diagnosed.
The Reformation the volume's title names is not Luther's. It is the return of the credit-creation operation to the commons - the restoration of what the Concluding Prayer of Lewis's 2016 epic poem Usury Hell's Fuel named: "good faith and brotherhood restored to the commons." The Reformation is not complete. Volume Three argues that it is completable, that the instruments exist, and that the lineage of dissent has been carrying them for 370 years.
Roger G. Lewis is a Chartered Surveyor, monetary-reform writer, and satirical novelist domiciled in Sweden. Doing Direct is the third volume of the CityCam trilogy; Volumes One (Think Again) and Two (Ephors) are published simultaneously.
Lewis, Roger: -
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