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The Alternative Currency of a 19th Century Abolitionist

9-5-2017 < SGT Report 85 388 words
 

from The Daily Bell:


Have you ever had the dream of starting your own society? What about introducing a new currency? Turns out Bitcoin was far from the first private currency.


Josiah Warren didn’t like the political system, and he didn’t like the economic system, so he started his own little alternative community, with a unique medium of exchange. Warren actually started multiple “anarchist” micro-societies, with varying levels of success. Although he never called himself an anarchist, he believed in individual freedom to the point that he argued government was inherently a violation of rights.


Warren said that when laying out laws and constitutions, governments always present the problem of interpretation. The power of the interpreter of laws becomes unlimited power.


Because of this, attempts to fit everyone under one unified umbrella of law and order will inevitably cause schism, disappointment, and resentment.


To be harmonious and successful we must begin anew; we must disconnect, disunite ourselves from all institutions or rise above them.


But how, you ask, can this be, where each is a member of the body politic–where obedience to some law or other is indispensable to the working of the political machine? If every one was the law unto himself, all would be perfect anarchy and confusion. No doubt of this. The error lies further back then you have contemplated. We should be no such thing as a body politic. Each man and woman must be an individual, no member of any body but that of the human family. Blackstone says, “It is the wants and the fears of the individuals which make them come together,” and form society.


In other words, it is for interchange of mutual assistance, and for security of person or property, that society is originally formed. Now if neither of these objects has ever been attained in society, we have no reason for keeping up a body politic…


With regard to security, we see that in the wide range of the world’s bloody history, there is not any one horrid feature so frightful, so appalling as the recklessness, the cold-blooded indifference with which laws and governments have sacrificed person or property in their wanton, their criminal, or ignorant pursuit of some blind passage or unsubstantial phantom of the imagination.


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