Book Review: Money Bona Fide or Non Bona Fide

Title: Money Bona Fide or Non-Bona Fide

Author: Edward E. Popp

Date: 1970

Publisher: Wisconsin Education Fund

ISBN: none

Length: 126 pages

Quote: “While it is appropriate to use the term usury when referring to very high interest rates, we must also remember that demanding low interest rates may be usury as well...if it is physically impossible for the borrower to pay them...also...if the lender loans counterfeit or inflationary money.”

Before Bitcoin, there were small groups of people, disgusted by the antics of the bank and money industry, who got together and worked out schemes to invent their own “money,” valid among members of the group only. It’s legal, legitimate, potentially a useful market corrective, and also severely limited. Given the alternative of being paid in Good Neighbor Coupons or in U.S. dollars...well, actually, for the duration of some very successful Town Festivals, intelligent people do exchange U.S. dollars for Good Neighbor Coupons. But not during the rest of the year.

During the recent Grapefest in the suburb-town of Grapevine, outside Dallas, wine, art, and street fair lovers shelled out the dollars for coupons, with the warning that this year’s coupons would have souvenir value only at the end of this year’s Grapefest. That’s typical. Citizens could send a message to the federal government in an absolutely legal, public-spirited, and probably delicious way. People who’ve tried it have, however, generally been tagged as wingnuts whether “left” or “right,” and alternative money has rarely reached high value even as a souvenir. Grapefest coupons just aren’t considered as exciting a collection piece as Confederate money, old-style printed food stamps, or 1940s ration tickets.

Edward E. Popp and his Wisconsin Education Fund seriously wanted to correct the 1970s’ “recession” with their own Wis-cash. (Insert jokes about cheese and/or snow here.) They wanted others to consider similar correctives: the bigger a protest movement gets, the better.

The result of which was...that Popp wrote a book that’s of historical interest to present-time protesters. The late George Peters had studied this book, while able to see, and his review is worth quoting here:

“This Mr. Popp gets out in left field about page 70.

It won’t work as he says.

Even so it can be done.

But I guess there would be some injustice.”

 Nevertheless, there was considerable appeal in the idea, as expressed on page 29:

“There will not be inflation and deflation...No one will have a monopoly...The price of goods and services will not be able to be raised or lowered by the banking system...People...would know that when the government asked for more taxes, it would be asking for the people to work harder...Government officials, as well as others, who expect the government officials to take something from everyone to give something to all, might—just might—learn the meaning of justice and they just might think about practicing it.”

One of the Islamic world’s great advantages is that, although Islamic banks demand money from customers to sustain the bank operations, they don’t charge interest that compounds into a spiral of debt and inflation. Muslims can be extremely rich or extremely poor; more of them are poor than are rich and the traditions of modesty and generosity don’t completely fix this, but they know how rich or poor they are, year to year. They pay a straightforward, reasonable fee for using a bank if they do, and keep their cash if they prefer not to use the bank, and their countries don’t reach economic conditions where they have to take a wheelbarrow full of money to the store to fill a handbasket with groceries. Some of their countries have been poor, before the oil boom, but money has tended to keep its value. 

Jewish law forbids charging interest on loans to fellow Jews. More recently written corporate law removes individual Jews from the responsibility of owning a corporation that is an out-of-control, amoral money-making machine with no religious identity, so Jewish Americans suffer as much from mortgages and credit cards as everyone else does. The trouble in the United States and Europe is that for a long time Europe allowed businesses to be operated by specific families. Jews were often barred from farming or entering trades, so they specialized in banking. While only the Rothschilds became quite as wealthy as the Rothschilds, the historical fact was that a loophole in the law of Moses allowed Jews to gouge as much interest out of enemy nations as they could get. As bankers they tended to define everyone, even Jews of different nationality, as an enemy. 

The other Europeans, who were nominally Christians and thus claimed to be adoptive heirs to Abraham, might have adopted the law of Moses for themselves and built a modern banking system as good as the Islamic one, but the historical fact was that they chose to treat everyone, even relatives, as an enemy, when it came to charging compound interest on terms limited by what had rallied a mob to run a banker out of town recently. They approached banking the way they perceived the Jews doing it only without even the constraint of kinship. And this fouled-up system, with its roots in intertribal warfare as a primary source of wealth, was what they brought to North America. Europeans learned about banking at a stage in their evolution when they still heard a claim like, “I never worked a day in my life! Every one of those cattle grazing on the hill was won from another man in a fight!”as a boast. And unless and until we start by recognizing the law of Moses, trying to fix our banking system is going to be like trying to bathe a Tar Baby—a glob of tar wrapped up like a baby (or some other object people wanted to pick up) to fool the naïve into getting tar all over their hands and clothes.

Such reforms as we have achieved have been made primarily by religious groups that are willing to be perceived as extreme, fanatical...and puritanical, with bans on all sorts of things manufactured by Unbelievers just because the community’s hoard of money is maintained by members not buying this or that.

Popp’s recommendation for reform started with using coins—“as few Federal Reserve notes as is practical”—and, if “producing or selling goods,” “issue certificates of credit,” and, “if our governmental body is in need of money and is considering borrowing it, advise it not to borrow, but to issue tax credit certificates.”

It’s still workable, Gentle Readers. Making it work will require mindful use of money, frugality, discipline, purchasing things from individuals you respect even if you can get similar things cheaper from the greedhead corporations. The Internet can help mindful communities connect across the miles but, in the long term or on a large scale, it won’t be reliable; the Internet itself is a greedhead corporate scheme and will be made to work against anyone who is using it to beat a monopoly or price-fixing cartel. (Similarly, the federal government will, if regarded as our only defense against the monopolies and cartels, become the biggest monopoly of all.) Then again, since we’re all subject to uncontrollable losses of income these days, those are ideas worth our attention in any case.

If you don’t have much income, it’s much better to live frugally on a small income than it is to have more of some things doled out to you as a welfare cheat.

If you have a decent income, it’s much better to make your own purchasing decisions and reward people who produce good things than it is to peel off money mindlessly for whatever the big-chain stores push at you.

Do you need Popp’s Money for guidance on mindful spending, or would a newer book or one relating to a community that interests you, such as the Mennonites, be more useful? Which should be your first book on mindful use of money is a topic beyond the scope of this review. I recommend Popp’s Money as a book for people who are ready to form an economic community (and not willing to affiliate with a religious one). If that’s not where you are, Money is primarily a book of historical interest. It can help you communicate with “preppers” of a certain vintage, being part of their history. It did not inspire a major economic movement all by itself, and plenty of historians will tell you it was read only by wingnuts and has no historic significance; they are wrong. But it is a short, simple, readable book that may inspire you to connect with others and become an economic community.

This review says nothing about specific attempts to create and use online community money. That is intentional. Popp obviously did not foresee Bitcoin and this web site is observing Bitcoin for a few more years.