Off The Grid News Better Ideas For Off The Grid Living
There’s a lot of raging debate going on in our society about fiat currency, and the gold and silver standard that our nation was on from its inception until the 20th century. Would it interest you to know, however, that the American colonies did not start out with a gold and silver currency?
You see, they had no gold or silver to trade in. None had been discovered. There were expeditions sent out to find silver and gold, but in the beginning there was no specie in the colonies. However, that lack of currency didn’t make the colonists any less prosperous.
In fact, they were quite prosperous! And the underpinning of that prosperity was due to their faith and their liberty.
We hope you’ll join us as Bill, Brian, and Bojidar discuss fiat currencies, gold and silver standards, the history of currencies in this country, and how the failure of an economic system can empower local communities and families to come together for the betterment of all.
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Off The Grid Radio
Ep 048
Released: May 13, 2011
Brian: Ladies and gentlemen, as the announcer says – welcome to Off the Grid News – the radio version of offthegridnews.com. I’m Brian Brawdy, as always with Mr. Bill Heid. Bill, how are you today?
Bill: Brian, I have never been better in my life. I assume the same is true with you.
Brian: As I say, every morning that I’m still here is a great morning. I wake up, as you know, in the mornings and go “you left me here for another gig. I’m going to go at it full on.” So, yeah, it’s 10 a.m., about the time we’re recording this. And I’m still here so it’s a great day.
Bill: It’s a great day. And today we’re having someone on the show and I think what you’ll find fascinating about this is someone that’s actually – well, let’s face it, this morning the headlines are a currency collapse, right? Everywhere you look you see – even the left, Brian, even the left is saying “the currency’s going to collapse.” Well, we’ve been saying this for a long time. Now they’re grabbing onto it. Everybody sees what’s happening to the dollar. Today we’re privileged to have someone speak with us that’s actually been on the ground – been there, done that, with respect to an inflationary collapse. We’re going to pick his brain about how’s this whole thing look.
Brian: Fantastic. Let’s jump right to it. Ladies and gentlemen, as Bill said, this morning a very special guest. If you are familiar with American Vision, his website, he’s terribly popular on Facebook. You’ve probably – if you’re linked to our Facebook account, no doubt you know of American or the American Vision on Facebook as well. WE have the great pleasure of having this morning – for the entire hour, which is cool, Bill, as well – Bojidar Marinov. Bo says he’s from Texas, Bill, so we can call him Bo. He’s a Reformed missionary to his native Bulgaria for over a decade now. Bo preaches and teaches doctrines of the Reformation and comprehensive biblical world view. You know, Bill, I was going to be a huge fan right out of the box when I learned that he is active in the formation of the Libertarian movement in Bulgaria and co-founder of the Bulgarian Society for Individual Liberty. He was also its first chairman. So, ladies and gentlemen, say hello and good morning to Bo Marinov. Bo, how are you sir?
Bo: Good morning. Good morning, Brian. I’m fine. How about yourself?
Brian: I think we’re both doing good. We’re excited to have you on for the full hour and let’s jump right to it. We’ve got a lot to learn from you. We were talking, just as we got ready to kick off the show, Bo, about the foundational principles of a debasing of a currency. What normally happens when we have a very special guest is the guest and Bill will start to talk and then I’m like “hold it, hold it, hold.” Or Bill will say to me “hold on, hold on, that’s a part of the show.” So I think what I’d like to do for our listeners that are just tuning in is have an opportunity to return to the discussion – when you and Bill kicked off this concept of the foundational principle of debasing a currency.
Bo: The first thing that I think we need to understand is a currency is only a sign of the health of a society. Currency has no value of its own. If we need to look at a currency, even gold, and a lot of people say there is a value – there is an intrinsic value of gold – well, no. Gold doesn’t have intrinsic value. Gold has only as much value as people put into it and only as much value as we can exchange it for. A lot of people believe that having more money is going to solve their problem – they can go out and buy more stuff – and therefore they request the government to print more money and give us more money. But what most people don’t understand, even in this country, is it’s your productivity, your absolute value, your intrinsic value that matters. If you’re only as productive as to give a value to the society of let’s say three gallons of gas an hour, that’s what you’re going to get back. If the government prints out more money and gives you more money, then the market is going to increase the value of a gallon of gas until it gets to the point where you still get three gallons of gas for that work – for that one hour of work. When the government debases currency, what it does – it actually plays with something that has no intrinsic value and it doesn’t help anybody because the absolute value of humans is not increasing or it’s not decreasing. But it only confuses them because most people don’t understand the basic principle – it’s your intrinsic value, it’s not intrinsic value of the currency. Christian societies have always understood that tampering with money, tampering with gold and silver and any kind of money, is anti-Christian, anti-God, because the government tries to play God. Tries to produce … that’s why all the Christian societies have been formally on gold. Look at the Byzantine Empire – it was a Christian empire for 800 years, they were on a firm gold standard, and they never had economic crisis. They had military crisis. They had never had economic crisis. Look at the West, especially Britain and the whole European civilization and America between 1750 and 1911. The whole European civilization was firmly on gold and silver standards, even though there was not a government compulsion in any of this. We had the industrial revolution and we had all this amazing growth because people could trust the money and therefore they could increase their own productivity. They can increase their productivity without having to wonder – is that dollar valued the same today as it is going to be tomorrow and so on? So when we focus on the fact that the economy’s about the absolute value of humans and not about the value of the currency, then we understand what the government’s trying to do. It’s trying to confuse us. It’s trying to focus – to make us idolaters to a currency rather than looking at humans and their value in the economy.
Bill: Bojidar, let me ask you a question first, before we too much further. Early on in the Bible, you have Moses – Leviticus, Deuteronomy, but especially in Leviticus – God through Moses stipulating honest weights and measures. So we have this idea of weights – we have this idea of silver and gold being weights. That theme constantly, throughout the Bible, especially in the Old Testament and into the New – it’s probably one of Isaiah’s best-known prophecies where he’s talking about … he’s using metallurgical devices. He’s saying “your silver becomes dross.” Let’s go back earlier yet and say – but what happens? This principle of nations, of the state, of the individuals, whatever it is – who want to debase a currency – this is not something new. This is something that’s been going on a long, long time, whether it’s coin clipping … but we even see it true whether it’s being used as a metaphor … I guess what I’m fascinated by, and I wanted to get your perspective, is Isaiah wouldn’t use this example of silver becoming dross if it wasn’t something familiar to the people. So they must have known that this was a pretty – this thing goes on, right? You use fire, you get the base metals out of it and you’ve got pure silver left. We see some New Testament analogies with that too where we’re tested by fire. But we get rid of the base metals with fire. He must have used – when he talked about that – he must have been very conscious of the fact that this was on the minds of the people 750 BC or so. Talk a little bit about this going on early on. What is it about man? Why do we want to do this?
Bo: The reason is … we need to understand that debasing a currency is closely related – it’s got a religious foundation. That religious foundation is idolatry. Of course idolatry has been with mankind forever, since Adam and Eve. The normal, practical applications of the religious sin of idolatry is trying to do all these things of debasing value – debasing God’s value. When people try to debase currency, what they’re trying to do is play God. People have been trying to play God throughout all history. That’s why we had the flood and that’s why we had the Tower of Babel and that’s why we had Sodom and Gomorrah. Yes, it’s normal that depraved people – people that are idolaters – will try to debase currency too.
Bill: But Bojidar, here’s the striking part for me and the part that really probably has me more concerned. This is obviously a part of God’s Word, right? Dishonest weights and measures – it’s obviously a part of what God would require of us. It’s stealing. It’s part of the eighth commandment.
Bo: Exactly.
Bill: How could a preacher spend his entire life preaching and never touch on what our responsibilities would be before God? Most people listening to this – maybe some, I know you’re coming a little more from the Reformed perspective – we’re going to run to a commercial break here and when we come back I want to get your perspective on how can someone preach an entire lifetime in a lot of mainline denominations and not ever touch the subject of inflation, of stealing, of debasing once. We’ll be right back. We’re going to go to a commercial break. We’ll be back with Bojidar Marinov right after this.
[0:10:56 – 15:08 break]Bill: And we’re back. It’s Bill Heid, talking with Bojidar Marinov. We’re talking about – just before we left for the break, we were talking about the idea is – how can a preacher preach an entire lifetime and never touch … what’s happened to the preaching in this country and other countries in Europe? Why doesn’t this ever get touched upon?
Bo: One reason is the church has allowed dualism to creep into its theology. When I say dualism, that means philosophically that is a belief that you have two different worlds, with two different sets of values, two different sets of laws, working for the two worlds. In the church today, we’ve got this dualism between what’s sacred and what’s worldly. There are church ministers today that believe that the whole world outside of the church is subject to different rules. Therefore, they … and these rules are not found in the Bible. If you ask preachers, they say the Bible has answers to all questions but then when you ask them “what about this question?” He says “well, these questions – we’re not allowed to ask.” We have a dualistic mindset – dualistic and sometimes openly dualistic ideology in the churches. Some of these preachers have been taught in seminaries – actually, there’s a very good article today on American Vision about seminaries. They’ve been taught in seminaries that we as pastors and preachers – we only tackle problems of the church and maybe Christian family, Christian life. But we don’t worry about the world outside of the church because that is subject to different sets of laws that are not found in the Bible. Now, if you go to the American colonies, right prior to the revolution and even after that, you will see preachers didn’t believe that. In fact, preachers did preach on economic issues. They did preach on inflation, they did preach on debtors and creditors – that’s one of the famous sermons of Cotton Mather on the debtor and creditor – “fair dealings between debtors and creditors.” You’ve got all the churches today, the pastors just don’t believe that the world is subject to God and to God’s law – the world outside of the church.
Bill: Do you think then, and this is kind of a scary question in a way, Bojidar – do you think that these pastors who are silent are culpable in any way? Does their silence make them guilty the way Isaiah talks about unjust judges? Is there a sense in which just your silence … do you remember Martin Luther, where he talked about “if I rail about this and that in the Bible, but I forget to make an application of the very thing in front of me, that I’m walking away from it all” – do you feel that at all with what’s going on today in contemporary circles?
Bo: I do feel like that. I do feel that silence is culpability when it comes to pastors. You can always excuse silence in people who are not in a leadership position, but a pastor is not allowed to be silent. A pastor is not allowed to leave any part of God’s world outside of the jurisdiction of the biblical law. They’re not allowed to be … they’re culpable, yes, I agree.
Bill: You talked a little bit about Cotton Mather. Certainly, if anyone reads the foundational documents of this country prior to the revolution, and if they read the sermons that are available, read just the letters that went back and forth of the Colonial period. They’re going to find that preachers made applications. Let’s talk about some of the monies and what was going on. How were these applications made in early Colonial America, Bojidar?
Bo: When you look at the economy – first of all, I need to recommend to your listeners a book that was written back, I think, in the 60s – a book by John Chamberlain, “Enterprising Americans.” I don’t think John Chamberlain wrote it from a Christian perspective. I would think he wrote it from a libertarian conservative perspective, rather. But the book is full with clues to how the Christian faith of those enterprising Americans in the early Colonial days and later was fundamental to their enterprise. Anyway … the United States and the colonies, at the beginning, were different from what the Spanish colonies had in Mexico or the Portuguese in Brazil, because there was no gold and silver here. Remember that all those kings in Europe, they would send out expeditions to find gold and silver. Now, most of the people that led the expeditions had other ideas in mind, like Columbus was an evangelist before he was anything else, but he knew that the king and the queen wanted gold. He didn’t find any gold but later in the Spanish colonies they found a lot of gold and silver. We know about the Mexican silver peso that became the first global currency. But the American colonies didn’t have that. In fact, there was no species here in the colonies. There was no species at all. You look at Paul Revere, who was the most famous silversmith – after the revolution he went from silver to copper and iron because – I don’t know all the reasons but one of the reasons may have been there was no silver in the colonies. There was no gold in the colonies. There was no business for him. The question is, that lack of money – that lack of silver and gold – did it make the American colonies, and there was not a lot of British currency on this side of the Atlantic because they had to pay taxes and it all went to England. Later on they didn’t pay the taxes but they were still not gold and silver. How did they make a living? The interesting thing is, at the time, there was no government in the American colonies. There was no government regulation of any kind of money, any kind of currency. Nothing. And yet, people prospered. How did they do that?
Bill: That’s a great question. Can I interrupt here for a second and ask you – when they got these charters from Charles – or Charles II – when they got the charters, was there nothing in there about what sort of currency or specie was going to be utilized?
Bo: I am not sure there was. I’m talking about later – the colonies later. The beginning they didn’t know what they were going to encounter here. Some of them did come to find gold and silver but there’s no gold and silver in the Appalachian Mountains. They couldn’t find anything here, in the Appalachians.
Bill: So what’d they do?
Bo: The first thing is they were free to decide what they want to use as a currency. Some of them have never seen gold and silver – maybe silver, but some of them have never seen gold. That’s why we have today the name of one of our coins is – what? Nickel. That’s what they used. They used nickel. They used copper as currency. But they started creating currencies out of nothing. They used those currencies to – tobacco notes, they used the Indian wampums – you know what the wampum is? That clam shell that is found on the Chesapeake Bay that the Indians made into some kind of – they looked like rosaries. They used those. In fact, there were cities in Virginia that established their taxes – the payment of taxes to the city or to the township – in wampums. Later on they found out that tobacco had a cash value so they paid with tobacco. The Episcopal Church or Anglican Church preachers got paid in tobacco notes. In fact, tobacco notes were used as late as 1860 down in Brazil and on the Caribbean islands. They were leftovers from the American tobacco notes. They were used down there in the Caribbean and in Brazil as legitimate money.
Bill: That’s really fascinating, Bojidar. We’ve got about a minute here before the break. I’ll get a quick comment from you. We said they sort of made things up, but there was something that undergirded whatever it was that they made up. I think it would be remiss of us to pass that up before we move on because it lets people say “they just made things up. Ben Bernanke can make things up as well.” We’re going to run to a short break here and then what I’d like to do is have you talk about, as we move into the next segment, what’s the difference? What undergirded their theological beliefs that allowed them to create some kind of trust bridge? Let’s talk about that a little bit. This is Bill Heid. We’re talking with Bojidar Marinov about money in early America. We’ll be right back after this break.
[0:24:48 – 0:28:58 break]Bill: We are back! It’s Bill Heid today, talking with Brian and Bojidar. Bojidar, before we left we were talking a little bit about what goes on – is there some kind of trust bridge that needs to … can a person print … start exchanging money? Let me phrase it different. If you have a culture that lives and breathes fraudulently, and everybody’s out to cheat each other, can you just start writing IOU on a piece of tobacco and will that work as a currency?
Bo: No. Of course it won’t. I’ve seen that happening in Eastern Europe and it just doesn’t work. In fact, we’ve seen it happening here with subprime loans and so on. People go to the bank and the bank gives them loans for pretty much nothing and no collateral. Later on, the banks find out that these people can’t pay. The same thing would have happened in the American colonies if there was not a single thing that made it not happen and that was the underlying Christian faith of those colonists at the very beginning. People will tell “you can have trust with other religions …” Well, no, we don’t see the same thing in the Muslim world, we don’t see the same thing in India or in any pagan cultures. It’s only in a thoroughly Christian culture that you can have this trust between people and know that people are not going to abuse that trust by having this free money like tobacco notes and wampums and so on. That’s what we had in the American colonies. That’s what nobody else in the world had. Maybe Europe, during the Middle Ages, but there was still a lot of gold there and not a lot of fiat currency. In America it was able to work only because of the underlying Christian faith of the colonists. One thing you need to understand about America that most Americans don’t realize – anybody who comes to America is shocked at the beginning by one thing that you guys take for granted – this is writing personal checks. I was so surprised. My first reaction was “they just write a number on a piece of paper and they sign it and everybody takes that for money?” You’ve got to understand, it’s a leftover of that Christian faith and the underlying Christian foundations of this society. There’s no checks in Europe.
Bill: The other thing that is important is – you’re in a unique position, Bojidar, to say what happens when that Christian culture breaks down? And then what happens – you’ve gone through an inflationary collapse, currency destruction – what did that look like when people don’t trust each other? Give us a little historical narrative about your own life and where were you at, what time in your life, and how did this happen, how did it affect … to arm our listeners for this inevitable collapse that’s coming to our country.
Bo: What happens is eventually people get to a point where nobody wants to produce because producers are not … a producer works for a profit, let’s face it. There’s no socialist producer in the world, not even Michael Moore. Michael Moore works for a profit, believe it or not. And everybody who produces something – I’m not saying that Michael Moore’s productions are worth anything but he works for a profit too.
Bill: He produces … what does he produce though? He produces anti-profit profitable – he produces profitable anti-profit products, right?
Bo: Yeah. And he keeps the profits.
Bill: And he keeps the profits. It’s amazing. Only in America can there be a market for that. Only in America can you sell that product.
Bo: Exactly. People in Europe are laughing at him. Anyway … or laughing at us here that we allowed Michael Moore to actually make $14 million on only one of his movies. Anyway … producers produce for a profit. The profit can be calculated in some kind of currency. If the population is forced to use a certain kind of currency, but that kind of currency cannot give you the ability to calculate your profits or losses, then a producer doesn’t want to produce because it’s not worth the effort to – it’s not worth the hassle to produce and to put goods on the market when you don’t know if you’re going to make profit on it. When actually, to keep the profits sometimes requires more effort and more expenses than the profit itself. You get to a point where the government – the government debases the currency, and I’ve seen that happen, and producers just don’t want to produce anymore. They say “we’ll wait till this madness is over,” and there’s less and less goods on the market, more and more money poured in the market, less and less goods. Guess what happens? People eventually end up with a lot of money in their pockets, number-wise, but they can’t buy anything on the market. I’ve seen that too. And I’ve seen when people go wait in long lines just to buy simple, basic necessities of life. They start blaming the capitalists and they start blaming the companies and the corporations. But the truth is, nobody produces if they’re not sure they’re going to make a profit and you can’t blame the producers for not working when they are not sure of profits.
Bill: So what happens to – let’s look at a grocery store, for example – and people at some point say “I don’t know …”– this could be true at the distribution level or the farm level – it just doesn’t pay to produce this anymore. What happens to shelves? You have this inflationary currency but do the shelves start to become empty after a certain period of time because everyone’s got this joint idea?
Bo: They do. They do start to become empty. And America hasn’t seen that yet because of the momentum. I would say it’s not even the momentum, it’s an inertia of the past. We can start seeing it happen, even in this country. Even in this country, you can see in many situations where the choice is not that big, especially where you have government regulations. For example, it can easily be seen in medical care. It can easily be seen in medicine and drugs, and the reason is the government controls it. Because the government controls, the producers are not sure they’re going to make enough profit on it. People ask me “why are the doctors so expensive?” Because there are less and less of them. That’s the same thing. The doctors are not – if you’re not sure you’re going to make profit as a doctor you don’t become a doctor. Therefore the few remaining doctors are more and more expensive. That’s what we’re going to see. That’s what’s happening in Britain and I think we’re going to see it here as well. It’s the profit that drives those people to offer their goods and services.
Bill: And Bojidar, just so the folks listening understand how important it is to say “that can never happen here,” the price of oil goes up and what’s the first thing Obama does? What’s the first thing he does? He wants to investigate the buyers and sellers of oil. Now, we might do another show on whether they’re subsidized or whether those profits are made without government interference and so forth, or there’s fascist elements with respect to the oil companies. But what I’m saying is, the first impulse that this administration has is to attack the producers, right?
Bo: That’s what the first impulse of all socialist governments in Europe is too.
Bill: So that happens – and he’ll probably – we’ve got another year or so of him, but he’ll probably start to do that when we see rising food prices. My guess, Bojidar, is he’ll attack the food producers, right?
Bo: … the food producers.
Bill: Yeah. And then what will the response – in Bulgaria, after the food producers get attacked, do they just go away then?
Bo: Every food producer produces only enough to feed his own family.
Bill: And that’s a prescription for rising prices and empty shelves, is it not?
Bo: I’m not exactly sure if that’s going to be a prescription. That is a prescription to protect yourself from putting effort and money into something that not’s going to produce anything back. But I would say extreme individualism in this case probably is not the solution. I would say what’s much better is to have communities that are organized along these lines of helping each other. Sometimes even having their own currency within the community where people will have different gifts and, in fact, reproduce a bigger society on a smaller level where people can take advantage of each others’ gifts and skills and ideas.
Bill: Bojidar, let me interrupt you. We’re going to go to a little commercial break. But it’s a perfect place to go to a break because when we come back, let’s talk more about solutions. What are some solutions you’ve seen before? What are some solutions that folks here in this country need to at least start to be thinking about so that we can survive on the far side of this crisis that’s coming. Again, this is Bill Heid, talking with Bojidar Marinov, and we’re going to be talking when we come back about solutions to the currency crisis.
[0:39:34 – 0:43:47 break]Bill: Hey everybody! We are back and we’re talking with Bojidar today about preparing for maybe what could be the worst – we’re talking about what’s the other side of a currency crisis looks like, Bojidar. Do you want to pick up where you left off with respect to – what do we do? What did you do … what happened in Bulgaria and maybe you want to delineate between the mindset of the average Bulgarian and the mindset of the average American, so we don’t think … maybe there’s some distinctions that need to be made there. But what got you by in Bulgaria when they inflated your currency out of existence? And what’s going to get us by?
Bo: The good thing about the crisis in Bulgaria, and there’s a blessing in every curse that God brings on a nation. It really brought many families together. I would say it bridged that generational gap. In some places, people were forced to go back to their parents and grandparents and so on to survive economically because only in a small community where somebody’s producing one thing and another person is producing another thing, and the trade is really based on the worth of what a person is producing, not on what the government is telling you that the money is worth, people can survive. So what you could see – and today in Russia – you can see the same thing in Russia. In fact, in Russia some villages – what I know, some villages and some local communities survive without having any interaction with the world outside of them – it’s huge distances there – only because they have local people help each other to survive in situations like economic crisis and depression and currency crisis. I think that it can happen to America too. Now, is there something different between Bulgaria and Americans? I tell you what, everybody’s pretty much the same mentality – down to the same mentality in times of crisis. They try to find solutions. I think Americans will start looking for solutions when … even today we see those solutions really working out in many places. One thing is, the gold standard is back, whether the government admits it or not. Look at gold. It’s $1500 an ounce. People go to gold and they don’t trust dollars anymore. But they will start trusting their communities more and more when they see that the government can’t give them any solution. That’s what happened in Bulgaria. That’s what happened in Eastern Europe. People would go back to local. People would go back to their extended family. People would rely on their extended family for getting what the grid does not give them, what the system does not give them. This crisis of trust in the system necessarily translates in trying to find solutions in the smaller community. I think Americans are, even with all the atomization of the family here and of the community, Americans are going to start looking for solutions here. Do you know what’s even better? It’s that it is the Christians who are in a better position than everybody else because we can trust each other.
Bill: As long as … yes, as long as the word Christian means the same thing and we don’t have Isaiah’s situation where the idea of even the word Christian becomes debased in and of itself. You’ve got an issue there. But I wanted to ask you also, Bojidar, because you’ve got a really unique perspective on this, and I think it’s similar to mine – you’ve got a corrupt society and now I think what you’re going to hear is cries at some point, when this thing really hits full bore, cries to back the currency that we now do have with gold. But why should I trust a bunch of politicians and bureaucrats who basically are ripping off widows and orphans, as well as everyone else, now to back it. Won’t they do through that dross thing all over on a new cycle after they get our attention – say “we’re going to back the currency with gold” – and then won’t they just cheat us again? How about The Who song – do they have The Who “Won’t Get Fooled Again” in Bulgaria? How many times are we going to get fooled?
Bo: [laughs] You remember the Continentals? The War for Independence? They were officially backed by gold and silver.
Bill: I didn’t know that though.
Bo: Yes. They were officially backed by gold and silver.
Bill: I know the phrase “not worth a continental” was part of the joke that’s becoming similar to what our dollar’s worth, but I didn’t know that was backed. That’s a great example.
Bo: Look at it. It’s politicians saying it’s backed by gold and silver and then you can trust politicians to be politicians. What did they do? They started printing more and more of them and eventually the farmers said “enough of it. We don’t want any of this. You pay in gold and silver. Real gold and silver.” And George Washington was wondering “what’s going on?” Until he found out that in fact those continentals backed by gold and silver were not backed by gold and silver because somebody in Philadelphia was tampering with it, was playing with it. We can see the same thing in Virginia and any other state that decides to go to currency. The solution is not to go to a currency that’s backed by gold and silver officially by a government, whether it’s federal government or state government. The solution is let people decide what they want as a currency. Sometimes they will go barter, sometimes they will make their own notes that they trust, sometimes they will use gold and silver. There’s enough gold and silver today to replace any kind of fiat currency. The solution is liberty. Always.
Bill: But at the end of the day, Bojidar, aren’t you also talking about the ultimate currency? Really at play, and you can name it anything you want, you can put a picture on it or disguise it, but the ultimate currency is trust, because isn’t that what all these things are about? You have to find a community where that trust element is mutual. If you start going to communities outside where “well, our ultimacy’s different than your ultimacy, so our trust level is different than your trust level,” then you’ve got some real problems. So I really like what you’re saying about coming back to a community where people know each other. You can look at somebody in the eye and say “here’s this piece of gold, I want my quarter calf” or whatever it is you’re going to buy. When you revert to community, you’re reverting geographically backwards, aren’t you? But it’s almost necessary.
Bo: Absolutely. We need to go back to local. In fact, American Vision started a project on reclaiming your county rights as over state rights and that’s a right more to the local. One thing that we don’t know about the United States between 1780 and 1850 was that power was based in the local communities. It was local counties that collected the taxes and taxes trickled up to state level and then to Federal level. It was a local community. Today, Switzerland – in 1848 they basically adopted the American Constitution making just a few changes. Today, Switzerland is a nation like this. They’re a locally based nation. They do not have a strong federal government and they’re all local communities-based. That’s why Switzerland has been able to prosper all these years.
Bill: Bojidar, you need to keep – you’re a great writer – you need to keep writing about these things. Keep providing people with ideas. Our friend, Tom Woods, constantly talking about the 10th amendment and taking it to the states’ level, but I think you’re also – that needs to be done, by the way, simultaneously – but you’re also pushing the envelope towards smaller and smaller units. You mentioned the family getting back together. And now the community getting back together. I think that’s really exciting. I think there’s a lot of stuff that you can develop – a lot of written materials, encouraging and inspirational materials, that you can provide over at American Vision to help us along the way with that regard.
Bo: We’re working on that. Also, if you look, we already have some solutions on a local level and homeschooling is a perfect example of that. Remember, 40 years ago, quite a few of those educational experts would say homeschooling wouldn’t work because it cannot take advantage of the big system where all the knowledge and money is pulled in and children can benefit from it. What do we have today? We have those that are products of the public school system are functionally literate and we have homeschooled kids educated on a local level – how much more local can you go than a family? And they’re excelling in everything. That can happen in every other area as well.
Bill: I’ll give you a real-life example of that. In the church that you’re going, one of the elders has some boys that are taking some economics classes – you may know who this man is. Someone was telling me in church, by the way, that they’ve CLEPed out of a lot of classes at the freshman maybe sophomore level. They’re talking with upper level economics and they won’t even – this is at a major college in Alabama – they won’t even let these boys answer in class, and these are homeschooled boys, until everybody else gets the answer – has a chance at it – because otherwise these guys would answer every question that the professor had. There’s a rule in class that these boys can’t answer until everyone else has had their turn. It’s like they’re handicapping in college at the upper level, in economics of all things, they’re handicapping the public school kids because they understand what’s going on with these homeschooled kids. It’s fascinating to me.
Bo: Absolutely. And if we can have solutions on that level, we can have solutions on any other level.
Bill: Well, I couldn’t agree, Bojidar, and I think we’re running out of time. I just want to say thank you. Thank you not only for being on our show but thank you for your work. And thank you for all of your writing you’re doing over there at American Vision. Folks can go to the American Vision website and check out your work. Do you have any final comments that you’d like to leave for our listeners today?
Bo: I want to say this, I’ve seen a lot of pessimism among even Christians and Libertarians in this country. Some of them say we’re not going to see a lot of improvement in our lifetime. Some of them are pretty afraid of what the government can do. I only can say this – I’ve seen communism fall and communism had all the guns and it had all the food and it still fell, because it couldn’t fight against realities. What I can say is what we’re up against is much weaker than we imagine it to be and it will fall too.
Brian: Ladies and gentlemen, you’ve been listening to Bojidar Marinov, along with Mr. Bill Heid, we’re going to go ahead and say goodbye now. As always, thank you for listening to Off the Grid Radio. Be sure to email us with your questions, your comments, your critiques at [email protected]. You can find us on Facebook as always as you can Bojidar himself. You can find us on Facebook. Our Facebook address is Facebook.com/offthegridnews. And, of course, you can follow us at Twitter @offgridnews. On behalf of everyone here at Solutions from Science and Off the Grid News, we know a valuable time of your day is a full hour. We thank you so very much for spending that hour here with us.
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