It’s a good week for currency cranks. I was working through some microfiched pamphlets from John Zube’s Libertarian Microfiche Project, trying to work my way through this “roll call” phase of my researches on mutual banking. I consider John a kindred libertarian-packrat, and I’m always finding little gems, usually with his notes attached, on fiche I picked up for some other text. How To Escape the Coin Monopoly (1895), published anonymously by the Equity Publishing Company of Oakland, California, is just such a gem. I won’t speculate right now on the authorship, but the sources are obvious and explicit. The short pamphlet rewrites Alfred B. Westrup’s revision of William B. Greene’s mutual banking plan, introducing the “product cheque” in place of the mutual bank bill. Equity Publishing Co. seems to have been affiliated with Egoism, a journal to which Westrup was a contributor.
The pamphlet contains the nth version of Greene’s proposal for a mutual bank. We really now have a pretty remarkable sample of such proposals. I’m contemplating a return to pamphlet publishing this fall, and the possibility of an anthology of these proposals is tempting.
