Besides learning how to perfect the art of pretense, one of the things that I learned after many years in academia was to always check my source. Well, here I am, your source for the authorship of Mount Cambitas - The Story of Real Money.

Let me begin by telling you that I do not have a Ph.D. in economics, but have been teaching undergraduate economics ever since I became a graduate student at the University of Oklahoma in Norman, Oklahoma in 1983. In fact, that I never received a Ph.D. is probably one of the best things in my life that I did not want, but happened to me anyway. For, by not obtaining a Ph.D. I evaded a trap that I would only discover through my own investigation many years later. This is not to say that I did not learn anything useful while I was in school. This said, obtaining a Ph.D., if you take the endeavor seriously, requires a great deal of focus for a prolonged period that leaves you as an expert in a very narrow field of study that might be as big as the universe, but viewed through an intense disciplinary filter that can potentially blind you to all else that is visible. In effect, you stop seeing the world as do most people. Further, in order to succeed as a holder of a Ph.D. you are under extreme pressure to perform research and publish papers that are acceptable to others who view the world through the same narrow focus as do you. Without these publications you simply cannot advance up the academic ladder.

As a teacher, in contrast, your judges are not your academic peers to whom you constantly cater in order to rise through the system; rather, they are your students who can be very critical of what they are being taught especially when it is not something that they have chosen to learn, but are compelled to endure, if they want their degree. Good students ask reasonable questions that demand commonsensical answers that when not provided can impede understanding. By its very nature the market place is a highly complex phenomenon that economists seek to understand through the creation of conceptual and mathematical models that greatly simply the world through a few common assumptions that are more easily accepted by some and not others. If the assumptions are easy to accept all of the rest is pretty easy to learn. And, if an assumption is not readily digestible, it is the job of the instructor to make it more palatable. Alas, making uncommon sense appear common sometimes forces a teacher to think outside of a box in which he was carefully trained and feels quite comfortable — the very same box that others view as alien and uninviting.

As a teacher of economics and the English language for my entire life I have lived in many boxes — mostly voluntarily, I have never been in prison for example — in eight different countries on three different continents (some would say four) including the United States in which I was born and grew up, as well as Germany (3 years), France (1 year), Japan (9 years), Hong Kong (7 years), South Korea (1 year), Thailand (1 year), and Saudi Arabia (4 years). My undergraduate degree from the University of Michigan (1971) was in anthropology — still another interest that began already while I was still in grade school, but that took off when I escaped military conscription during the Vietnam War due to my mother's medical due diligence. I had started out as an engineer keen on following in my father's footsteps. No matter, I protested against a war that I believed to be unjust, and America cried out, “Love it, or leave it”. I left, not because I did not love it, rather because the war made no sense, and I felt a little guilty for having not joined the war effort. At the time my family was severely burdened by a set of unforeseen crises to which I only contributed, and a job opportunity opened up that allowed me to escape the entire mess. What is more, I was very close to my father, am a first generation American on my father's side, and had the opportunity to visit his birthplace. That we not linger too long off the beaten path, else we will never make it to the summit.

Indeed, there was always a question that some student would ask that I never felt comfortable answering, and there was always a question that I never bothered to ask that was closely related to the question that I was always asked, but that I did not realize was related. It was this relationship that remained hidden to me for nearly half of my professional career until I entered into a highly poignant intellectual debate with a libertarian who believed himself to be a “free thinker”. My goal was to convince him that he danced around a fire just like every other believer of an intellectual, ideological, or theological persuasion different from his own. During this conversation he exposed me to a small piece of insight that lit a fire in the box that had always prevented me from answering the question that I could never answer and asking the question that I never asked. I barely escaped the conflagration. I was in Jeddah, Saudi Arabia at the time and employed as a lecturer at King Abdulaziz University. My interlocuteur was in the United States. My tears of joy put out the fire, and the sand began to blossom. For the next several years I read and read and read, and soon began to write, present, and even publish.

I started with Roger Garrison's book, Time and Money: The Macroeconomics of Capital Structure (2001). It served as a go-between for what I had learned in economics while a graduate student of economics at Wayne State University in Detroit, the University of Oklahoma in Norman, the University of Washington in Seattle, and Vanderbilt University in Nashville, Tennessee, and the Austrian school of economics which I had only read about in passing while studying the history of economic theory at OU (Go Sooners!). From there I delved into Ludwig von Mises's Theorie des Geldes und der Umlaufsmittel (1912) followed by Money, Bank Credit, and Economic Cycles (originally published in 1998 as Dinero, crédito bancario, y ciclos económicos)by Jesús Huerta de Soto. As both Garrison's and De Soto's work leaned heavily on that of Friedrich Hayek I followed up with Hayek's paper entitled “The Pure Theory of Capital” (1941). Hayek was the Tooke Professor of Economic Science and Statistics at the London School of Economics from 1931 to 1950.

The question that I never asked was now answered: “How did money come about?”. And, I now felt comfortable answering the question that I was always asked, but could never answer with any degree of confidence: “What brings about the economic business cycle?” But now, there was a new question: “Why had I never been taught what I had just learned while studying economics at four reputable American graduate schools?” Something was not right.

As there was a direct line from Ludwig von Mises (1881-1973) to Friedrich Hayek (1899-1992) to Murray Rothbard (1926-1995), I decided to read Rothbard's A History of Money and Banking in the United States (2002) and The Panic of 1819: Reactions and Policies (1962). But, America was not Europe, and American finance was built on the British model. That was still another unanswered question. How did this model come about?

By this time I had returned to the United States and had met the successor to Murray Rothbard -- namely, Hans-Hermann Hoppe (1949-present), a German immigrant to the United States and my age-mate. It was at an economics conference at the Ludwig von Mises Institute in Auburn, Alabama in early spring of 2015. Professor Hoppe lectured on “On Man, Nature, Truth, and Justice”, and I presented my paper entitled “Hayek's Triangle, General Equilibrium, and Keynesian Folly: A First Step in Bridging the Gap Between the Spanish-Austrian School and Mathematical Formalism” which I researched and developed while at King Abdulaziz University in Jeddah.

It was a fitting end to my several year love affair with the Austrian school. Indeed, I had completed the loop and formalized Roger Garrison's pictorial model of capital structure and turned it into a mathematical model.

Still inspired by my meeting with Professor Hoppe I read his work entitled A Theory of Socialism and Capitalism (1989) and honed in my understanding of property rights and the state. Accordingly, I was now ready for his critique of the democratic state and read Democracy: The God that Failed. Having spent the past five years in two very different kingdoms including Thailand and Saudi Arabia I was well prepared to read about the “God that failed”. So convincing was Professor Hoppe's argument that I was frightened. After all, unlike Professor Hoppe who grew up in Germany in the aftermath of the Second Thirty Years War (1914-1945), I had grown up in America.

Whereas America emerged from the war as the glorious victor of the “free world”, Germany, who had just seen its third empire destroyed, and who had witnessed only a generation before, as America and its European allies imposed their democratic institutions on half of Europe, was now buried in rubble. What is more, the Iron Curtain had since been torn down, and America was the proven victor over the world's most powerful socialist state.

It was time for review, and what better way to start than with Alexis de Tocqueville's two volume work entitled De la Democratie en Amérique (1835 and 1840). It was the story of what America was meant to be, and for nearly three-quarters of a century had actually become. De Tocqueville wrote during the Jacksonian Era before Lincoln's War of Consolidation (1861-1865) transformed America nearly over night. All the good and bad, and there has been much of both, that is America today can be traced back to the horror of that war and its devastating aftermath for nearly half of the reunited States of the North American continent. The war set America down the path of empire that America has since become. More importantly, perhaps, is the way in which it changed America's view about itself and the role of government in American society. My initial query in this latter regard began with Thomas D. Lorenzo's book entitled The Real Lincoln: A New Look at Abraham Lincoln, His Agenda, and an Unnecessary War (2002), but I did not stop there. My own primary research touched on areas even more revealing and pertinent to The Story of Real Money.

Reading De Tocqueville reminded me that America was once very different, and that she stood out in stark contrast with her European counterparts.

Indeed, I was not yet ready, as Hans-Herman Hoppe had done, to package America and Europe into the same theoretical box with a similar, but different historical ribbon. What is more, I had much to unpack of what had been written before Hoppe did his repackaging. My recent 27 years in Asia made it all the easier, because I could view America and Europe through a more objective lens. I began my investigation with French classic liberalism and read in addition to De Tocqueville some of the works of Frédéric Bastiat (1801-1850) and Gustave de Molinari (1819-1912) -- in particular La Loi (1850) and “De la Production de Sécurité” (1849), respectively. I completed my French inquiry with Qu’est-ce que la propriété? (1840) by Pierre-Joseph Proudhon (1809-1865). Lincoln's War of Consolidation had had a sobering impact not only on the way that Americans viewed the American state, but also on the way in which America was viewed by the world. Proudhon is often known as the father of anarchy. He denounced private property as the primary cause of all social conflict and set the stage for the writings of Karl Marx and others who promoted the communist ideal of a “heaven on earth”. In the end Marx would denounce Proudhon as ineffective and promote political revolution -- today's forerunner to DEI, critical race theory, the WOKE social justice warriors, the LBGTQ+ alphabet mafia, and the whole rest of the radical, “progressive” Left that would set us back several hundreds of years, if we actually followed in its footsteps!

It was also at this time that I read A Treatise on Political Economy (1803) by Jean-Baptiste Say (1767–1832) whom I call the father of supply side economics, as he clearly understood that in a real economy with real money it is the suppliers who create the income (demand) for the buyers who purchase what is supplied. His writing, like that of the Austrian School, is nearly completely ignored in today's economics textbooks that are designed to promote fiat money, statutory counterfeit, and the artificial demand created by the American state in cooperation with America's private banking cartel, their corporate friends, and everyone else who holds money-, as opposed to wealth-generating, interest-bearing bonds — America's top half.

My return to the United States in the early spring of 2015 was not what I expected. After some three decades overseas I had come home to dismantle the empire, and found a nation in crisis. The empire that I had experienced overseas was merely a symptom of a much larger problem. What is more, it was not only the United States that “were” in trouble. It was becoming apparent that the entire Western World had lost its way. Indeed, I had returned home, but it was a home that I no longer recognized. It were as if I were still overseas; I was a foreigner in my own nation.

We are often told to forget the past, to put it behind us, and move on. If by this is meant do not destroy your future by dwelling on past failures, then it is surely wise advice. If it means never look back when you cannot find your way forward, then it is surely ill-advised. Each step we make in life determines the next, and if we cannot see our way forward, then looking to the past is by far our best guide to the future.

We live in an age in which technology is advancing so rapidly and the competition to manage and control each new advance is so intense, that we have little time to look back. No one wants to be left behind. We have erred grievously as a result and have made the means the end.

Technology is a tool. It is something that we use to make it easier to achieve a particular task. It is the achievement of the task that is the end — not the tool. If our only purpose in life is to advance technologically in an effort to make easier the achievement of our ends, then we had better be very clear what those ends are before we commit ourselves to making easier the tasks necessary to achieve them. This is the rub.

What is the purpose of life? It is a question that many have stopped asking, and it is by far the most important question that needs to be answered, for it should be guiding everything else that we do. More importantly, it is not a question whose answer we should surrender to others unless, of course, we can trust them with all of our might — hopefully our parents, a few good teachers, a best friend, perhaps a local minister, a rare dedicated political leader, etc.

Following the herd is not always wise, unless you know who or what is guiding it. We used to rely on the media to keep us informed about who are leaders were and what they were up to. Today, most realize that the media has become a propaganda arm for our leaders, and that our true leaders are barely visible, if at all. These latter operate behind the scenes, while our elected leaders — those whom we see — are little more than puppets who tell us what we want to hear, but who answer to their largest donors. These latter are, of course, our nation's largest wealth holders and others, whose primary interest is their own — unlikely that of the American people whom are highly visible, elected leaders are suppose to represent.

The system has largely failed us, but there are important ways to correct it. Foremost among these is the reform of our nation's money supply.

Money is the lifeblood of our economic system. It is is the standard against which all other market value is measured, and it has been thoroughly corrupted. Because of its important role in any market economy, the corruption of our nation's money supply can be felt throughout all of American society and beyond. Indeed, it is the sources of this corruption — and there are several — that Mount Cambitas - The Story of Money is mostly about.

Fortunately, Mount Cambitas is much more than just another story, for it is a story with a solution. What is more, it is a story that integrates many important aspects of Western civilization and American society into a unique and highly functional world view developed over many years by someone who has spent a third of his life exploring the societies of others from the perspective of a highly educated individual with his feet on the ground.

Whether as a casual mountain visitor, an avid hiker, or a dedicated climber, I wish you a fulfilling journey that will answer many questions about how things have become what they are, and best of all how to reach the summit of a sincere and lasting, highly workable correction. Whereupon, you, like me, can shout it from the mountain top!

First Hill, Seattle, Washington