Real Money for Mexico

by Eric Englund

"Concern for man himself and his fate must always be the chief interest of all technical endeavors... In order that the creations of our mind shall be a blessing and not a curse to mankind. Never forget this in the midst of your diagrams and equations." ~ Albert Einstein

Bill Gates and Warren Buffett certainly enjoy basking in the headlines related to their joint philanthropic endeavors as undertaken by the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation. An integral aspect of this foundation’s mission is to provide financial services to the poor including loans, insurance, wire transfers, and savings accounts. Along these lines, Muhammad Yunus and his Grameen Bank were jointly awarded the 2006 Nobel Peace Prize "…for their efforts to create economic and social development from below. Lasting peace can not be achieved unless large population groups find ways in which to break out of poverty. Micro-credit is one such means." Perhaps, someday, Messrs. Gates and Buffett will similarly find themselves to be Peace Prize laureates. However, all of the global economic development efforts of Muhammad Yunus, Bill Gates, and Warren Buffett may be for naught if Hugo Salinas Price and his Mexican Civic Association for Silver are not successful in bringing honest money back into circulation in Mexico; thereby, providing a model for the rest of the world to follow.

On the surface, Muhammad Yunus’ vision of creating a poverty-free world is a compelling one – yet, it is fundamentally flawed in that he is promoting indebtedness instead of savings. His idea is not to provide charity to the poor but too provide small loans so that such borrowers can start small businesses, become self-sufficient, and pull themselves out of poverty. Here are his exact words, pertaining to providing credit to the poor, from an interview with the Nobel Foundation:

People come out of poverty every day. So it's right in front of us what happens and it can be done globally, it can be done more forcefully, we can organize more things to go with it, so this is something not theoretical…it's a very real issue. People can change their own lives, provided they have the right kind of institutional support. They're not asking for charity, charity is no solution to poverty…We didn't do anything special; lend money to the people so – but they never lent it to the poor people – all we did was we lent it to the poor people, and that makes the trick. That makes the change.

Debt promotion aside, what a wonderful message the Norwegian Nobel Committee has delivered to the world. There is, indeed, a connection between entrepreneurship, business, and peace. Entrepreneurs know that violent and hateful behavior, towards customers, pave the road to business failure. Consequently, peaceful and mutually beneficial relationships naturally emerge between business and customers. By putting money in the hands of the poor (via micro-credit), Muhammad Yunus desires to plant the seeds for prosperity one person and, typically, one family at a time. Where prosperity takes root, peace is bound to grow as well.

With money being a powerful human construct, it is important to understand that a moral dimension is bound up within money. What immediately comes to mind is the following biblical quote: "For the love of money is the root of all evil: which while some coveted after, they have erred from the faith, and pierced themselves through with many sorrows." What many fail to grasp is that money, which emerged spontaneously via the self-interested actions of individuals, allows for specialization and the division of labor. Accordingly, today’s vast array of goods and services never could have become available, to the masses, without the prior emergence of money. Hence, money (i.e. gold and silver) has served humanity well and should be viewed as having a positive moral dimension.

Does Muhammad Yunus, as reflected by the actions of his Grameen Bank, truly understand the positive moral dimension of money? Or does Yunus view money as a useful, therefore coercive, social-engineering tool? Jeffrey Tucker, in his essay Will Microcredit Save The World?, provides a most troubling answer – as demonstrated by the following excerpt:

The repayment tactics of Yunus are very disturbing. He assembles peer groups to lean on delinquent borrowers, and makes political-mental reconstruction a condition of the loans, which nowadays are taken out in order to repay previous loans and so on. His "Sixteen Decisions" that must be adopted by all borrowers read like a party platform for collectivist regimentation.

• "We shall take part in all social activities collectively"
• "We shall grow vegetables all the year round. We shall eat plenty of them and sell the surplus."
• "We shall build and use pit-latrines."
• "If we come to know of any breach of discipline in any centre, we shall all go there and help restore discipline."

Regardless of Muhammad Yunus’ noble intentions, burdening the poor with debt and "collectivist regimentation", in the long run, is more likely to deepen the problem of poverty than to solve it.

Notwithstanding the considerable defects of Muhammad Yunus’ vision of stamping out poverty, there is an American institution working at cross-purposes to his efforts. This institution is the Federal Reserve. Straight away, the morality of this institution should be questioned as it has been bestowed, by the U.S. government, the monopoly power to create money out of thin air. Such a monopoly power is tantamount to legalized counterfeiting; which benefits the very wealthy at the expense of the middle class and the poor. Murray Rothbard provides an excellent explanation as to the depraved consequences of the Federal Reserve’s practices:

What will be the consequences? First, there will be a clear gain to the counterfeiters. They take the newly-created money and use it to buy goods and services. In the words of the famous New Yorker cartoon, showing a group of counterfeiters in sober contemplation of their handiwork: "Retail spending is about to get a needed shot in the arm." Precisely. Local spending, indeed, does get a shot in the arm. The new money works its way, step by step, throughout the economic system. As the new money spreads, it bids prices up – as we have seen, new money can only dilute the effectiveness of each dollar. But this dilution takes time and is therefore uneven; in the meantime, some people gain and other people lose. In short, the counterfeiters and their local retailers have found their incomes increased before any rise in the prices of the things they buy. But, on the other hand, people in remote areas of the economy, who have not yet received the new money, find their buying prices rising before their incomes. Retailers at the other end of the country, for example, will suffer losses. The first receivers of the new money gain most, and at the expense of the latest receivers.

Inflation, then, confers no general social benefit; instead, it redistributes the wealth in favor of the first-comers and at the expense of the laggards in the race. And inflation is, in effect, a race – to see who can get the new money earliest. The latecomers – the ones stuck with the loss – are often called the "fixed income groups." Ministers, teachers, people on salaries, lag notoriously behind other groups in acquiring the new money. Particular sufferers will be those depending on fixed money contracts – contracts made in the days before the inflationary rise in prices. Life insurance beneficiaries and annuitants, retired persons living off pensions, landlords with long term leases, bondholders and other creditors, those holding cash, all will bear the brunt of the inflation. They will be the ones who are "taxed." (Italics in the original)

Here is a revealing article portraying how the Bank of England’s legalized counterfeiting, presently, is negatively impacting Britain’s middle class and its poor – unfolding exactly as Murray Rothbard elucidated above.

So, what is happening in the United States? Since the founding of the Federal Reserve in 1913, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, the U.S. dollar has lost over 95% of it purchasing power. Moreover, since President Nixon severed the dollar’s last tenuous link to gold on August 15, 1971, the dollar’s purchasing power has depreciated by 80%.

When one finally understands the immoral and pernicious tax that is inflation, is it any wonder that America’s rich are getting richer and the poor are getting poorer? Families in America, clearly, are struggling to make ends meet because the prices of goods and services are rising over time; directly due to the dollar's depreciation brought on by the Federal Reserve’s inflationary policies. Using a little bit of logic here, doesn't it stand to reason that it will be more difficult to climb out of poverty if the overall prices of goods and services are escalating continuously? This has international implications.

President Nixon’s August 15, 1971unilateral withdrawal, from the Bretton Woods Agreement, put the world on a purely fiat-money standard. Although Uncle Sam had essentially declared national bankruptcy, central banks across the world continued to use U.S. dollars as the reserve currency of choice – knowing full well that the link to gold had been obliterated. As long as the world’s central bankers maintained confidence in the full faith and credit of the United States, the international dollar-reserve system would remain in tact. And it has remained so.

With the discipline of gold, regrettably, having been expunged from the monetary system, the international dollar-reserve scheme has allowed for an explosion in the amount of fiat dollars created by the Federal Reserve. Alas, America’s leading export, as shown by the following table, is inflation itself. One must keep in mind that the classic, and proper, definition of inflation means increasing the quantity of money and bank notes in circulation and the quantity of bank deposits subject to check.

To think that reserves at central banks have gone from $56 billion, in 1970, up to nearly $4.6 trillion by 2006, is incomprehensible. Today much of these reserves are merely account balances represented by nothing more than abstract digits in a computer.

Per Alan Greenspan’s November 14, 2005 speech – delivered to the Banco de Mexico – he confirmed that approximately 60% of foreign exchange reserves were held in the form of U.S. dollars and 25% in the form of Euros. Although Europe is having some success in having its particular brand of fiat money accepted internationally, the United States is still the kingpin of exporting inflation.

With the dollar being accepted around the world, as a medium of exchange, the Federal Reserve’s irresponsible inflation of its own brand of money (the dollar) has dire international ramifications. Frank Shostak provides an apt description of what Uncle Sam is doing on a global basis:

Consequently, by means of money, which was created out of "thin air," …the counterfeiter can consume without any production. Note that the money here, which was created out of "thin air," is not supported by any production of useful goods or services. Or we can also say that here we have a case where nothing useful is exchanged for money and money is exchanged for useful things – nothing is exchanged for something useful by means of money out of "thin air."

He further states that:

It follows then that the diversion of real wealth from wealth generators to non-wealth generators by means of increases in the money supply is what inflation is all about. Or we can say that inflation is about the economic impoverishment of wealth producers, which is set in motion by means of inflating the stock of money.

Hugo Salinas Price is acutely aware that the United States is plundering the Earth’s wealth via exchanging dollars, created out of thin air, for tangible products manufactured worldwide. Mr. Salinas is one of Mexico’s leading businessmen and, over the past 55 years, has guided Grupo Elektra to become one of Mexico’s most successful business enterprises. He holds degrees from Wharton and ITESM as well as a law degree from the Universidad Nacional Autonoma de Mexico. Mr. Salinas, moreover, is a renowned monetary expert, in North America, and has spearheaded the movement to remonetize silver in Mexico. This is a man who has seen, first hand, how Uncle Sam’s profligate inflation can leave a country’s entire economy in shambles – this happened to Mexico in 1994.

Hugo Salinas Price’s essay, Why are the Americans Smiling?, cogently describes how the international dollar-reserve standard is little more than a wealth transfer scheme exploiting the poor and burgeoning middle classes the world over. He states the…

…U.S. has transferred its inflation, to the rest of the world, exporting it in the form of dollar reserves in Central Banks around the world.

When dollars arrive in foreign countries, the local Central Bank purchases the dollars in exchange for the local currency. More reserves equals more local currency. More currency means prices rise; as prices rise, cheap exports to the U.S. decline. The remedy: devaluation. Other countries must devalue their currencies in order to have the privilege of receiving papers from the U.S. Devaluation destroys local financial and productive systems, because in order to persuade local savers from exchanging their local currencies for dollars, interest rates, for instance in Mexican pesos, are raised. Mexico and Brazil are classic cases.

It is a curious fact that not one Nobel Prize winner has pointed out these extraordinary circumstances. The reason must be, that dollar reserves are such a gigantic tribute operation, that it is not convenient to point out these things. (Italics in the original)

Not only does this 1999 essay describe the economic carnage – caused by the Federal Reserve – in Mexico and Brazil, it is also applicable to other economic implosions during the 1990s. Think of Indonesia, South Korea, and Thailand.

As the 1990s melted away, more economic turmoil, caused by the dollar-reserve scheme, would welcome humanity into the new millennium. Argentina became another victim of America’s "gigantic tribute operation." Indeed, Argentina’s poor and middle classes would bear the brunt of the economic collapse and would suffer a financially devastating confiscatory deflation imposed by the very plutocrats who support a fiat-money system.

In his essay, What Really Killed Argentina?, Salinas skillfully exposes how the dollar-reserve standard gutted Argentina’s economy. To wit:

As most readers well know, the [Bretton Woods] Agreement was violated by President Nixon on August 15, 1971, when he "closed the gold window", and refused to continue redeeming dollars in the hands of foreign Central Banks, for gold, at any price.

With a dollar that did not have to be redeemed, as of 1971 the U.S. was free to expand credit out of nothing, and this expansion of credit resulted in conditions which led the American people to believe themselves superior in many ways, to the rest of the world.

As the years went on, credit – debt that is – kept expanding and this expansion of credit, led to more money in the hands of the public. The U.S. public proceeded to buy anything and everything the world had to offer, and send dollars in payment, to such an extent that today, dollars in the amount of some $400 billion a year, leave the U.S. to purchase goods and services, and even for the purchase of all sorts of assets all over the world.

The other side of this "exorbitant privilege" for the U.S., is a corresponding "exorbitant impoverishment" for the rest of the world.

It is essential to recognize that the U.S. trade deficit of $400 billion a year, is really a tax on the whole world, for the benefit of the U.S.

Imports are not really paid with dollars sent abroad. Imports are only actually paid with exports of goods and services. Since the U.S. has no intention of ever actually paying for present and past imports, with goods and services, and bringing back to the U.S. the immense amount of dollars sent abroad through its accumulated trade deficits, that yearly trade deficit amounts to a yearly tax on the rest of the world. The accumulated taxation extorted by the U.S., is huge…The measure of the taxation is the amount of Central Bank reserves – in dollars – which have built up enormously since 1971.

That is what really killed Argentina: U.S. taxation through the monetary system which prevails, and which allows the U.S. to buy things without paying for them.

The process of enriching the U.S. through this exaction of tribute – the correct word – is matched by a corresponding impoverishment of the rest of the world.

Five years after Salinas wrote this essay, Uncle Sam’s exaction of tribute has over doubled in size. For calendar year 2006, the United States’ trade deficit is expected to hit $866 billion.

Of course, this trade deficit mushroomed in conjunction with America’s housing bubble. As the housing bubble grew in size, courtesy of the Federal Reserve’s reckless creation of money and credit, millions of Americans borrowed against home equity to buy products manufactured the world over. Such Americans, in reality, grew poorer by going deeper into debt while Wall Street and the banking cartel cheered on while fostering a shallow American culture of debt addiction and mindless consumption. It is the very rich who truly benefit from the international dollar-reserve scheme; as they are the ones closest in proximity to the printing press.

Along these lines, Salinas has written poignantly as to the poverty and cultural rot fiat inflation (i.e. the printing press) has inflicted upon Mexico.

In cultural and human terms the use of simulated money has cost Mexico the disintegration of the institutions which have given shape to our nationality. The cultural and human stature of each Mexican has been severely reduced; we have all with no exceptions fallen into an endless race for survival. Simulated money is a merciless master who grants neither peace nor tranquility, and who imperiously and ceaselessly orders: "Work! Work! Work!" One hundred million Mexicans are submissive slaves of the system of simulated money.

Faced with a history of destruction of our culture, of our institutions and of the human dimensions of Mexicans, not to mention the impoverishment which has resulted from the devaluation of our currency, all attributable to the simulated Peso, the Central Bank remains supremely unconcerned; however, the consequences of abandoning real money in favor of simulated money are inevitable, not only for Mexico, but for the rest of the world as well, which is suffering the same destructive process. (Italics added)

There is an undeniable link between social decay and simulated money. Fiat inflation brings about economic instability, social unrest, chaos, and misery. In other words, fiat money creates social conditions completely antithetical to peace and widespread prosperity. Salinas, clearly, is profoundly aware of this.

Mexico is a poor country yet, paradoxically, rich in natural resources including a hard-working labor pool. Being a successful businessman, and a student of Austrian economics, Hugo Salinas Price understands that saving provides the foundation for capital accumulation and economic growth. As Ludwig von Mises stated:

The only source of the generation of additional capital goods is saving. If all the goods produced are consumed, no new capital comes into being.

Mises also said:

Capital is not a free gift of God or of nature. It is the outcome of a provident restriction of consumption on the part of man. It is created and increased by saving and maintained by the abstention from dissaving.

With the Mexican peso, however, being nothing more than a derivative of the dollar, there is little incentive for Mexicans to save their ever-depreciating currency – inflation encourages spending not saving. Such inflation hinders Mexico’s organic growth of business and industry. Inflation, additionally, as exported by the U.S. to Mexico, makes it more difficult for individuals and families to rise out of poverty. As mentioned above, it stands to reason that it is much harder to climb out of poverty when the prices of goods and services continue to rise due to Uncle Sam’s profligate inflation.

After Mexico’s economy tanked, in late 1994, Salinas was determined to find a means to protect Mexicans from the ravages of the fiat-dollar reserve scheme. Such a means, correspondingly, would encourage Mexicans to save; thus, providing a foundation for capital accumulation, entrepreneurship, job growth, and, thereby, planting the seeds for long-term prosperity and peace. After much thought, the answer was clear: Mexico must remonetize silver. This is why Salinas founded the Mexican Civic Association for Silver. He shares his thoughts, on the matter of remonetizing silver, in his essay Silver’s Three Flags:

Silver turned into Mexican money, circulating in parallel with paper money, no matter how insignificant the importance of that small amount of silver in the nation’s economy, means that Mexicans will always remember that silver can actually be used as real, honest money. And that as the years pass, it will always be there, inviting us to use it in the most dangerous and dark times that may come.

Silver in circulation will serve to remind us that it is possible for a society to use silver and benefit from the use of real money, honest money.

Otherwise, it is possible that we may forget this, as has happened to many nations in the world.

When Mexico monetizes silver, it will become a lighthouse of hope for the world, a light that shows the way out of the swamp of slavery and perpetual impoverishment that comes with paper money.

Paper money, which is today the only kind of money in the world, ensures economic and therefore political control over the populations that use it. The planet’s banking caste that issues paper money and virtual, electronic money, threatens to become the sovereign power through the fictitious money it issues, and aspires to dominate all humanity.

The outcome of paper money is the dehumanization of the human race.

This is silver’s third and most important flag: the cause of humanity.

Hugo Salinas Price’s plan, to remonetize silver in Mexico, is straightforward and workable. In his own words, here are the three key elements of his proposal:

1. The one troy ounce pure silver coin minted by the Mexican Mint, which is currently an official coin with certain quite limited legal tender characteristics, and which is one of the "Libertad" series of silver coins, will be selected as the coin to circulate in parallel with paper (fiduciary) pesos. This coin has no nominal value engraved upon it. This is an essential characteristic of any coin that is to circulate in parallel with paper money.
2. The Mexican Central Bank will issue a daily quote on the full legal tender value of the one-ounce "Libertad" coin, expressed in fiduciary pesos. At its quoted legal tender value, the coin is good for all types of payments, without discount of any sort.
3. The Mexican Central Bank will not reduce any quoted value of the "Libertad" ounce in fiduciary pesos, in any future quote. Successive quotes may stipulate a higher value in fiduciary pesos; or, there may be no change in a quote for a period of time; but in any case, there will never be a lower quote for the "Libertad" ounce.

For further details about his plan, I highly recommend that you read his essay How to Introduce a Silver Coin into Circulation in Mexico: The Hybrid Coin.

Due to his tireless efforts, Salinas played the pivotal role in seeing to it that a bill be introduced to the Mexican Congress with regard to remonetizing silver in Mexico. He did not stand alone with respect to this undertaking:

• Governors from all 31 Mexican states sent a letter to the Ways and Means Committee, of the Mexican House of Representatives, to urge approval of legislation to remonetize silver.
• Nearly 200 Mexican journalists signed a declaration in support of the legislation.
• A poll, by the Mexican television network TV Azteca, found that 96 percent of viewers approved of the idea to remonetize the silver ounce.

In spite of such popular support, Mexico’s Congress has yet to pass legislation to remonetize silver. To be sure, by thwarting the endeavor to remonetize silver, it is obvious that the U.S. is not the only country where wealthy elites care nothing for the working classes. Those Mexicans, who support the current fiat regime, do so for personal gain that comes at the monumental expense of fellow citizens.

Due to the depredations of the global fiat-dollar reserve scheme, the longer the Mexican Congress delays passing legislation to remonetize silver, the poorer the vast majority of Mexicans will become. Let’s look at just one glaring example. Mexico is the second-leading silver mining country in the world while also being a major player in gold production. In 2005, Mexico exported over $1 billion worth of gold and silver. Internationally, with gold and silver being traded in terms of dollars, Mexicans are trading valuable precious metals for Uncle Sam’s worthless paper tickets. To literally give away national treasure can only serve to further impoverish Mexicans.

Enough is enough. As Jose Alberto Villasana Munguia, vice president of the Mexican Civic Association for Silver, has stated:

At this time, money is the most important subject upon which it behooves us to reflect. Our civilization has arrived at a crucial point and we must carry out a correct diagnosis. Money is like the blood of society and that is why we are paying the consequences of its corruption. When someone can lie with regard to money, he can lie with regard to anything. If the basic unit of account is only a fiction, then the whole structure is unstable, with the gravest consequences imaginable.

It is not possible to carry out a full reform of the monetary system. False, fiat money will break down under its own falsity, but not without causing enormous damage to humanity in a collapse of a magnitude never before witnessed.

In Mexico we have a lifesaver with the opportunity to preempt the coming financial collapse through the introduction of the "Libertad" silver ounce into the Mexican monetary system. This coin possesses a value in itself, it does not depend on dollar reserves to be worth something. Its precious metal content prevents its devaluation and its official quote, adjustable upward, guarantees that it will never leave circulation.

We must use silver as a bridge, over which we may move forward from the fictitious economy to the real economy, by applying a fiat characteristic to the stability and real existence of the precious metal.

The entire globe must come to grips with the socially destabilizing fiat-money scheme perpetrated by the world’s central banks. Ever since the dollar ceased being backed by gold, there has been a global explosion of fiat inflation and debt; which are saddling countries, families, and individuals on every corner of the Earth. Muhammad Yunus is simply extending humanity’s debt affliction to the poorest people alive. Indebtedness can be a cruel master and has been known to tear families apart. Debt should not be considered a keystone of global peace.

Hugo Salinas Price, on the other hand, is not fooled by the debt-hawking, mathematical-economics wizards populating central banks. Due to his deep understanding of Austrian economics, he comprehends that not a single one of these wizards actually knows what the "correct" interest rate should be and what the "correct" money supply is. To be sure, central bankers can wow us with complex mathematical equations, diagrams, and impressive sounding jargon; all to continue justifying the stealthy process of transferring wealth, via fiat inflation, from the world’s poor and middle classes to the very wealthy. Hence, the technical endeavor, of central banking, is not to bless mankind with stable money (i.e. gold and silver) but is to eternally curse humanity with the pernicious tax that is fiat inflation and with debt slavery – remember, under a fractional reserve banking system, money is loaned into existence. Thank heavens Salinas, and his Mexican Civic Association for Silver, have the courage, and staying power, to stand up to the powerful plutocracy in Mexico – which kowtows to America’s moneyed elites. And, thankfully, Salinas has provided a roadmap, paved in silver, to get Mexico out of the mess the Banco de Mexico and the Federal Reserve have jointly created.

Thirty-two years ago there was a lonely voice, similar to my friend Hugo’s, imploring economists to stop the madness that is fiat inflation. The following is the opening paragraph of Friedrich A. Hayek’s lecture to the memory of Alfred Nobel, delivered on December 11, 1974, titled The Pretence of Knowledge:

The particular occasion of this lecture, combined with the chief practical problem which economists have to face today, have made the choice of its topic almost inevitable. On the one hand the still recent establishment of the Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Science marks a significant step in the process by which, in the opinion of the general public, economics has been conceded some of the dignity and prestige of the physical sciences. On the other hand, the economists are at this moment called upon to say how to extricate the free world from the serious threat of accelerating inflation which, it must be admitted, has been brought about by policies which the majority of economists recommended and even urged governments to pursue. We have indeed at the moment little cause for pride: as a profession we have made a mess of things.

Friedrich A. Hayek is the only Austrian economist to have won the Nobel Prize in economics. Alas, his courageous words have been ignored considering that central bank fiat-money reserves have increased nearly 8,000% since he delivered his Prize Lecture. Mainstream mathematical economists, undeniably, have chosen power and prestige over humankind.

In light of the mind-numbing fiat inflation produced by central bankers, Salinas no longer believes the world can be extricated from this monumental fiat-money mess. In his own words:

I do not believe that the world’s monetary and financial system can be reformed; any attempt at reform would decimate the world’s economic activity instantly. There is no alternative: we have to let the world’s monetary and financial system proceed to its own destruction; we cannot "go back to gold".

What we must therefore strive for, as possible, is the reintroduction of silver or gold – or even both – to circulate in parallel, along with the fiat paper money we presently use everywhere. Eventually, the world fiat money system will destroy itself through its own inherent defects. Humanity has selected gold and silver as money. No other metals or objects have served humanity as well. The precious metals will never be supplanted by fiat money. The fiat money time we are living in, is an aberration in an instant in human history which will soon pass.

Just like Hayek, Salinas is willing to speak truth to power. His endeavor, to remonetize silver in Mexico, towers above politically-correct, "world-improving" concepts such as giving away billions of dollars (Gates and Buffett) and loaning money to the poor (Yunus). America has become the world’s "mouth" and it is consuming/destroying capital at an alarming rate. Each day the dollar-reserve scheme survives, the world grows poorer. A highly successful businessman, such as Salinas, could simply ignore this fact, enjoy the substantial fruits of his labor, give some money to charity, and turn his back on the plight of Mexicans. Instead, this man of considerable courage, intellect, and wealth has chosen to confront Mexico’s plutocracy at great personal risk. No stakes are higher. For if the inflationists win, Mexico will continue down its path to utter destitution and social chaos.

Conversely, if Salinas’ silver remonetization plan is adopted, this will be akin to building a bridge from economic darkness (wrought by modern central banking), to a place where saving, capital formation, and entrepreneurship will allow prosperity to emerge from the ashes of fiat money. Salinas is keenly aware that prosperity’s silver lining is peace itself. Hence, the Norwegian Nobel Committee should take great interest in Hugo Salinas Price’s body of work, and personal sacrifice, as there is no greater advocate for peace on this planet.

To award the Nobel Peace Prize, to Hugo Salinas Price, will enhance the stature of the prize itself while sending the world a resounding message that sound money is a fundamental underpinning of peace.

January 9, 2007