In 2015 I was confronted with an important decision: return to Thailand where I could surely find work as an English teacher or return to the United States and “confront the empire” where I knew my chances of finding employment were next to zero.
For the past three decades I had been slowly strangled on the world stage by the American credential’s industry, and had reached an age that made me unemployable in many countries. As I was tired of being treated as a second-class citizen for half of my life and did not wish to acquire still another foreign language and culture, I decided to return home and confront the empire. Surely three foreign languages and cultures, as well as small and large bits and pieces of several more foreign languages and cultures acquired in seven countries on three continents was enough!
I now had a pretty good ideas of what it meant to be a human being.
In the fall of 2021 Governor Inslee’s failure to lift his draconian lockdown protocol in the State of Washington was making my life miserable. By this time it had also become clear that there was something truly evil afoot in the United States of America and the world at large, and I was not about to sit passively by while it overwhelmed my free spirit.
I had just spent late spring and early summer of the same year translating, from German into English, a book about Christian persecution for a friend of a Christian friend whom I had known for many years. Although I learned a great deal about the history of the Christian church in Japan, translating the excruciating detail of the many tortures to which Japanese Christians were subjected aggravated my own mental anguish about being locked down in a country that was suppose to be a beacon of freedom for the entire world. Alas America had become just another socialist democracy, and it was no longer exceptional — just another empire waiting to fall.
Important in my decision to “confront the empire” was what I had learned in Saudi Arabia while teaching at King Abdulaziz University in Jeddah along the Red Sea. It was the answer to a question about market behavior that I was unable to answer during some six years of graduate training in economics at four American graduate schools including Wayne State University in Detroit, the University of Oklahoma in Norman, the University of Washington in Seattle, and Vanderbilt University in Nashville, Tennessee. What had I learned? A theoretical explanation of economic boom-and-bust cycles that did not depend on historical circumstance for its dynamic. The theory was as solid as the economic laws of supply and demand. In fact, it was only these that were required to explain the phenomenon — well, these and something that I have since come to know as statutory counterfeit that few are willing to call out for what it is — namely, national grand theft.
Indeed, during my nearly three-decade overseas sojourn my interest had shifted from the mathematical formalism of contemporary theoretical economics that explains both much and little, and that I now regard to be an academic diversion from the world’s corrupt financial industry. During these many transformative years I discovered the Austrian School of Economics and several of its most important authors including Ludwig von Mises, Friedrich Hayek, Murray Rothbard, Hans-Hermann Hoppe, as well as Jesús Huerta de Soto and Jörg Guido Hülsmann.
In an effort to lift my spirit I began tweeting about the nature of money online. My goal was to stimulate a discussion about statutory counterfeit. I did not even call it that at the time.
Soon I began noticing that my tweets were no longer gathering the same attention with which I started, but my content was getting better. Something was not right. Was it that many people are not very interested in money that they cannot earn? Do they really not care that they are being rippied off? Or, do they care, but believe that there is nothing that they can do about it? Or, was it that I was being shadow-banned because of other things that I had tweeted.
And then, I decided to write a collaborative book, left Twitter, and moved to Substack. The effort was barely collaborative, but I did not relent. I had decided.
The first draft of the book is now complete, and as promised AveVerum, my substack subdomain, is now a blog spot that I have entitled I’m American. The final online draft of my book, Mount Cambitas - The Story of Real Money, can be found at cambitas.spiritof2021.online. Nearly 50 percent of the book has been uploaded, and more pages are being added everyday. When it is complete, I will seek out a publisher and promote it in hard- and soft-back formats. Who knows, maybe I will even run for election as I promote it!
The book is written in a language and at a level understandable to most advanced high schoolers and college undergraduates. For the moment, everything is free, even though it says that it is not.
Although you still cannot read more than one page a day, you can choose the days and time of day that you would like online delivery in your email box. In the future I will make it so that you can read multiple pages at a single sitting. Already you can download the entire first chapter in PDF format.
If you would like to learn about Western culture through the lens of real money from someone who has a pretty good idea of how markets work and human society is constructed, then I invite you to make the journey up the slope of Mount Cambitas. The story of real money has been a very long struggle, and it is not yet over. What is more, We, the People of the United States of America, can bring it across the 100-yard line!
In liberty,
Roddy A. Stegemann, First Hill, Seattle 98104
Author of Mount Cambitas - The Story of Real Money