Anti-Gold and Anti-Silver in Argentina and Uruguay

Montevideo: Roturando Adelantas, 1915. Original purple-brown wrappers; 88pp (+ 1 loose leaf errata). In German. Ernst Frankfurth (? — 1916), close friend, South American travel companion, and co-author with Silvio Gesell (1862–1930). Frankfurth and Gesell shared political and economics beliefs, although Gesell lived longer and went on to write more about them. Their philosophy was: free land (that is, no private land ownership), free money (all money had a limited life-span and wasted or rusted away—this was the invention of negative interest rates), and free trade. The three F’s of Freiwirtschaft. See Item DXX of this List for more on that cool cat Gesell; and in general Part II of this List includes more items with a marked anti-precious metals stance. Little is known about Frankfurth. He moved to Uruguay after Gesell invited him on a trip to South America. There he remained until his death in 1916. This scarce publication, printed in Montevideo, is written in the form of 19 letters to an anonymous audience on the state of gold and silver as currency in South America. Frankfurth argues that it’s ludicrous to tie a nation’s wealth to digging a metal out of the ground. There is no reason the money supply should be tied to the vagaries of mother nature’s deposits. [“One has patiently endured the gold standard, even though it so often leads to unemployment, hunger, crime and misery… but when the nervous, cowardly gold money prevents the people from attacking their arch enemies… then, it will be thrown overboard!”] pg. 88. Frankfurth was no fan of gold and no fan of silver. In the United States, scarce, with less than a handful of university holdings per OCLC.