I don’t normally write about myself. Please bear with me as I get something off my chest.

My field is monetary science. I focus on two areas. One is the pathology of the dollar, which is in terminal decline. The other is a free market in money, a.k.a. the gold standard. Science is a quest to discover new principles. I work on understanding the processes and mechanisms of both the failing dollar and the unadulterated gold standard.

One of the greatest satisfactions in my life is to identify something, work out what it is, obsess until I truly understand it, and then communicate it. For example, why we need an objective unit of measure of economic value and how we can recognize it when we see it.

This is what I have done all my life. As an early teen, learning to program on the Apple ][+, I developed a way to write floppy disks that could not be read by any copy program (copy protection was important in those days). I studied how the disk drive mechanism worked, and traced the inner loop of the commercial copy programs (alas I did not have the discipline to finish and commercialize it, or I should have made a lot of money).

At my last company, DiamondWare, I envisioned what 3D audio would sound like, what it would do for voice communications. I remember the day when we finally put together all the code to implement it, and I heard it for the first time. It worked! Later, I architected a scalable realtime audio server to provide this 3D voice experience to a massive number of people.

After selling the business (and spending several years at Nortel, and then at Avaya), I applied myself to monetary economics. The gold world has a benchmark called the Gold Forward Rate (GOFO). It is as important to gold-using businesses as LIBOR in conventional finance. It was published daily by the London Bullion Market Association until a few years ago. Everyone said it could not be calculated using only public market data. I developed a way to do it. We now update a daily chart of GOFO.

I have worked out what a modern, 21^st century gold standard will look like—and the path to get from here to there.

Without boasting, this is what I do.

So I must say the most frustrating experience for me is when someone denies my observation. What they are saying (without understanding what I am saying) is, “you didn’t see that.”

Obama infamously said “you didn’t build that.” It’s pure envy. He did not build anything, and says this to feel better about his own lack of achievement. When various and sundry alleged free marketers say “you didn’t see that,” they are trying to feel better about their own lack of vision. They hold to the conventional Quantity Theory of Money. Aside from being wrong, this theory does not encourage (or enable) seeing new phenomenon. It’s a dead-end.

Some of these folks are threatened by my seeing that, the way Obama is threatened by entrepreneurs who build that.

They have even tried to suggest that I am attacking Mises along with all economists. Sorry, guys, that’s not how science works. You do not get to deny an observation by such emotional appeal. You cannot just conjure up a picture of carnage, of economists slain by the dragon of a new idea.

Either I am right, or I am not. If not, show me where I made a mistake (which would first demand that you understand what I said). Failing to meet that standard, you’re just attacking what you don’t comprehend.

You cannot make me unsee something. Nor can you cow me into remaining silent. If there may have been a time when you could have marginalized me by browbeating my early audience with fear that if they follow my work they will be ostracized, that time is long past.

If what I say makes you feel uncomfortable, then it is not my sin. It’s all yours. It is you who ought to check your premises, oh you who would presume to utter “you didn’t see that” out of fear of seeing it for yourself. It is you who need to know why my ideas cause you such anxiety. If it were true that I saw nothing, and my work just rubbish, then you know that it would not vex you so.

And if you don’t want to know, if you don’t want to check your premises, and you don’t want to understand my ideas well enough to refute then, then you marginalize yourself. Monetary science is moving forward, whether you will or not.

I’ve got science to do, a business to build, and a world to help move towards the gold standard. What are the “you didn’t see that” crowd doing?