The Unofficial Lives of Public Money

by Will Beaman

Recent Money on the Left proposals for endogenous credit campaigns—like Unis or Blue Bonds—often run headlong into an unspoken but deeply rooted distinction between “official” and “unofficial” money. This distinction can make such projects seem peripheral, even when they are designed to work alongside and strengthen existing public infrastructures. Clarifying how this distinction works, and how it might be reframed, is essential to building a narrative in which these proposals make intuitive sense as part of a broader democratic vision.

Perhaps a more helpful axis for thinking about currency is not official versus unofficial, but democratic and publicly responsible monetary practices versus rogue and publicly irresponsible ones. This framing helps us see how the dollar itself contains multiple layers of issuance and coordination that are neither fully centralized nor always democratically accountable. It also allows us to recognize that some so‑called “unofficial” currencies may, in fact, make their connections to public infrastructure more visible and accountable than many “official” practices do.

We have inherited contradictory public imaginaries that reinforce the official/unofficial binary. The legacy of federalism and constitutional demarcations of “sovereign” public authority over issuing money—the gold standard fantasy that implies a natural, finite supply of currency, and tacit ideological assumptions about what kinds of work count as legitimate—all feed the belief that there is a “real” quantity of money to which everything else must conform. Each of these imaginaries narrows our sense of what money is and what it can do.

The dollar’s apparent seamlessness emerges from an ongoing choreography in which multiple institutions—from Congress to municipal courts—issue and reissue credit, coordinate payments, and manage its acceptance. This takes many everyday forms: congressional appropriations, loan‑originated bank deposits, marked‑up reserve balances and Treasuries, and municipal bonds. It also happens through public rituals and discourses—such as the oft‑repeated claim that government must tax before it can spend, or moments when state governments refuse to draw on appropriated funds, as though hoarding balances were a mark of fiscal virtue. These narratives and practices naturalize the idea of the dollar as finite, pre‑existing, and self‑contained, when in fact its continuity depends on countless points of issuance and coordination. The question is not whether these points exist, but whether their issuance and functions are democratically accountable.

Sovereignty and its Doppelgänger 

When we reframe the landscape in terms of democratic and publicly responsible versus rogue and publicly irresponsible monetary practices, sovereignty becomes a revealing figure. In one register, it names the institutional intransigence that locks fiscal authority inside gatekept procedures and narrow definitions of “legitimate” spending—congressional supermajorities, balanced‑budget amendments, debt ceilings, and appropriations that never reach the people they were passed for. This is sovereignty as a state of affairs: insulated, resistant to public challenge, and wielded to forestall democratic fiscal contestation.

In another register, sovereignty animates a frontier fantasy. Here it becomes the outlaw dream of escaping any collective obligation—a dream with deep roots in the settler‑colonial “free banking” movements of the Jacksonian West. In the nineteenth century, “free banks” were celebrated in some quarters as engines of independence, issuing notes supposedly backed by local initiative and unshackled from federal oversight. In reality, they operated inside a broader federal and state monetary order, often failing spectacularly and leaving communities to absorb the losses. This history has been re‑stylized in the twenty‑first century as Silicon Valley’s crypto imaginary: Manifest Destiny reborn in code and venture capital, promising a “sovereign” infrastructure of value beyond the reach of government.

Both registers disavow their entanglements with the wider monetary system. The first enshrines continuity rituals—like taxing before spending—as natural limits, masking the many points where the dollar is already issued and re‑issued. The second glorifies breakaway issuance, pretending it can float free of public infrastructure while quietly relying on it for convertibility, legal enforceability, and market credibility. In different ways, both treat accountability as a threat rather than a foundation.

By holding these two faces of sovereignty together, we can see how rogue and publicly irresponsible currencies cut across the official/unofficial divide. The dollar itself can be made to act like a rogue instrument when its points of issuance are hidden behind sovereignty’s gatekeeping. And many “unofficial” projects, from speculative crypto tokens to Trump Coins, rehearse the same fantasy of unaccountable freedom that drove the free banking frontier—right down to their selective nostalgia for collapse and reset.

What this framing makes possible is a different horizon: one where new currencies, like Unis or Blue Bonds, work precisely by making their embeddedness in public infrastructure visible and contestable—expanding the field of fiscal coordination rather than evading it.

Postscript: On Naming and Silencing

Jakob Feinig’s concept of monetary silencing—the process by which institutions and experts render money apolitical, finite, and beyond democratic contestation—offers a powerful complement to the framing here. His historical work shows how silencing deepens when coalitional struggles over public money recede. Though he most often applies the term to mainstream institutions, Feinig has also noted how crypto imaginaries obscure their reliance on legal and infrastructural scaffolding.

My own framing begins from the other end: the outlaw, herrenvolk ethos of cryptocurrencies and the free banking movements before them. But we converge in showing that these are two sides of the same coin—each eroding democratic governance when left unexamined. That convergence highlights a deeper point: naming is not just rhetorical. If monetary silencing thrives in the absence of coalitional imagination, then how we describe monetary practices helps form the context in which public futures can be seen.