Sunday, July 25, 2010

Gold, the Dollar, and a new currency

The Tyranny of the Dollar
[...] As Madame Speaker said, we’d know what was in the Health Control bill after we passed it. The other day, we learned the health bill augments the 1099 tax form to track gold coin transactions.

This is another surprise attack in the economic war of the government against the people. You should know more about this war, since you’re in it.

[...]

So if you want freedom from government oversight and overreach, then you’ll either keep false books or you’ll resort to barter transactions that don’t appear on the books at all. Either path sets you on a collision course with authority. But is there anything a citizen can do that’s both safe and legal, or at least closer to being safe and legal? Can we ease away from the Federal monopoly dollars?

The government is deathly afraid of losing control of your assets. If the idea of a money-substitute such as gold catches on, the government will react by pushing the people back onto their radar. Hence the new law slipped into the health control bill.

I have a dream. And I’ll admit that this is a stupid dream; an unrealistic dream; a dream that is not thought out. So please mute your enthusiasm, because I’m doing nothing here but speaking in the vaguest possible terms about where we want to get to. But the goal is to give “we the people” an alternative to the dollar. Rather than being forced to hold our assets in government paper, there should be a new private currency (call it a “NewBuck”), managed by an authority that acts with integrity and is accountable only to the people that hold NewBucks.

The dollar was once respected because you could exchange it for gold. Now it’s respected only by custom and force of law. We take the dollars because the next guy will take the dollars from us. Not to mention that it’s illegal to refuse dollars. But our confidence in the underlying integrity of the dollar is dwindling.

[...]

Several years ago, someone actually tried to create an alternative currency called a “Liberty Dollar”. The idea was to mint coins with silver or gold in them and get merchants to accept those coins. This operation has been stomped down by the Feds. Their website, LibertyDollar.org, now announces: “Site Removed Due to Court Order”. So much for freedom of expression.

I don’t want to rush to defend the Liberty Dollar. I don’t know enough about the situation to offer a definitive opinion. The Wikipedia entry reports that the government saw an unsavory element of multilevel marketing in the operation. I can’t say that’s not the case. And it may be that the term “dollar” should have been avoided, in that it implies legal tender.

On the other hand, it’s not clear how Liberty Dollar’s offences are more than mere technicalities. It seems that people were interested in the notion of Liberty Dollars because they understood how unsound the ordinary dollars have become. I think the government hit hard against the Liberty Dollar out of fear rather than due to any serious transgression. [...]

I used archive.org to find a copy of the LibertyDollar.org website. Here is the last reported page before the Feds closed it down:


http://web.archive.org/web/20080615190237/http://www.libertydollar.org/

The archive shows that the website existed from 2002 to 2008. So the Feds were content to let it exist for several years. I don't know if there was anything crooked about it or not, but the site presents an interesting idea: a viable, private currency. I can see why the government wouldn't allow it, but I can also see why people would want it. Many people believe that the dollar is a fiat currency, and that our US currency has already collapsed; that the current financial crisis is just the first stage of the collapse manifesting, with more to come. I'm not certain of that, but there are some compelling arguments to be made for it. Either way, people do want a sound currency like we used to have. Will the American people demand that we go back to one?
     

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