Making Your Own Money
The old adage “money doesn’t grow on trees” doesn’t hold truth like it used to. Today, money literally does grow on trees to the extent that it’s freely printed on tree pulp by the Federal Reserve without any backing in gold or other value. In most instances, we mustn’t even grow it on a tree at all - instead conjuring wealth through tallies on computerized ledgers. Amidst all this, making your own money is practically impossible. Sure, you can go out and work and “earn” it, but that’s not the subject matter of this article. Quite literally, you cannot print or coin your own personalized money and solicit its usage to satisfy debts.
To illustrate the perilousness of such a venture, consider the task. In this exercise, we’ll imagine trying to establish HitHimAgain dollars. The goal will be creating a HitHimAgain currency that is lightweight and has universally understood value. We must choose a medium that can be exchanged for goods and services and is usable as a measure of their values on the market.
The most obvious solution would be to make coins out of some precious metal. I’ll choose copper, just because I have a lot of it sitting around the house. It melts at a low temperature and it malleable - should be pretty easy to stamp my face on it. Anybody in the world can easily check that copper is worth approximately $3.50 per pound, so once you overcome people’s bias toward Federal Reserve Notes, you should be able to conduct business using these coins.
Ok, we’re off to a seemingly-good start. Let’s say I’ve coined a few hundred of these HitHimAgain dollars and I’ve made a couple of transactions with them. Unfortunately, I have just committed a federal crime that will land me in prison for up to five years. Our experiment has ended prematurely.
18 U.S.C. § 486 reads:
Whoever, except as authorized by law, makes or utters or passes, or attempts to utter or pass, any coins of gold or silver or other metal, or alloys of metals, intended for use as current money, whether in the resemblance of coins of the United States or of foreign countries, or of original design, shall be fined under this title or imprisoned not more than five years, or both.
If you think this must be a joke, consider the plight of the Liberty Dollar.
The Liberty Dollar is a private currency embodied in minted metal pieces (referred to as rounds) and gold and silver certificates (ALD), and electronic currency (eLD). ALD certificates are warehouse receipts for real gold and silver owned by ALD certificate holders, warehoused at the Sunshine Mint in Coeur d’Alene, Idaho. The Liberty Dollar is distributed by Liberty Services (formerly known as NORFED), based in Evansville, Indiana. . . .
The Liberty Dollar warehouses were raided and the contents [millions of dollars of gold and silver owned by thousands all around the country] confiscated by the US government (FBI & Secret Service) on 15 November 2007. . . . [cite]
In filing it’s probable cause motion to raid the Liberty Dollar’s headquarters, the FBI Cited 18 U.S.C. § 486 described above, and, strangely, the U.S. Constitution - specifically, Art I., Sec. 8, cl. 5:
[Congress shall have the power] To coin Money, regulate the Value thereof, and of foreign Coin, and fix the Standard of Weights and Measures”
This, of course, being used for the proposition that anyone who wanted to coin money is violating the constitution - even though there’s no penalty in the constitution for doing so. Section 10 of the same Article rebuts the argument that this clause gives the Congress the exclusive right to create money when it states that:
No State shall . . . make any Thing but gold and silver Coin a Tender in Payment of Debts . . .
How do States have the authority to make gold and silver coin money if Congress has that exclusive authority? Something is broken in the FBI’s logic.
In the end, Ron Paul was right when he introduced the Free Competition in Currency Act.
Of course, even if the act of coining money or creating a backed paper currency were to become legal, it would be of little use because the gains would be taxable, and the gains are measured against the dollar.
Consider again that I don’t want to carry around my bucket of coins to transact business. Instead, I create a negotiable instrument, a note, representing that a given piece of paper is redeemable in 20 lbs. of copper. It would be only slightly less foolish to hold my HitHimAgain copper note (which is backed by something of value) than a Federal Reserve Note (which is worth the paper it’s printed on). Even though I outright own copper which itself cannot decrease in value, I’m held prisoner by the Federal Reserve’s inflationary policies. As more dollars recklessly enter the market, the dollar loses value. When this happens, from the IRS’s standpoint, my copper note has gains in value, and is subject to a 15-20% capital gain should I spend it. For instance, if I had printed a note that was redeemable in 1 ounce of Gold six months ago (at a Federal Reserve Note value of approx $660), I would have incurred a $300 gain and owe the Federal Government $60 in Federal Reserve Notes if I had tendered the gold note in a transaction - further entrenching the dollar as an unscrupulous fiat currency.
Until gold and silver coin are allowed to compete tax free on the open market and without threat of imprisonment, the federal government and the privately-owned Federal Reserve will have monopoly control over what medium can be used in exchange for goods and services.
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