September 30. 2008
Alert #29: Aloha Liberty Dollar

Now I am not usually a doom-and-gloom guy. I developed the Liberty Dollar to bring a real solution to the currency situation that I realized in 1974… some 34 years ago! And for all these years I have strived to bring about a proven, positive, peaceful and profitable solution to our country’s controlled fiat monetary system.

And while I greatly appreciated your support (ala the Choir), at almost every turn there has been an invisible force that has thwarted the Liberty Dollar development and larger use. At first you may think, I mean the government. That is not the case. The government had been amazingly supportive up until the raid. The most disturbing “invisible force” is bunch of traitors who confess to have the very ideals that you think they endorse. Unfortunately, most of the time I found our supposed “leaders” to be vain little men, who were much more interested in maintaining their position than saving the country.

Who are these traitors who have steadfastfully blocked or secretly worked to undermine the Liberty Dollar and its ideals? Well over the years I have made several lists, but I am now on Tour and time has long dulled that list… but it is easy to list a few and you may know a few more from your own efforts with the Liberty Dollar.

List of Bellybuttons:
Lew Rockwell, Von Mises Institute
Mark Skousen, Newsletter
Bill Bonner, Agora Publishing
Addison Wiggin, Newsletter
John McManus, John Birch Society
Ed Crane, Cato Institute
Jack Pugsley, Sovereign Society
Vin Suprynowicz, Las Vegas reporter
Charley Reese, Orlando reporter
Sheldon Richman, writer
Doug Casey, Newsletter
Franklin Sanders, Moneychanger-my-ass
Jim Cook, Investment Rarities
Peymon Mottahedeh, Freedom Law School
Ron Paul, Politician

I contacted every one of these bellybuttons. Each had the opportunity to really advance the ideals of liberty but didn’t. They are liars and traitors to the ideals that you may think they support. I would never trust any of them. None will address the issues or even state their objections to the Liberty Dollar. Most will not even reply. A few have said I don’t like them because they would not endorse the Liberty Dollar. Hell, I have never asked for an endorsement from anyone and don’t care if someone endorses the Liberty Dollar or not. But I brand these traitors as bellybuttons because they stonewall, back stab and take adverse positions against the Liberty Dollar while publicly stating that they support the very same ideals but refuse to enter a discourse to move a viable solution forward.

As a student of Austrian Economics, I was particularly drawn to the Mises Institute so I made an appointment to meet Lew Lockwell. When the day finally arrived, his secretary kept me waiting for an hour, then he stood me up and had me forcibly evicted into a driving Alabama rainstorm without a car. Nice business manners, eh?! For that and ten years of behind-the-scenes of negativity, I name Prickwell king bellybutton of the government controlled opposition. Skousen, Bonner, McManus, Crane and Casey are not far behind. Be very careful of whom you ask advice. If you have any doubts, just ask this list of American traitors, because I have and they all made me sick.

Contrary to these lying bellybutton traitors, there have been a great many “ordinary Joes” who have exemplified the greatness of our original Founding Fathers. These men and women have won my heart, not because they support the Liberty Dollar, but because they have devoted their lives, fortunes and sacred honor to furthering the ideals as represented by the Liberty Dollar.

I don’t know what happened at his appointment nor do we know why he’s pissed at the rest of those listed but I’m not getting the feeling that it was anything to garner this kind of response. In my opinion the Liberty Dollar little more than a scam. Selling a one troy ounce silver round for $50 is 3.66 times the spot price of $13.64 (bought in 50 to 100 troy oz batch) at the time of writing. They then attempt to use the $50 face valued coin as if it was worth as much as a $50 FRN. As the cost of silver rose so did the profit margin when it was re-minted with a higher face value. It is no wonder that these individuals didn’t want to associate themselves with von NotHaus and the Liberty Dollar. It’s obviously of questionable legality (not that any of those listed agree with that status but they likely don’t want to be directly affiliated with that) and it questionable morally too. If someone wishes to invest in metals the Liberty Dollar is a complete waste of money and if you wish to use metals as a currency or barter buying generic rounds is not only significantly cheaper but it doesn’t have the legal issues. Those “ordinary Joes”, of which I know a few personally, who are RCOs or are purchasers and users of the Liberty Dollars were suckered into a pyramid scheme.

The idea is right but the implementation is just too off to be an honest business.

• “I sincerely believe … that banking establishments are more dangerous than standing armies, and that the principle of spending money to be paid by posterity under the name of funding is but swindling futurity on a large scale.” — Thomas Jefferson to John Taylor, 1816.
• “Paper is poverty,… it is only the ghost of money, and not money itself.” — Thomas Jefferson to Edward Carrington, 1788.
• “Scenes are now to take place as will open the eyes of credulity and of insanity itself, to the dangers of a paper medium abandoned to the discretion of avarice and of swindlers.” –Thomas Jefferson to Thomas Cooper, 1814.
• “I now deny [the Federal Government's] power of making paper money or anything else a legal tender.” — Thomas Jefferson to John Taylor, 1798.
• “The maxim of buying nothing without the money in our pockets to pay for it would make of our country one of the happiest on earth.” –Thomas Jefferson to Alexander Donald, 1787.
• “Every discouragement should be thrown in the way of men who undertake to trade without capital.” –Thomas Jefferson to Nathaniel Tracy, 1785.
• “I am an enemy to all banks discounting bills or notes for anything but coin.” –Thomas Jefferson to Thomas Cooper, 1814.
• “It is said that our paper is as good as silver, because we may have silver for it at the bank where it issues. This is not true. One, two, or three persons might have it; but a general application would soon exhaust their vaults, and leave a ruinous proportion of their paper in its intrinsic worthless form.” –Thomas Jefferson to John W. Eppes, 1813.
• “Everything predicted by the enemies of banks, in the beginning, is now coming to pass. We are to be ruined now by the deluge of bank paper. It is cruel that such revolutions in private fortunes should be at the mercy of avaricious adventurers, who, instead of employing their capital, if any they have, in manufactures, commerce, and other useful pursuits, make it an instrument to burden all the interchanges of property with their swindling profits, profits which are the price of no useful industry of theirs.” –Thomas Jefferson to Thomas Cooper, 1814.
• “We are now taught to believe that legerdemain tricks upon paper can produce as solid wealth as hard labor in the earth. It is vain for common sense to urge that nothing can produce but nothing; that it is an idle dream to believe in a philosopher’s stone which is to turn everything into gold, and to redeem man from the original sentence of his Maker, ‘in the sweat of his brow shall he eat his bread.’” –Thomas Jefferson to Charles Yancey, 1816.
• “The incorporation of a bank and the powers assumed [by legislation doing so] have not, in my opinion, been delegated to the United States by the Constitution. They are not among the powers specially enumerated.” –Thomas Jefferson: Opinion on Bank, 1791.

H/T LewRockwell Blog

http://mises.org/…

An Ironic Tribute: Franklin D. Roosevelt Commemorative Gold Coin

It’s been 75 years since the federal government, on the spurious grounds of fighting the Great Depression, ordered the confiscation of all monetary gold from Americans, permitting trivial amounts for ornamental or industrial use. This happens to be one of the episodes Kevin Gutzman and I describe in detail in our new book, Who Killed the Constitution? The Fate of American Liberty from World War I to George W. Bush. From the point of view of the typical American classroom, on the other hand, the incident may as well not have occurred.

A key piece of legislation in this story is the Emergency Banking Act of 1933, which Congress passed on March 9 without having read it and after only the most trivial debate. House Minority Leader Bertrand H. Snell (R-NY) generously conceded that it was “entirely out of the ordinary” to pass legislation that “is not even in print at the time it is offered.” He urged his colleagues to pass it all the same: “The house is burning down, and the President of the United States says this is the way to put out the fire. [Applause.] And to me at this time there is only one answer to this question, and that is to give the President what he demands and says is necessary to meet the situation.”

Among other things, the act retroactively approved the president’s closing of private banks throughout the country for several days the previous week, an act for which he had not bothered to provide a legal justification. It gave the secretary of the Treasury the power to require all individuals and corporations to hand over all their gold coin, gold bullion, or gold certificates if in his judgment “such action is necessary to protect the currency system of the United States.”

The Emergency Banking Act reached back in time to amend the Trading with the Enemy Act of 1917, which had originally been intended to criminalize economic intercourse between American citizens and declared enemies of the United States. One provision of the act granted the president the power to regulate and even prohibit “under such rules and regulations as he may prescribe … any transactions in foreign exchange, export or earmarkings of gold or silver coin or bullion or currency … by any person within the United States.” In 1918, the act was amended to extend its provisions two years beyond the conclusion of hostilities, and to allow the president to “investigate, regulate, or prohibit” even the “hoarding” of gold by an American.

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A rather good summery of FDR’s gold theivery.