As you’ve all come to realize our government will not tolerate
competition. And, above all others its congressionally-awarded contractor,
the US Federal Reserve, can be deadly for competitors.
Beyond Bernard von NotHaus
Editorial of The New
York Sun | December 3, 2014
Congratulations
are in order to United States District Judge Richard Voorhees of North
Carolina for the judiciousness of his decision in the case of Bernard von
NotHaus. We weren’t personally present at the courthouse at Statesville, where
von NotHaus had been ordered to appear Tuesday for sentencing on his
conviction of uttering — introducing into circulation — his Liberty Dollars.
But we were on tenterhooks, because von NotHaus, 70, was looking at the
possibility of spending the rest of his life in prison.
The
reason we’ve been watching the case is that von NotHaus’ demarche is one of
the few direct challenges to what the Foundation for the Advancement of
Monetary Education likes to call “legal tender irredeemable electronic paper
ticket money.” That refers to the scrip being issued by the Federal Reserve.
Von NotHaus had designed and circulated a medallion made of pure silver, the
same specie that was fixed on by the Founders of America as the basis of the
constitutional dollar.
A
jury found, among other things, that von NotHaus’ Liberty Dollar violated
federal law against private coinage and was similar enough to American
legal-tender coin that it constituted counterfeiting. “Attempts to undermine
the legitimate currency of this country are simply a unique form of domestic
terrorism,” the prosecutor, Anne Tompkins, said after von NotHaus was
convicted. She suggested that such schemes “represent a clear and present
danger to the economic stability of this country.”
In the three
and a half years since the jury reached its decision, Judge Voorhees allowed
constitutional and procedural objections to be heard but in the end supported
the jury. The government on Tuesday asked for a prison sentence of at least
14 years and as much as 17 ½ years. The government was also seeking
forfeiture of some 16,000 pounds of Liberty Dollar coins and specie, which in
2011 it had valued at nearly $7 million.
Then
spake the judge, sentencing von NotHaus to but six months of home detention,
to run concurrently with three years of probation. He departed from
non-binding guidelines because, he suggested, von NotHaus had been motivated
not by criminal intent but by an intention to make a philosophical point.
That is what these columns have been reporting for more than four years, and,
while the Sun’s coverage played no part in the case, we are glad to discover
that the judge is of a similar, if not identical, mind.
Von
NotHaus is no doubt relieved that he doesn’t have to go to jail, but he has
put out no statement. Our guess is that it is sinking in on him that he has
been marked now as a felon, and his own dream of a parallel form of money,
composed of constitutional specie, is gone. There may yet be surprises, but
the sagacity of Judge Voorhees’s handling of this case lies in, among other
elements, the fact that he has left no great incentive for either side to
make an appeal.
Whatever
happens, the logic now is for the issues raised in the von NotHaus case to be
pursued in the political arena. We are coming up on the 50th anniversary of
the Coinage Act of 1965, which stripped silver from our common coinage.
President Lyndon Johnson, who signed the bill into law, called it “the first
fundamental change in our coinage in 173 years.” He noted that during that
nearly two-century span our coinage of dimes, quarters, half dollars, and
dollars have contained 90 percent silver.”
“The
new dimes and the new quarters will contain no silver,” the president
confessed. “They will be composites, with faces of the same alloy used in our
5-cent piece that is bonded to a core of pure copper.” That is how the
debasement began, though LBJ did issue a warning. “If anybody has any idea of
hoarding our silver coins, let me say this. Treasury has a lot of silver on
hand, and it can be, and it will be used to keep the price of silver in line
with its value in our present silver coin.”
It
was a vain boast. At the time, the value of the dollar was more than
two-thirds of an ounce of silver, as it was in 1792. By January 1980, the
value of a dollar plunged to less than a 49th of an ounce of silver and even
today has regained nowhere near its historic value. It is a shocking
abdication by the United States Congress, a point that von NotHaus has thrown
into sharper relief than any monetary gadfly has managed to do in years. That
is no small achievement.
Source
NYSun.com
