US Mint hates competiton, lies to squash it

In a recent press release, the US Mint has indicated that Liberty Dollars (see http://www.libertydollar.org/) is illegal currency. See http://intlib.blogspot.com/2006/09/us-mint-claims-norfed-are-federal.html for details.

For background, Liberty Dollars are coins backed by silver and gold that can be used to engage in regular commerce. Current Federal Reserve Notes (FRNs) as printed by the Treasury and issued to the illegal Federal Reserve, are backed by the illusion of the labor of the American people. In other words, fiat currency.

The Treasury Department, the Mint's parent agency, and the Secret Service, its sibling agency, and its bastard uncle, the In-Justice Department (who remarkably gets one right for once, in a case of Stopped-Clock Syndrome), all in the past have disagreed with the Mint.

The Mint is just plain looney tunes on this one. If they are right, then all non-FRN means of doing transactions are also illegal. That means everything from subway and arcade tokens to casino chips, from baseball cards to booze and firearms is illegal as well.

Problem is that the Mint forgets just what currency is. All currency is is a proxy used in place of a barter trade that is commonly accepted as having value in the absence of a true barter. To make sense of it, consider the following examples:

1. Tom can build fences but has no eggs. Jerry needs a fence to hold in his chickens. They meet and Tom agrees to build Jerry a fence in exchange for several dozen eggs. This is a barter trade, the very basic building block of free economics.

2. Same example, but now Jerry's chickens aren't laying at the moment. Tom accepts a note from Jerry promising him eggs once they lay later in exchange for fixing the fence now. That note is a proxy in place of the eggs. If Tom trades that note to Spike so Spike can get the eggs in exchange for fixing Tom's stove, then Jerry honors that note with Spike instead. That note has become a barter proxy in absence of the real thing. This note is a basic voluntary contract, and the note is also currency since all three people accept it as having value in the trade.

The whole point of this is that anything at all can be used as a barter proxy as long as the parties to the barter agree it has appropriate value. That anything includes personal property and one's labor. That is why when two parties agree to exchange labor for barter proxy (in other words, money!) it is an agreed exchange of equal value. That is, THERE IS NO GAIN! THERE IS NO INCOME!

This is why they are scared--if people realize that the value of FRNs only exists because they believe it so, and the logical extension that its value can cease to exist if they don't, then the entire Federal Reserve System is in trouble. Besides that, if people use currency other than FRNs to barter goods and services, such as Liberty Dollars, then the feds can't tax what is not transacted in their system or is readily translatable into their system (such as foreign currency as determined by the international currency markets). Since the feds illegally tax a property exchange as income already, any further erosion of that scam is something that they can't handle, hence the Mint's pronouncements, since Liberty Dollars, like all other alternative barter proxies, serve to shatter that myth that they feds and the Mint cling to--that only *their* currency is the valuable one. Only *their* barter contracts are valid. Yeah, right.

Every barter proxy that is not taxable since it it outside the tax system is easily seen as a property exchange. Only within the confines of the federal system is reality warped to make a property exchange produce phantom income (or alternatively, our labor is worthless and the cash production actually is gain, which may be closer to the truth of our financially bankrupt federal system and their fiat monopoly money!). The Liberty Dollar, like other alternative barter proxies, is a return to reality and the real free market economy, free of regulation and taxation, and that is what truly scares the federal government--it is outside of their control and in fact destroys their control.

Think about it. The best cashless society is the barter society, not where currency is replaced by electrons. The barter system will never go away, and it needs to resume its rightful place as the true economy, not some shadow economy or black market because it is outside the tax system.

The Mudslinger