Tag: money

DeSantis Signs Gold Money Legislation Into Law

Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis signed “transactional gold” legislation on Wednesday, aiming to help Floridians use precious metals in commerce and savings to protect their purchasing power from inflation.

The move can also protect the freedom and privacy of citizens if federal policymakers were to ever revisit Biden-era plans for tools such as a central bank digital currency, the governor said. Those federal proposals were among the key reasons this sort of state policy was pursued in the first place, he said.

The new law, passed unanimously by lawmakers in both chambers, aims to create a system that citizens can use to buy, store, sell, save, and transact with gold and silver.

It creates a framework for precious metals to become a part of everyday commerce, with backing and authorization from the state.

Eventually, the law will pave the way for consumers to use a debit card-style card or app to pay for everyday needs with precious metals held in a depository. Merchants, though, could choose to be paid in dollars if they prefer.

The metals are now considered “legal tender” under state law, too, making them exempt from state sales taxes.

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Missouri Senate Passes Constitutional Money Act

Today, the Missouri Senate passed the Constitutional Money Act, a bill that would treat gold and silver as legal tender and eliminate state capital gains tax on the same.

The proposed law would recognize gold and silver as legal tender and make them receivable in payment of all debts contracted for in the state of Missouri. It would also permit any entity doing business in this state to compensate its employees, in full or in part, in the dollar equivalent of specie legal tender.

Sen. Mike Moon successfully had the Constitutional Money Act language amended to House Bill 754 (HB754), which passed the Senate by a 21-10 vote. On May 1, the full bill cleared the Senate by a 20-11 vote. It will now have to go back to the House for concurrence with the amendments.

The state would be required to accept gold and silver in electronic form for the payment of public debts. Private debts could be settled with gold or silver in physical or electronic form at the parties’ discretion.

The Director of the Department of Revenue would be tasked with “promulgating rules on the methods of acceptance of specie legal tender as payment for any debt, tax, fee, or obligation owed.”

The enactment of the measure would make Missouri the eighth state to recognize gold and silver as legal tender, as they always should have been doing. Utah led the way, reestablishing constitutional money in 2011. Wyoming, Oklahoma, Arkansas, Louisiana, Idaho, and Alabama have since joined.

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President Trump Orders Treasury to Stop the Production of New Pennies

President Donald Trump has ordered the U.S. Treasury to cease the production of new pennies, calling the practice an unnecessary drain on taxpayer dollars.

The announcement came shortly after Trump left the Super Bowl, departing about 10 minutes into the second half to return to Washington, D.C.

During rapper Kendrick Lamar’s halftime performance, Trump was seen standing in his private box alongside his daughter, Ivanka Trump, according to The Hill.

As he traveled back to the nation’s capital, Trump took to Truth Social, declaring, “For far too long the United States has minted pennies which literally cost us more than 2 cents. This is so wasteful! I have instructed my Secretary of the U.S. Treasury to stop producing new pennies. Let’s rip the waste out of our great nation’s budget, even if it’s a penny at a time.”

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The Government Says Money Isn’t Property—So It Can Take Yours

As a lawyer who sues the government, you get used to the different kinds of arguments that government lawyers use to justify abuses of individual rights—sweeping claims of government power, bad-faith procedural obstacles, and more.  

This was a new one: The U.S. Department of Justice (DOJ) argued that confiscating $50,000 from a small business did not infringe the business’ right to private property because money is not property.  

“Money is not necessarily ‘property’ for constitutional purposes,” the government’s brief declared—putting the very idea of property in square quotes. Reading at my desk, I practically fell out of my chair. 

The DOJ gave three rationales for the argument, all packed into a doorstopper of a footnote: (1) the government creates money, so you can’t own it; (2) the government can tax your money, so you don’t own it; and (3) the Constitution allows the government to spend money for the “general welfare.”

If a libertarian was asked to write a satire of a government lawyer’s brief, this is what they might come up with. But here it was, in black and white. 

Whose money, specifically, was the government saying wasn’t property? That of Chuck Saine, the owner of C.S. Lawn & Landscaping, a small landscaping business outside Annapolis, Maryland, which he has operated for over 40 years. 

Saine became a client of the Institute for Justice (I.J.), a public interest law firm, when the federal government sought to impose over $50,000 in liability on his business through a “trial” held deep inside the bowls of a federal administrative agency. At said trial, both the prosecutor and the judge were employed by the same federal agency. 

I.J. sued, arguing that before the government can impose that kind of liability, it has to provide a real trial before a real judge and jury. The specifics of what the government claims Saine did wrong (in short: arcane labor law) are beside the point. If the government wants to confiscate over $50,000 from your business, you must have the chance to argue your defense to an impartial judge and jury—not an agency bureaucrat. 

Now, the DOJ argued that Saine has no right to a real judge and jury because the government was only trying to take his money, not his property. They claimed that fiat currency is a legal fiction that the government can as easily destroy as create. Lest anyone miss the implicit connection to the history of the gold standard, DOJ’s footnote prominently cited the Legal Tender Cases—where the Supreme Court upheld laws forcing people to accept paper currency, rather than gold and silver, as payment for debts. 

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80% of All US Dollars in Existence Have Been Printed in Just the Last Two Years

Since March of 2020, Americans and the world alike have watched from the sidelines as power hungry politicians have ushered in draconian lockdowns, shutdowns, police state measures, and brought the economy to its knees. While governments around the planet used their central banks to devalue their currencies by printing money to fund their tyranny, the US led the way down this road to fiscal horror.

Thanks to the trillions of dollars the Federal Reserve has printed over the last two years, America is currently in an inflation crisis. One need only look at the price of groceries over the last two years to realize just how bad of a crisis we are currently experiencing.

As the Biden Administration blames high prices on greedy industries, this is little more than a distraction from the actual perpetrator. Nevertheless, the left continues to attribute soaring costs on businesses making “too much profit.”

While these corporations are not innocent in this debacle, the role of America’s central bank is far more insidious. As government spending has skyrocketed over the last two years, they have financed their massive expenditures by stealing value from your savings by printing more money through the central bank.

When you print more money it means there are more dollars chasing the same amount of goods and services, which causes prices to rise. In just the past three fiscal years, federal spending has swollen to nearly $7 trillion a year, up from about $4.4 trillion in fiscal year 2019. Spending was $6.6 trillion in 2020, and $6.8 trillion in 2021.

If we want to put this into perspective, we can take a look at the monetary supply at the beginning of 2020, which showed just $4.0192 trillion in circulation. By January 2021, that number had jumped up to $6.7 trillion — but this was only the beginning.

By November of last year, that number climbed to $20.354 trillion dollars in circulation — meaning that since January 2020, the United States has printed nearly 80% of all US dollars in existence. 

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