By Franklin Sanders
July 27, 2022
“Money has a history which is fifty centuries old, and filled with an experience too valuable and too dearly bought to be ignored or thrown away.” ~ Alexander del Mar
“Betting against gold is the same as betting on governments. He who bets on governments and government money bets against 6,000 years of recorded human history.” ~ Gary North
“Money is Money, and Paper is Paper. All the invention of man cannot make them otherwise.” ~ Thomas Paine
“[Credit] is not the money itself. Money is gold, and nothing else.” ~ J.P. Morgan, 1912
I. Introduction
This report is not about gold and silver, it’s about individual sovereignty and gold and silver as a means to establish that. Individual sovereignty depends on food, on a financial infrastructure enabling us to transact with each other, and the rule of law to make those transactions dependable.
This report highlights actual, ongoing efforts to bring gold and silver back into circulation as money. Recirculation or remonetization does not mean legislating an official gold/silver standard. In fact, one thing that most strongly favors recirculation is that it does not depend on government action. While this report surveys efforts by U.S. state governments to get gold and silver circulating again as money, and those efforts are helpful and needed, the especially good news is we don’t have to wait for any government to pass any laws or set up any bureaucracy. The law already favors gold and silver—the rule of that law must be restored.
Sovereignty is the goal, metals are a means to that. Money is a tool to serve life. Civilized life can only exist where we have a covenant that prescribes how we treat each other: the rule of law. Without this infrastructure, civilized society is impossible.
We Forge Our Own Chains
Where money is concerned, we forge our own chains. Because it is convenient and because we are ignorant, we use bank credit money voluntarily, but the truth is, no one can force us to use it. Right now, today, it is perfectly legal for us to contract among ourselves to use silver and gold.
So, the money issue can be resolved at the lowest level, the grassroots, in our own daily transactions with each other—the one area of our lives where we have the most control and initiative.
Surprise: The Feds Are Helping Us
As if that weren’t enough good news, there is more. Ironically, the entities working hardest today to bring down the fiat U.S. dollar are the U.S. government and the Federal Reserve. With its sanctions that denied the Russian central bank access to $300 billion of its own reserves, the U.S. government sent a chill throughout the world, a warning that the U.S. dollar and digital assets could no longer be trusted. Claiming to ease the disaster caused by its own Covid lockdown, the federal government spent trillions. The Federal Reserve’s ever-compliant monetizing of those deficits, adding to their ongoing Quantitative Easing policies, has unleashed a monstrous and unendurable inflation never before seen in U.S. history.
In fact, the federal government and the Federal Reserve have long been at war with individual sovereignty. The reigning financial infrastructure bleeds us and makes us dependent. We must make a transition to independence, and gold and silver money can help us create the infrastructure and conditions to break our addiction to federal spending and credit.
Men have established governments for a reason. We are social creatures. Without government sovereignty to protect individual sovereignty, we will lose sovereignty altogether. However, the federal government itself has no sovereignty—it is financially dependent on and a creature of the central banks and their special interests. It can’t protect us because it has been converted to a machinery that is the greatest threat to individual freedom and prosperity. The question is, can the states and their citizens hold the line and defend our sovereignty?
How dependent are we on government spending? How many among us work directly for government or government contractors or receive pensions or Social Security from government? In most states, 50% or more of the people receive their living from government. About two-fifths of that 50% comes from federal government spending, while three-fifths comes from state and local government spending, much of it federally subsidized. We have become dependent on federal money, and now they can’t keep on shoveling it out. We have to step in.
Global Reserve Currency No More?
What does it mean that the U.S. dollar is the world’s reserve currency? Superficially, it means that the U.S. dollar is the one currency central banks most favor to hold in their reserves. Underneath the surface, it means the world must have U.S. dollars for international trade so that the U.S. can recklessly print as many dollars as it wants, export that inflation, and force the world to grin and bear it. The U.S. prints money out of thin air, and the rest of the world has to accept it. The dollar as the world’s reserve currency means that the dollar is America’s most potent weapon of empire and dominance.
Why can’t the Feds just keep on printing and shoveling out money forever? The fact is, if the U.S. dollar loses reserve currency status, the U.S. can no longer export its inflation, that is, force the world to receive dollars because it is the reserve currency. In that case, it could no longer make good its promised payments to the people.
Why? The federal government can spend more than it takes in (“deficit spending”) because the Federal Reserve monetizes the debt the federal government issues to spend that deficit. But that’s a recipe for hyperinflation, a central bank monetizing government debt limitlessly. So, how does the federal government escape hyperinflation? They can export the inflation because the dollar is the world’s reserve currency. If the federal government can no longer export its inflation, then it must either hyperinflate the dollar, or renege on its promised payments to the people. These people will then fall back on the states for support.
The unspoken presupposition here is that with 50% of the people in every state earning their living from either state or federal government—and the federal government heavily subsidizing state governments—the federal government’s breach of promised payments will wreck state economies, and the states will be forced to take measures to relieve these people.
Signs are popping up everywhere that the dollar is losing its global reserve status. For many decades, other nations’ central banks took U.S. trade deficits and meekly laundered them by buying U.S. Treasury securities that they then held as reserves. Yet no longer are they so eager to trust the dollar and U.S. solvency. Since 2015, foreign central banks have spent three times as much on gold as on U.S. Treasury securities. Recently, even the Israelis dropped their percentage of dollar reserves to add other currencies.
Look at the U.S. dollar/ruble exchange rate for the past year: not only are U.S. sanctions not working, they are making the ruble stronger.
US Dollar to Ruble
The BRICS bloc—Brazil, Russia, India, China, and South Africa—is rebelling against dollar dominance and intends to create an international reserve system to replace the U.S. dollar.
In a desperate bid to retain control, central banks are trying to create a cashless society using central bank digital currencies (CBDCs). Their only object is control of individuals and their wealth. Ask the Canadian protestors Trudeau punished by locking up their digital assets. The CBDC control grid will be the death of individual sovereignty.
Miracle on Main Street
In 1980, the late Tupper Saussy wrote The Miracle on Main Street: Saving Yourself and America from Financial Ruin. In it, he presented the mad circumstances of American money: we have every legal right to gold and silver money, but nobody, certainly no government, uses it. Tupper argued that since Article I, Section 10 of the U.S. Constitution said “no state shall make any Thing but gold and silver coin a tender in payment of debt,” then no state or local government could force anyone to pay a fine or tax in Federal Reserve note money, only in gold and silver money.
His argument was technically correct, but no judge from the lowest municipal court to the highest court in the land was willing to be the first man who said, “You’re right! We can’t assess fines and collect taxes in Federal Reserve notes! If you can’t pay in gold or silver, we can’t make you pay.”
Tupper’s book launched a wave of monetary activists who went into courts at every level arguing something like this: “Your honor, I understand that I am supposed to pay a $50 traffic fine, but I am confused. The Constitution says that the state can’t demand payment in anything but gold or silver coin, but there isn’t any of that circulating. I don’t want to break the law. I want to fulfill my obligation, not merely discharge it with Federal Reserve notes. So please tell me, how can I pay this debt without giving up that constitutional right? How can the state order me to pay in anything but gold or silver?”
These activists set off a chain of hilarious and not-so-hilarious reactions, and many if not most wound up in jail for asking that question. Turned out, the emperor did not like anyone pointing out that he was wearing no clothes.
A Better Way
With all due respect to those brave monetary activists, going to jail is not the most effective or popular way to oppose government corruption and unconstitutional acts. There is a better way. Since silver and gold coin are already officially legal tender in the law, to use them we need only specify in our dealings with others that our transactions must be paid only in gold and silver coin. Whether you are a restaurateur with a barbecue joint selling $9 meals or a real estate investor trading buildings and land worth hundreds of thousands of dollars, you only need to specify, publicly and by contract, that you will only accept payment in silver and gold.
Now, it may be slow, and it may take some trouble to explain why you are doing business this way, but if folks want to do business with you, they’ll pay in the coin you specify. And think: you don’t have to persuade a majority in Congress or in your state legislature or a political party; you don’t have to start a movement; you just have to adopt silver and gold money personally, and the change will take place in the grassroots.
Reversing Gresham’s Law
Wait, you may ask, why do you think that will stick? It will be more inconvenient than using bank credit money, take more time and trouble and explanation at first, but in time, Gresham’s law will operate in our favor.
Hold on! I thought Gresham’s law said that “bad money drives good money out of circulation.” Hasn’t the bad bank credit money already driven gold and silver out of circulation? Won’t the bad bank credit money drive gold and silver out of circulation again?
Not at all. Gresham’s law assumes something, the clause left out: “Bad money drives good money out of circulation when government legal tender laws force the public to accept it.” When no law forces its circulation, the opposite is the result: good money drives bad money out of circulation.
Wait, wait! Aren’t Federal Reserve notes, the paper evidences of bank credit money, “legal tender?” Yes, they are, except that you are free to contract out of that system with gold and silver clause contracts. Federal Reserve notes are only legal tender when you fail to specify you will only accept gold and silver money.
Some Deep History
For 5,000 years, metals have been used as money: as a store of value, standard of value, and means of exchange. Long millennia before gold and silver were first coined as money, silver and gold and copper were used as money in ancient Mesopotamia and Egypt, weighed out for each transaction. Pharaoh Menes (fl. 3200-3000 B.C.), who united the kingdoms of Upper and Lower Egypt, ratified the ratio of gold to silver at one weight of gold to two and a half weights of silver. In Mesopotamia in about 3,000 B.C. the shekel was first used as a unit of weight, although it only became a coin centuries later. Genesis 23:1-24 reports that when his wife Sarah died in 1859 B.C., Abraham bought from Ephron a field and cave in Machpelah to bury her. “[A]nd Abraham weighed to Ephron the silver, which he had named in the audience of the sons of Heth, four hundred shekels of silver, current money with the merchant.”
Testing and weighing metal for every transaction is slow and cumbersome, but not until about 600 B.C. in Lydia (modern-day Turkey) were silver and gold first coined from electrum, a naturally occurring alloy of silver and gold. The new technology spread rapidly, but circulation was hampered by the varying percentages of silver and gold in the electrum. Coinage really took hold about 550 B.C. when King Croesus of Lydia began minting separate coins of gold and silver with standardized purity, creating the world’s first bimetallic system. The gold-silver ratio was 1 to 13.3, and the reliable new coinage unleashed a flood of national and international trade.
There’s no room here to recite the whole history of gold and silver money with government coin clipping inflationary schemes, the terrors of governments introducing fiat paper money to replace gold and silver (and the inevitably catastrophic inflationary outcomes), the perils of bank credit money booms and busts, the rise of central banks after 1650, or the gold-silver ratio’s vacillations. Only note that by steady and determined action central banks were introduced and control of money centralized in the hands of these banking cartels. Like the cuckoo who lays his egg in the songbird’s nest so his chick can crowd out the songbird’s nestlings, by 1934, central banks around the world had largely replaced gold and silver money with bank credit. By 1968, they had removed silver even from U.S. currency. After 1971 when Nixon took the U.S. off the gold exchange standard, not even central banks could redeem dollars for gold. For the first time in history, the whole world was on a fiat bank credit standard. The result is the ongoing international monetary and financial crisis we know today, veering and careening from the cliff edge of boom to the rock wall of bust.
From the deep history of silver and gold money, we learn the secret of its lasting claim as treasure: for all human history, human beings have valued and desired silver and gold. That desire gives them their enduring value and is even more important today when every other financial asset has counterparty risk. That is, every bond or share of stock or bank deposit or bank note has a counterparty on the other side. If that counterparty can’t make good on the obligation, the asset is worthless. Silver and gold have no counterparty risk; they are good simply because people want and value them—always have, always will. They are also the only analog financial assets in an age of digital assets subject to the risk of government intervention or digital failure. No Internet, no access to digital assets.
God Is in the Details
In this report, we will provide you the details of how silver and gold are being remonetized in the United States, what new laws you need to ask from your state legislature, and how you can use gold and silver money in your daily life.
- We will also show you signs that gold and silver usage, as well as cash and coin, are increasing, and why they will keep on growing.
- We will explain why you need silver, and how it helps ensure a stable and honest monetary system.
- We will introduce you to the work being done in state legislatures removing taxes and other barriers to gold and silver.
- We will teach you how people lose money on gold and silver, and how you can avoid those traps.
- One section of this report will explain gold and silver clause contracts and how you can use them.
- Wait! you may ask, but how can I use silver and gold? How do I know what gold and silver are worth? Precisely to fix that problem, Solari and The Moneychanger developed our Silver & Gold Payment Calculator at www.silverandgoldaremoney.com. It is easy and simple to use. Choose a payment solution in gold, silver, or a combination, choose the national currency that will be exchanged, then enter the amount of that currency you want to pay in gold and silver.
- We’ll show you how to barter with gold and silver, and offer you reference lists of gold and silver coins and of safe, reliable depositories where you can store gold and silver.
- Finally, we will give you a shopping list to take to your state legislators, so you can show them what they need to do and why they need to do it.
You say, “But this is so hard to do!” Nonsense. Never is it too hard to build the future we want for ourselves and our families. The future you and I intend to live in is one in which we are sovereign—where we can trade freely together. So, as the musician John Cage used to say, “Begin anywhere.”
Continue to Part II: Beats Me! What Is a Dollar?