Posted on 11/16/2007 10:13:07 AM PST by KentTrappedInLiberalSeattle
Your posts are inconsistent.
What are you trying to say?
The constitution makes absolutely no provision for paper money. The use of coins wasn’t prohibited; it was the only thing that had been workable at the time of the founding. The spanish dollar (piece of eight) was the prevailing mode of exchange at the time.
There are no transactions on record to support that contention. Where did you get that idea?
Please describe how that could be. If anything, it would be a boon to have money circulating that they didn't have to honor. Your statement is poorly thought out.
This is something that has always puzzled me about hard money advocates in general. They tend to be numismatists, but in critical times, it is unlikely that the numismatic value of many of their assets will hold up. They may lose their shirts on a sizeable portion of their assets that they claim to hold as a hedge.
But even before that, they were getting screwed in the early 80s. My mother had to begin paying taxes on her SS in 1984.
My coin collection is not held as a hedge.
The most valuable coins may change little with the spot market because rarity is the key factor in their value, not the bullion content.
Comparing apples to oranges, the last Van Gogh painting sold for far more than any coin, and had vitually no intrinsic worth (canvas, paint, wood), whereas the rarity and artistic value made it worth tens of millions. If wood, canvas, and paint were traded commodities, changes in the value of paint, wood, and canvas would affect its value very little.
In hard times, an ounce of gold is an ounce of gold, and a collector would be watching even then for coins which would command a high numismatic premium when things improve (call it a 'down market--buying opportunity') and using the common issues and lower graded coins for trade.
In the most critical of times, I would put more faith in my 'semi-precious metal' portfolio, anyway.
There are - it's just that there's no line item that says "seignorage income" on a balance sheet somewhere. The income is returned in the form of transactions between the Federal Reserve open market operations with the Treasury and the Fed's member banks.
In theory, they would confiscate the bullion to keep them from minting more coins.
They might confiscate the notes because the notes represent some of the bullion, that they are confiscating.
Or perhaps they suspect them of some kind of fraud.
The government definitely has a habit of seizing anything that might possibly be evidence under a warrant. They want to make sure they don't miss anything that they may need, and anything they don't take that might be relevant might disappear before they could come back for it, so they can end up being more than a little excessive while trying to be through.
However, I'm really just guessing.
How exactly do you expect those executing the warrant to tell if the gold really belongs to someone else or not? After all, wouldn't it be in the best interest of those at Liberty to lie and say that it is someone else's gold to avoid it being confiscated?
The only practical way for them to do it is confiscate it all and then figure out what doesn't belong to Liberty and isn't relevant to the case after the fact. Unless the warrant is extremely narrow, that is pretty much how they have to execute warrants to make sure they get all the evidence.
It can place a large burden on innocent parties, but unfortunately that is unavoidable a lot of the time, and they don't really know what isn't relevant to the case until they have gone through the evidence.
They do. NORFED (the organization that makes Liberty Dollars) goes out of its way on its website and in its literature to make it clear to the consumer that these coins are NOT LEGAL TENDER. You can’t pay your taxes with them, you can’t make court settlements with them, and you can’t compel merchants to accept them if they don’t want to. They are just plain old little chunks of gold, and we should be free to trade them about as much or as little as we want.
Then they ought to have their lawyers investigate how exactly they are advertising differently from the Franklin Mint, which doesn’t get charged with money laundering and wire fraud, etc.
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