First we reported that 1,800 people renounced their citizenship last year, which is a record high. The number one reason was over taxes. Then we reported that SB 1813, the so-called “Moving Ahead for Progress in the 21st Century Act” would suspend passport rights for delinquent taxpayers. And now it seems there’s a new development in the State’s ever increasing effort to keep the tax cattle on the farm. Now it seems they are denying applications to relinquish US citizenship. That’s right, very soon that last refuge of the blind patriot, “If you don’t like American you can leave” will no longer be true… for many it already isn’t.
Simon Black, writing for SovereignMan.com reports:

“I was approached recently by a member of our Sovereign Man community who filed the paperwork to relinquish US citizenship some time ago. Long story short, after an incomprehensibly long wait, the US government finally sent him a reply: Application DENIED.”

To me personally it’s absurd to think we should even have to “apply” to renounce our citizenship. It seems to be the burden of proof should be on them. “Citizen” is just something they claim about me. A citizen is “a person who owes allegiance to a nation and is entitled to protection by and from the government.” So, to be a citizen, and not a subject there must be a social contract were one exchanges allegiance for protection.  I didn’t sign shit. Citizenship is nothing more than accident of birth. It’s a description of which arbitrary invisible lines you born inside, which is how they know which human farm you belong on. There’s no contract. There’s no agreement. There’s no consent.

For most people it’s still a free range human farm. If you go to a US consulate on some other farm, fill out a series of forms, pay a steep exit tax, and swear an oath to another farm, you can leave. But then… moving a slave from one plantation to another is not emancipation. But you see, when the masters have already taken out loans leveraging the slaves future production as collateral, they can’t just allow slaves to wonder off the plantation.

I think of it something like a run on a bank. We all know the money isn’t there, and if we all took all our money at the same time the bank wouldn’t have enough reserves to cover it. Yet, the bank allows individuals to make withdrawals whenever they like. But if enough people decide to pull their money out at the same time, and it starts to threaten the solvency of the bank, you can bet the bank will deny you access to your own money. And if those people make a big enough scene about it, police will be called in to forcibly separate you from your own money.

The human farm is no different. The State may allow individuals to occasionally leave the farm if they like. But if enough people decide to leave at the same time, and it starts to threaten the solvency of the State, they will deny you the freedom to leave, and police will be called in to forcibly keep you on the farm.

And don’t forget to visit our official website to learn more about the Silver Circle Movie:http://SilverCircleMovie.com

Because of the deeply-rooted influence of Confucianism, Chinese culture has a reputation for encouraging people to fall into line, do as they’re told, and not “rock the boat.” But here at The Silver Underground, we’ve been taking note of the many inspiring and revolutionary rebels of the contemporary movement for liberalization and openness in China. From village uprisings everywhere to daring defiance of the Chinese government’s human rights abuses, China is clearly a civilization in transition and there’s no shortage of Chinese rebels to laud here in our weekly Rebel of  the Week feature. Like those classical liberals who fought entrenched power structures and oppression in Western civilization, forging societies with unprecedented freedoms and a large, well-educated middle class, these activists will have a positive impact on China that lasts for centuries.

This week’s rebel is Mao Yushi, an 83-year-old Chinese economist and liberty activist who has spent his entire life fighting for free markets, limited government, and individual liberty. At the height of communist oppression in China, a young Yushi would face expulsion from the communist party and exile to a life of hard labor in a re-education camp where he avoided starvation by eating locusts. That didn’t stop him from continuing to advocate for liberty and free markets for the rest of his life.

Yushi’s story and work were brought to my attention when earlier this month, he was awarded the Cato Institute‘s $250,000 Milton Friedman Prize for Advancing Liberty at a black tie gala in Washington, DC.

Here’s what the Cato Institute had to say about him:

Mao, an 83-year-old economist, is a well-known advocate for an open and transparent political system and is one of the pioneers of the movement in China for civil society and freedom. Before economic reform began in China in 1978, he had been an engineer and during his lifetime has faced severe punishment, exile, and near starvation for remarks critical of a command-based economy and society. During the Cultural Revolution, he and his family were deprived of all of their property, and in 2011 he angered some in China with his article “Returning Mao Zedong to Human Form,” which boldly calculated the human cost of Mao’s brutal Communist policies from 1949 to 1976. The article led to calls for his prosecution and execution, with 50,000 left-faction members signing a petition that called for his imprisonment on charges of treason. Immediately following the article’s appearance he had to be surrounded by students to protect him from physical attack from zealots, while the government remained silent and neutral.

In 1993 he and five other economists founded the Unirule Institute of Economics, an independent Chinese think tank committed to the growth of a market economy and to reforming Chinese government policies.

In addition, Mao Yushi has been a pioneer in creating private charity and self-help programs in the People’s Republic of China and has helped countless people become independent members of society through the Fuping Development Institute and other initiatives. He believes that the more income an individual earns the more freedom an individual has, and has devoted himself to China’s transition from a planned economy to a free market economy.

For further research, here’s a Cato video about Mao Yushi’s life and activism, and this is an interview with Yushi in which he shares his thoughts about fellow Chinese dissident, and recent Silver Underground Rebel of  the Week, Chen Guangcheng, the blind activist and lawyer who escaped house arrest by eluding 90 guards under the cover of night and courageously shared the story of his family’s suffering with the world. China is a better place for the efforts of people like Chen and Mao.

The Cato Institute chose its Milton Friedman Prize winner well. I can’t help but wonder why more people like Mao Yushi don’t win Nobel Peace Prizes. Maybe he should launch some cruise missiles into an African country and hit some civilians in Pakistan with a drone strike like recent Nobel laureate, President Barack Obama. Even when the Nobel Prize Committee does select Chinese dissidents for a Nobel Peace Prize as it did in 2010, it puzzlingly picks one who advocates strongly for all of the United States’ wars(!), including Bush’s preemptive Iraq War, stokes Middle Eastern tensions by calling Palestinians provocateurs, considers Western imperialism a good thing, and has called Cold War era US foreign policy– including the Vietnam war– “ethically defensible,” and “good examples” of how war should be conducted in modern civilization. The Nobel Prize Committee might as well award Dick Cheney next.

Whatever. They can keep Nobel’s blood money. When I want to know who the real rebels on this planet are, I don’t look to the Nobel Prize Committee’s usually absurd Peace Prize laureates, just like when I want to know who has been the most influential on recent events, I don’t consult TIME Magazine’s Person of the Year. Instead, when I want to know who’s really sticking it to the man and fighting for a world of peaceful and voluntary cooperation between productive individuals pursuing their own separate creative interests, I can count on The Cato Institute’s biennial Milton Friedman Prize for Advancing Liberty.

Mao Yushi really earned it. I hope he puts some of it away in gold and silver.

And don’t forget to visit our official website to learn more about the Silver Circle Movie:http://SilverCircleMovie.com

(photo credit: BY CC BY-SA Paco Gómez/Flickr)

So naturally this headline was way too good to pass up for today’s Tinfoil Tuesday feature. What makes it especially fun is the wordplay on “Turkey” and “Bird,” making this sound like an inter-species squabble instead of an international one.

The Times of Israel reports that a Turkish farmer recently found the carcass of a dead Merops Apiaster, or European bee-eater, on his land and when he discovered a band on the bird’s leg inscribed with the word “Israel,” he alerted authorities. The Turkish Agriculture Ministry then turned the bird over to Ankara’s intelligence services for further investigation. While the band did spark Turkey’s initial interest in the bird, tracking birds with bands is a common practice by the ornithological community. What really raised suspicions was the bird’s single enlarged nostril, which led to Turkish speculation that Mossad surveillance equipment had been planted in the beak…

Apparently, the Turkish media has been abuzz with news about the Israeli “spy bird,” while Israeli officials and media are laughing about the speculation and concern, calling this another instance of the sour and suspicion-laden relations between Israel and its neighboring states like Turkey. Then again, if it were a spy bird, that’s exactly how we might expect Israeli officials to react. That doesn’t prove it is a spy bird, but their incredulity doesn’t prove that it isn’t either. Throughout the history of modern geopolitical spying and intelligence gathering, it wouldn’t be the weirdest thing that a government’s intelligence community has tried.

What makes the case especially interesting is that Davi Barker just reported last week in the Tinfoil Tuesday feature here at The Silver Underground that DARPA (the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency) has outsourced research to a facility in Israel where scientists are working on creating remote control insects that act as drones for the purpose of intelligence gathering, with the possibility of more sinister applications, such as delivering a lethal dose of arsenic to a target. Literally observing insects fly in wind tunnels while measuring nerve activity to specific muscles in order to develop the technology to control their flight is certainly a step beyond putting surveillance equipment in a bird’s beak and tracking it. If there’s serious lab research being conducted on the former, it would be unsurprising to learn that the latter is already happening.

Someone close to me who worked in intelligence for the US Department of Defense for years once told me that at one US intelligence facility during 1980s-era Cold War tensions, the military would receive packages of socks mailed from the Soviet Union. Apparently US intelligence would insert an agent who would wash his or her socks down river from Soviet nuclear facilities and mail them back to the United States where they could be examined for different radioactive particles and the DOD could infer just what kind of nuclear technology the Soviets had or were developing. When you get into the world of intelligence, stories that sound too far-fetched, too “tinfoil hat” to be true, just might be more plausible than you think.

Another interesting note on Davi’s Tinfoil Tuesday piece last week was the recent discovery of bees that literally drink human tears. It’s an adaptation they’ve made in order to get their daily value of salt. Apparently they’ll buzz around people’s faces, land on their eyes, and pretty aggressively persist despite swatting and blinking, even licking at a person’s closed eye slits until they get enough human tear liquid to satisfy their salt requirements. Creeeepy, huh?

Davi was interested in the practical applications of a remote-controlled tear-drinking bee drone that performs retina scans, but I was more fascinated by the poetic elegance of the idea– the government using bee drones to drink human tears for their salt content isn’t far off from what Western governments are doing already, using drones to protect their ability to extract minerals from other countries by feeding off of human tears– that is human suffering. A drone strike in an African or Middle Eastern country helps maintain hegemony over their resources and the monopolization of their resources via the petro-dollar to create artificial demand and value for a currency that otherwise holds no intrinsic value. The cost is civilian casualties and understandable resentment toward Western nations, particularly the United States.

I wonder if these remarkable and frightening applications of technology to intelligence gathering and even covert kill operations will come to horrific fruition, or if future generations will look at the notion of remote-controlled insect assassins and spy birds with the same level of ridicule as we would now view Joseph Stalin’s failed attempt to engineer a hybrid human-ape species of super-warriors of low intelligence, great physical strength, and no qualms about their living conditions.

If the state does manage to successfully co-opt and militarize nature, it will be a truly dark and malevolent “achievement” of human civilization and like the tear-drinking bees, it will metaphorically and powerfully epitomize the death and destruction wrought by humanity’s centuries-long experiment in absolute nation statism with its corresponding, ever-expanding militarism. Only something as vile, evil, and absurd as the absolutist, modern nation state could and would take the birds and the bees– a long-standing metaphor for life, fertility, and reproduction– and literally make them instruments of death, sterility, and extermination.

And don’t forget to visit our official website to learn more about the Silver Circle Movie:http://SilverCircleMovie.com

Why does coercive, fiat, central banking still even exist? There’s absolutely no special interest group outside of the central bankers and their direct beneficiaries (an elite and powerful group, but definitely a minority of human beings on this planet) whose lives and best interests aren’t threatened and undermined by central banking and fiat currency. If we can just help the people of the world to realize this, we’ll be well on our way to breaking the central banking clan’s hold on power. All their influence and power would evaporate in the face of a united opposition that refuses to play along with their game for a minute longer. It’s time to unite in our common interest together!

Here’s just how common our interest is:

Republicans should support sound money and oppose central banking because as long as the Republican Party can use central banking to hand out favors when it’s in power, it will never be accountable to the rank-and-file Republican voter. That’s why Republican voters are perennially disgruntled with their party leadership and elected officials.

Democrats should support sound money and oppose central banking for the same reason: because as long as the Democratic Party can use central banking to hand out favors when it’s in power, it will never be accountable to the rank-and-file Democratic voter. That’s why Democratic voters are also perennially disgruntled with their party leadership and elected officials.

Independents should support sound money and oppose central banking because the two main parties in America use the power of central banking to maintain power by handing out favors instead of actually courting voters with substantive policy reforms (instead of insincere pandering on the campaign trail).

Economic Conservatives should support sound money and oppose central banking because they oppose economic central planning and price fixing. Central banking is the most pervasive and egregious kind of central economic planning and fixes prices for the most important market in a modern economy, the capital market.

Economic Liberals should support sound money and oppose central banking because they oppose the exploitation and marginalization of the low-income working class, and nothing exploits or marginalizes working class people more than the subtle but substantial destruction of their hard-earned savings by the monetary expansion of central banking, which stealthily steals savings from workers to give to wealthy banking corporations at zero interest to loan back to the workers again at interest.

Social Conservatives should support sound money and oppose central banking because the strength and importance of marriages and the family unit are continually undermined by the ills of central banking: financial stress on families as prices rise due to inflation; a rampant credit and debt-driven culture of consumerism that gives advertisers more sway than parents over instilling values in their children; and endless overseas military interventions that keep families apart and leave children growing up in single parent households for years or even forever if their parent dies overseas.

Social Liberals should support sound money and oppose central banking because the money created by the central bank is handed out by the billions (both publicly by the US Treasury at the direction of the Congress and other executive departments, and secretly by the Federal Reserve itself) to foreign countries with abysmal human rights records, that repress and harm women and people of minority sexual orientations.

People Who Buy Groceries or Gasoline should support sound money and oppose central banking because the monetary expansion of the central bank only causes the price of groceries and gasoline to rise. Wages and salaries never keep pace with the rise in price of consumer goods, and the consumer is left with less and less purchasing power and therefore a lower standard of living. This is why so many working class Americans can’t shake the feeling that they’re working harder and harder for less and less.

Anti-War Liberals and Conservatives should support sound money and oppose central banking because the endless wars of preemption, nation-building, and foreign intervention will come to an end as soon as the government cannot borrow money created out of thin air to pay for them.

Civil Libertarians of All Stripes should support sound money and oppose central banking because the exponential growth of the unconstitutional surveillance state over the last decade has coincided with the exponential growth in the money supply and the money for these “national security” programs and agencies comes from the central bank.

Hipsters should support sound money and oppose central banking so that when the monetary system inevitably crashes and more people start to oppose fiat central banking, they can say they supported sound money before it was cool. Oh yeah– and central banking fuels the rampant consumerism and cynically profit-driven, mass-produced entertainment that hipsters hate.

Christians should support sound money and oppose central banking because the entire central banking system is grounded in and perpetuates a global economic regime of deceit, theft, and murder in violation of Christian values opposed to lying, stealing, and murdering. Also, Christians know that the government and central bankers are not God and cannot actually create wealth from nothing as they posit.

Atheists should support sound money and oppose central banking because atheists don’t believe in God or miracles, so they also know that the government and central bankers are not God and cannot actually create wealth from nothing as they posit.

Muslims should support sound money and oppose central banking because like Christians, their religion enforces values that oppose the deceit, theft, and murder that has been institutionalized by central banking and because the machinations of the global central banking system have disproportionately wrought so much havoc and suffering on the predominately Muslim populations of Middle-Eastern, oil-producing countries.

Jews should support sound money and oppose central banking because the law, poets, and prophets of the Tanakh (which Christians call the Old Testament) all explicitly assert the immorality and inherent oppressiveness of dishonest money systems like fiat central banking– another reason for Christians and Muslims (who both also consider these texts to be sacred and inspired) to oppose central banking.

Environmentalists should support sound money and oppose central banking because the money created by the central bank fuels the worst pollution and unchecked environmental destruction that happens on planet Earth year after year, even worse than that fueled by corporate profits.

Tea Party Activists should support sound money and oppose central banking because central banking is the number one reason for the one thing Tea Party activists exist to oppose: the unrestrained growth in the size, role, and influence of the federal government.

Occupy Wall Street Activists should support sound money and oppose central banking because the central banking system IS Wall Street.

Non-Americans should support sound money and oppose central banking because the central banking system has given the United States an unfair economic advantage over the rest of the world, an advantage that it unhesitatingly abuses the rest of the world to jealously maintain and safeguard.

Americans should support sound money and oppose central banking because their unfair advantage has come at the cost of their safety as Washington permanently entangles their affairs with the rest of the world; their economic prospects as the exportation of money and war has come to replace the job-creating exports of actual goods and services; and their future as inflation destroys their standards of living despite their temporary economic advantage (which is mostly enjoyed by the banking elite in America anyways), and as the central bank saddles their government with unsustainable debt levels that they are on the hook to pay.

And don’t forget to visit our official website to learn more about the Silver Circle Movie:http://SilverCircleMovie.com

You know, sometimes an action movie is just an action movie. I tend to take my movie recommendations from the liberty community, partially because a strong liberty theme makes it a more enjoyable experience for me, but also because at this point in my life I just can’t stomach very much state worship and I certainly don’t want to pay to see it. So, when Mark Edge from Free Talk Live (an admitted Captain-Amerophile) endorsed the film, and Ernie Hancock from Declare Your Independence basically called it military propaganda I knew I’d have to see it for myself.

Just in general I’ve been much more impressed with the Avengers movie franchise than the X-Men franchise, which is disappointing because I was always more impressed with the X-Men comic. But Avengers seems to have mastered the film adaptation of comic crossover, which is very exciting for the future of comic movies. Avid comic readers already know that often in the Marvel Universe to follow an entire story thread you’ll have to read a few issues from multiple titles, and with the X-Men, Fantastic Four, Silver Surfer, Daredevil and Spider Man all present on the big screen many fans wanted to see a crossover, but unfortunately intellectual property made it impossible. Hopefully the success of Avengers will motivate the owners of these characters to share the spotlight, and we’ll see more crossovers in the future. So, I walked into the movie excited just as a comic fan.

I wonder if people expected libertarian themes in Avengers on account of being written by Joss Whedon, who also wrote Firefly and Serenity. But I gotta tell you, other than a rant from Loki about the natural state of mankind being in subjugation, and the bad guys finally admitting that humans are “unruly and therefore unfit to be ruled” I didn’t see much in the way of liberty themes.  But I didn’t see the military propaganda either. The Avengers are cast as heroes, but other than a few select individuals in the ranks the military is more of less just the lesser of evils between two great powers. So slimy are the shadowy government leaders that Captain America questions his blind just-following-orders mentality. The State is just as obsessed with control as the villain, and ultimately the Avengers insist on remaining rogue agents.

What I did see in the film was an awesome action flick punctuated by great comedic dialog, and for my dollar that’s enough. But for those out there in the liberty movement who want to see movies that explicitly espouse the philosophy of liberty, I suggest you support those of us trying to make them.

One last tip. At the end of the credits there are two secret clips, so don’t leave the theater after the first one.

And don’t forget to visit our official website to learn more about the Silver Circle Movie:http://SilverCircleMovie.com

We’ve talked about it 100 times on the blog, but today I’d like to give some detailed information about this event in Lancaster, NH to not only inform, but possibly persuade some of you on the fence to attend.

PorcFest is not only an event but a part of my life. Every summer I look forward to packing up the car and heading about 3.5 hours north of Boston to visit a place I’ll always consider my “ideal home away from home”. This will be my fourth year and I’ve only seen it get better. It’s a place to catch up with Facebook friends you never see in person, learn extensively about the free-market of not only products and finance, but also the free-market of ideas. This week-long gathering has helped me become a more educated and mature person in my walk towards a life of liberty. Here is what the organizers want you to know:

This year, the Porcupine Freedom Festival will be held on June 18-24, 2012 in Lancaster, NH.

Haven’t heard of the Porcupine Freedom Festival? How about “Porcfest”, as it’s lovingly called for short? If you have heard of this festival, you know that you are not going to want to miss it. If you haven’t heard of Porcfest, here’s why you will want to be there this year….and every year after. In fact, why not just move to NH to be a part of this year round community?

Each year Porcfest grows bigger and better than the last. This year is no exception. What should you expect at this year’s Porcfest? Here’s a few things to share about what 2012′s Porcupine Freedom Festival has in store.

This year they have returning guests such as Stefan Molyneux and Robert Murphy. They also will have some new guests who have had the word reach them about the awesomeness which is PorcFest and are excited to make their first appearances. Most recently announced Porcfest will be welcoming world infamous financial freedom fighter, Jeff Berwick, the editor of The Dollar Vigilante and host of Anarchast.  As well, best-selling and Prometheus award-winning author F. Paul Wilson join us the lineup, only a month after the release of his concluding novel in the Repairman Jack series. In addition to speaking on his experiences as a libertarian writer, F. Paul will be officiating the Flash Fiction Contest for PorcFest attendees.

For those who had enough of that learning stuff in school, there is also plenty of fun in store. Parties, kids activities and socializing in “meat space” are important parts of Porcfest. From musical guests to some really smashing parties, there will be something for people of all ages. At the end of the day you can wind down in the in the Think Twice Theater, which will be showing both classic liberty-themed films, as well as the as-yet-unreleased Silver Circle and Chartarum.

With all of this, we have not even scratched the surface of what PorcFest is really all about. The Porcupine Freedom Festival was established by the Free State Project to gather together New Hampshire natives, settlers, and prospective movers to see what this whole movement and life in the Granite State is really like. To that end, they have realtors and representatives from the various communities to answer your questions about where to settle down. There will be recruiting agents and business folk to talk to you about finding employment and they will have politicians to report on their efforts and explain how you can run for office. There will also be a variety of activists will be on site who will be more than happy to get you involved in all manner of efforts that are already going on today.

Now you may be asking yourself how we are able to pull off a week-long festival for the low price of $35 per person. The answer is that we cannot. It takes a number of sponsors such as Silver Circle, Paysius.com, Shire Society, and the Porcupine Realtor to make this thing happen.

So you may not be someone who has a reason to advertise to the attendees of PorcFest. That’s totally fine, because we have created the VIP (Very Important Porcupine) registration just for you. For the affordable additional contribution of $75, you can be recognized with some extra Porcupine love reserved only for VIPs.  Register today to help us make this event as awesome as possible.

PorcFest – Liberty in our Life… Now.

Contact Porcfest:

General Inquiries - Info@Porcfest.com
Vending - Vend@Porcfest.com
Entertainment - Bands@Porcfest.com
Volunteer - Volunteer@Porcfest.com
Donations & Sponsorships - Sponsor@Porcfest.com

It’s important to note that Silver Circle is going to have some awesome events going on all through the week. Our rough-cut screening of the film on Thursday at 8pm, the Zoe Taylor Award, and our roundtable discussion with Stefan Molyneux will surely keep us busy! Please post on our Facebook page if you’d like to promote your event some more, we’d love to help out our fellow porcupines in anyway we can!

My full endorsement goes to this event and all of its wonderful-ness. Every year I learn more about economics, civil liberties, and localizing a community of liberty from the Porcupine Freedom Festival and no one-person or government could ever take this knowledge away from me – no matter how long I was indoctrinated in public schools…

Jeff Berwick, the author of a financial newsletter for free market and sound money advocates called The Dollar Vigilante, has really made a splash lately in the world of libertarian financial and economic commentary and investment advice, especially with the launch late last year of Anarchast, his new podcast for anarchists. It’s not hard to tell because without us coordinating with each other or even knowing, Silver Circle‘s own Megan Duffield and myself scheduled separate interviews with Jeff within a couple days of each other early last week. Megan’s interview was as the featured guest for Episode 24 of Anarchast. Just a couple days earlier, Jeff was the featured guest on my personal online radio podcast.

I was thrilled for the opportunity to speak with Berwick and ask him some serious personal questions about finance for sound money and free market advocates who believe our monetary system is on the verge of collapse. His answers were so helpful and informative that I decided to share them in a blog post here, especially after remembering that on a Silver Underground post I wrote earlier this year about just how bad the economy is, one despondent reader left a comment to vent her uncertainty about how to prepare for the coming economic storm, asking, “What are my options now?” and despairing, “Should I just begin building a decent sized cardboard hut on an abandoned lot or something?”

It’s a despair that I’m all too familiar with, but after talking to Jeff, I feel a little more empowered and prepared. Here’s what he said…

1. Invest your time and attention in economic knowledge.

Sound money advocates already understand the devastation wrought by central banking, but before venturing out into the world of business, finance, and investing, it is absolutely essential that you have a solid understanding of fundamental economic principles. You owe it to yourself as an enlightened and responsible citizen of the world to understand the study of human action. To that end, Jeff Berwick has a simple enough recommendation: Just read Henry Hazlitt’s classic book, Economics in One Lesson. You can’t graduate to applied personal finance until you have an explicit understanding of basic economic principles. Luckily, you don’t need to buy a dozen books or take college-level courses on economics (which would probably leave you less informed) in order to gain this understanding. This one book has all you need for a solid grasp of the fundamentals. The full text of Economics in One Lesson is available online for free here and here. Start reading!

Once you’ve got the basics of sound economics under your belt, you can graduate to applied personal finance.

2. Invest your income in paying off debts.

If you are in debt, it goes without saying that getting out of debt is obviously an urgent financial priority for you. During our interview, we didn’t spend a lot of time on this topic because building wealth and assets, not debts and liabilities, is a pretty self-evident principle of financial success; there are already a number of good non-libertarian resources out there for strategies to get out of debt; and I already understand how to stay out of debt and have never had any financial debts in my life (and I definitely selfishly used all the time I had with Jeff to ask questions that were pertinent to my own personal finances).

If you are already debt free, you can skip to the next step. If you aren’t, it’s important to budget your finances and come up with a plan to get out of debt. If you know that you have a serious debt problem, one of the most widely-acclaimed systems for getting out of debt comes from Christian financial adviser and motivational speaker, Dave Ramsey, who counsels people with debt to aggressively cut expenses to pay it off and “Live like no one else now, so you can live like no one else later.”

3. Invest your spare Dollars in something the Fed can’t print (gold or silver)

Here’s where I really needed to hear some advice from a financial adviser who believes in sound money. If you’re out of the debt hole and have income to spare after your expenses, what is the smart thing to do with it in light of our current economic and monetary situation? I put it to Jeff point blank: “Should I just buy gold or silver?” I elaborated a little first: “Let’s say I have a budding career as a writer and blogger, have enough income to cover the low expenses of my frugal lifestyle, and I never have less than $2,000 cash on hand in my checking account. I need a little bit of that– say $1,000– to stay very liquid as a buffer. I don’t like to have less than $1,000 in my checking account. But after paying my living expenses, any cash I have other than that buffer of $1,000 is just sitting there doing nothing but losing its value to inflation and I even risk losing it all if there’s a major run on the financial system and the banks go insolvent like Peter Schiff and others are predicting.”

I told Jeff that as a sound money advocate, I felt totally dumb asking the question, like I should already know that the answer is yes, but: “Should I just buy gold or silver?”

Jeff answered:

“Absolutely. If your reason for holding dollars is for savings and you won’t need it for something else in the near future, then put it into precious metals. If you’ve done that for the last ten years, you’ve obviously done very well. Gold has always held up its value against everything. If you price oil in gold, it’s still about $.20 a gallon… in our view, the U.S. dollar won’t exist five years from now, at least not in its present form.”

But where do you go to buy gold or silver, and can someone like me buy it in relatively small amounts without paying too much of a markup (too much “over spot“)? Jeff answered that local coin shops are one way to go and that at many of these there’s not a very big mark up for metals. Find out if there’s a coin shop in your area and compare their prices to the current spot price of the metal your looking at buying. Jeff also said it’s easy and affordable to buy gold and silver online. He mentioned GoldMoney and BullionVault as just two examples.

Jeff Berwick didn’t mention this, but when buying gold and silver, one resource you might find useful is Peter Schiff’s free 15-page report on common scams that hurt unsuspecting investors new to buying gold or silver.

4. Invest your spare spare Dollars in keeping your metal secure

Okay, so buy gold and silver as a reliable store of wealth that will hold its value whether or not the fiat monetary system crashes and burns. But where do you keep it? I’m as likely to lose a gold coin as I am to trade it to a farmer for a few weeks of food in a post-apocalyptic economy ten years from now (or trade it for a piece of junk boat so I can high tail it to Costa Rica). So should I keep my metal in my own personal possession? Stuff it under the mattress? Bury it in a jar in my back yard? Buy a safe to keep it in? Keep it overseas in a vault? Jeff answered:

“I recommend having some metal in your personal possession, but it doesn’t all have to be. People don’t understand owning metals anymore and the media and government make it seem crazy to store wealth in gold or silver, but yeah, get a safe. No one seems to have a problem with keeping a $30,000 car out in their driveway, but when you talk about keeping $10,000 or $20,000 in gold in your house people act like that’s crazy. Well go put it out on your driveway then, because that’s exactly what you’re doing with your car. So it’s just a matter of getting over the mental problem of just not being used to something. People get used to things quite easily, but until you’re used to them, new things can seem strange.

Because of the financial system today with government control of the banking system, you can’t as easily just buy gold and store it at a bank so we’re left to our own devices. I heard about this guy who had his house broken into recently. He actually had some gold and silver coins sitting out right beside his VCR and DVD player, and they stole the VCR and the DVD player and left the gold and silver. That just goes to show your typical criminal doesn’t know what gold and silver even is. He might have thought it was some sort of toy or trinket or something.”

As Jeff said, not all of your metal has to be in your personal possession, and he added that keeping some in overseas vaults (one example he named was Das Safe in Austria) could help diversify your risk and keep some of your metal safe from the reach of the US government itself should the government decide to criminally seize gold from its citizens’ possession as it has actually done once before, not letting them have it again until 1973. Jeff mentioned a report he offers called Getting Your Gold Out Of Dodge, that discusses how to keep your metal safe from government.

5. In case of collapse, invest your metals in business opportunities

My jokes about economic apocalypse aside, Jeff actually said that he believes the collapse of the dollar-based monetary system, while temporarily painful, will usher in a new era of bountiful opportunities to invest, start businesses, and create wealth. He said that those who survive the monetary collapse with the capital to take advantage of these opportunities will be the ones who profit from them, which is why it’s important to keep your savings in the form of reliably valuable commodities like gold or silver, and out of dollars and dollar-based investments where they will dramatically lose value in the event of a monetary collapse. After the dollar crashes hard, instead of trading your metal coins in for some food, you might just buy a whole farm.

And don’t forget to visit our official website to learn more about the Silver Circle Movie:http://SilverCircleMovie.com

The Fed wants to know if you have what it takes to stabilize the economy. Today you can give it your best shot with their online game that allows you to control the Federal Funds Rate, while simultaneously balancing unemployment and inflation at a stable level. Who knew it was that simple?

Click photo to play

Aren’t there a few things missing from this equation? Let us know in the comments how you do, or if they can you.

Play the game, pull the overly-simplified strings.

This summer we will be rolling out a new piece of merchandise, one that we can’t believe we’ve just now created. Pasha worded it best when he said:

“It has been hiding in plain sight for almost a hundred years, and I’ve been carrying it around in my pockets for almost half that.  No, I’m not talking about fiat currency – we were hip to that before it became cool.  No, I’m talking about the hidden Punisher logo inside of the Federal Reserve logo.  Once you see it, you’ll wonder what planet you were on for so long.”

Our newest addition to the t-shirt line up will be our menacing re-design of the Federal Reserve’s eagle logo. Every comic convention we attend, we see these shirts around every corner. People love the badass punisher shirt, but this time around we are going to give them a real life Punisher to show off…an economic Punisher.

In Silver Circle’s story, the Fed isn’t just this preposterous entity fixing interest rates and printing money. No, in 2019 the Fed has taken over the housing market and is now a vital part of the security and police force. No longer do regular banks even exist, the Fed has taken over the country while the government trails behind. People’s lives are of no significance as long as order is kept. For that, we’ve added these words to the back of our new shirt: Safety – Stability – Tyranny

Pasha’s proud moment came to him after a recent visit to a comic convention, and now his goal is to completely destroy their logo forever. We hope that all of our fans and more wear this shirt and spread the word to end this ponzi scheme once and for all (of course the movie will help with this exposition too!).

We’ll have the first run of the shirts available at the Puerto Rico Comic Convention and shortly after at PorcFest and online! So keep an eye out!