Rebel of the Week: “The Liberty Dollar Guy”

American history is peppered with stories about brave men and women who stood up to special interests, establishment politicians, and oppressive decrees, taking on overwhelming odds in the process. The legacies of some of these upstarts include monumental shifts in culture or policy while others, despite their historic contributions, are known today only to a minority of the population. likely because they don’t fit in well with the whitewashed version of history taught in American public schools (We can’t have school children learning about Lysander Spooner, they might start thinking independently!).

This past week a court decided that a contemporary American upstart ought to be locked in a cage and so the title of Silver Circle: Rebel of the Week goes to a man with a name meant for the history books: Bernard Von Nothaus, the “Liberty Dollar guy.”

The story of Bernard Von Nothaus and the Liberty Dollar first caught my eye back in 2007. I remember reading that the US Secret Service had confiscated several million dollars worth of gold and silver to be used in an alleged counterfeiting scheme. Immediately, I wondered, “Why would someone make counterfeit money out of gold and silver, doesn’t that defeat the point of counterfeiting?” Upon researching the story further I found the truth, Von Nothaus was minting his own private currency which included solid gold, silver, and copper coins as well as paper notes backed by these metals. The Liberty Dollar was intended to be a sound alternative to the debt-backed US Dollar. Contrary to the government’s assertions, there was no fraud involved, just sound money backed by real assets.

Readers of this blog are likely familiar with reasons for the desirability of a gold/silver backed currency, but for the unfamiliar I’ll try to sum it up in a sentence. The US Dollar is a debt-based fiat currency, the value of  which has been steadily eroded over the last century; a gold/silver-backed currency gets its value from a tangible resource, the supply of which is finite and the value of which is stable.

In the trial, the government alleged that the Liberty Dollar constituted counterfeiting because it shared features found on the US Dollar. That may have been the case, but the last time I checked, US currency didn’t feature a website URL on it and there are plenty of other private currencies using the term “dollar.” If it truly is the case that the Liberty Dollar looks too similar to the US Dollar, then I argue that the Disney Corporation had better watch out because their currency looks even more similar.

Regardless of whether Bernard Von Nothaus’s Liberty Dollar looked similar or not, it is the spirit and principle behind his endeavor that is important. The US Constitution calls for a currency backed by gold and silver and the Federal government is derelict in its duty to adhere to that mandate. Von Nothaus, a sovereign citizen, stepped up to provide his fellow citizens a voluntary and sound alternative to holding debased US Dollars, only to be shut down by the Feds. Not only did they shut his operation down and steal over seven million dollars worth of his precious metals, the US Attorney prosecuting the case branded him a “domestic terrorist.” The same “public servant” went on to level a threat at anyone else who seeks to promote circulating gold or silver in place of the US Dollar (I wonder if filmmakers who promote this behavior also land in the “domestic terrorist” category?). Unfortunately for her and the back-room interests she represents, the people who have already abandoned the dollar won’t be scared back onto that sinking ship.

The Feds may think they have squashed this bug, but they have only added fuel to the fire. Reverse Gresham’s Law states that the good money will chase out the bad, and this attempt to shut out good currency will ultimately fail. The signs of a currency crisis have been manifesting steadily, and Von Nothaus’s Liberty Dollar is one of them. As the Feds print more money to pay for warfare and welfare, the dollar will continue its decline; as it declines people will continue to seek alternatives. When historians examine the final years of the US Dollar’s role as the world’s reserve currency they will likely note the alternative currencies that arose, of these the Liberty Dollar will undoubtedly be featured, and alongside it will be the name Bernard Von Nothaus, a real-life Silver Circle Rebel.

John Jones  is a USAF veteran who served in the American Air Force from 2005 to 2009 as an Afghan-Pashtu linguist and intelligence specialist. He is an activist to the core and loves writing on subjects regarding foreign policy, specifically the recent Wikileaks controversy, monetary policy, among other liberty minded topics. You can read more of his work at CrushingBastards.org. He was also featured as a Rebel of the Week in the past…