U.S. government sued over seizure of Liberty Dollars

By Joseph Goldstein
New York Sun
Friday, June 20, 2008


The federal government's attempt to stop a group of gold-standard activists from minting an alternative to the greenback is about to face its first legal test.

A dozen people around the country filed suit in U.S. District Court in Idaho this week demanding the return of all the copper, silver, gold, and platinum coins -- more than seven tons of metal in all -- that the FBI and Secret Service seized in November during raids of a mint in Idaho and a strip mall storefront in Indiana.

The Justice Department had decided that the coins, many of which bear the familiar symbol of Lady Liberty and the phrase "Trust in Gold," were being illegally marketed as government-sanctioned currency, according to the sworn affidavit of an FBI agent.

The creator of the coins, Bernard von NotHaus, who lives in Miami, claims that the federal government is trying to shut down production of his liberty dollars, as the coins are called, because of the competition they pose to the greenback. In recent years his precious metal coins have outperformed the dollar, whose value has plunged in relation to gold.

The raids in November were the result of a two-year undercover investigation of Mr. Von NotHaus and how he sold liberty dollars. The Justice Department has not followed up with any criminal charges against Mr. Von NotHaus or the regional distributors of his coins.

In the suit filed in Idaho, the various plaintiffs say the federal government has no right to continue holding onto their coins any longer.

While it is common for agents to warehouse property seized during criminal investigations, such as firearms or surveillance equipment, the plaintiffs say coins of precious metal should be off-limits.

The coins "do not constitute contraband or other property subject to seizure," the legal papers state, adding that the seizures violated the Fourth Amendment rights of the plaintiffs.

For the most part, the plaintiffs had possessed bearer certificates for the silver liberty dollars that were being warehoused in Couer d'Alene, Idaho, at a mint. The mint, Sunshine Minting, is one of the sites that federal agents raided.

In an unusual request, the plaintiffs ask for an order, at the very least, forbidding federal agents from touching or moving the coins so that they are not dirtied in any way.

"Mishandling numismatic material can negatively impact value," the legal papers say.

A spokesman for the Justice Department, Charles Miller, said that the agency had not yet seen the legal papers and could not comment.

E-mail messages circulating among Liberty Dollar enthusiasts have expressed fears that the federal government intends to publicly auction off the coins. There has been no public announcement indicating that to be the case. The U.S. attorney's office in Asheville, N.C., which led the investigation that prompted the raids last November, did not return several calls for comment over the last few weeks.

Mr. Von NotHaus markets his coins via the Internet as an inflation-proof currency and claims that between 100,000 and 250,000 Americans own them. They have attracted the interest of coin enthusiasts, as well as critics of the Federal Reserve.

A 1999 report by the Southern Poverty Law Center said that many of the stores that accepted liberty dollars "are run by men and women connected to the radical right." The coins have caught on particularly well in Asheville, N.C., and Austin, Texas, and are accepted by some merchants there.

More than 50,000 of the coins seized last year bear the likeness of Rep. Ron Paul, whose monetary policies Mr. Von NotHaus supports.

"About a quarter of a million people holding liberty dollars are almost up-in arms -- not up in arms yet, but almost -- about having their property seized, and rightly so," Mr. Von NotHaus told The New York Sun yesterday.

* * *

Fed up with the Federal Reserve...

We've Been Told Not to Imagine
a World Without the Federal Reserve.
Maybe We Should.

By Alvaro Vargas Llosa
The New Republic
Wednesday, November 28, 2007

WASHINGTON -- Recently the Washington Post carried a front-page story about a federal raid on the headquarters of the National Organization for the Repeal of the Federal Reserve Act and Internal Revenue Code (Norfed). The Indiana-based company, which advocates "sound money," has been selling coins and paper certificates backed by gold and silver for years, in effect trying to compete with the dollar.

The government ignored Norfed's "Liberty Dollars" for a long time -- until the group started selling thousands of coins with Ron Paul's likeness to show support for the Republican presidential candidate. Paul also wants to abolish the Federal Reserve.

To the public at large, the activities of Norfed seem utopian, naive, and even downright fraudulent. The idea that the world's greatest economy could be run without a central bank and private parties could replace the government as issuers of currency is one that many people will find scary. With the dollar in something of a free fall and the United States in the midst of a housing and credit crisis that has sent some of the nation's top CEOs packing, Americans will be looking for financial security, not monetary adventures.

And yet it is precisely in such a financially wobbly environment that the actions of Norfed should invite a critical look at the way money is managed. Some of the country's greatest economists, including Nobel Prize winners, have been saying for years that the Federal Reserve has probably caused more problems than it has solved since its creation in 1913. Its role in the last century's boom-and-bust cycles is a matter of record; it looks as though it played a similar role in the current housing market crisis too.

While the creation of the Federal Reserve was essentially a response to a series of bank runs, those crises were mild compared to the ones that were to follow. In 1913 the United States was under the gold standard. Although the government issued currency, the fact that currency was tied to gold meant that the authorities could not manipulate the money supply easily. The Fed's initial mission was to guarantee the convertibility of deposits into currency on demand. A few decades later the United States abandoned the gold standard and the Federal Reserve became the country's most powerful economic institution, exercising its monopoly in issuing currency based on the discretionary power of its board of governors.

All in all, financial instability has been far greater since the creation of the Federal Reserve. What did the Great Depression teach us? Essentially that even with the best of intentions, it is impossible for the authorities to manage the supply of money in accordance with the exact needs of the economy.

A country's economy is the sum of millions of people making decisions that no single individual is in a position to anticipate. As the economist Murray Rothbard showed in his book "America's Great Depression," in the 1920s the Federal Reserve pumped up the money supply, expanding credit by more than 60 percent. Because the economy was very productive, this monetary expansion did not show up in the regular inflation figures. But, as is always the case with inflation, many resources went to the wrong kind of investments -- until the crisis hit.

The late Milton Friedman showed how the Fed made things worse by not providing the system with enough liquidity once the Depression was obvious.

The current housing market and debt market crises are in good part the children of the Federal Reserve. By cutting rates 13 times between 2001 and 2003 and then keeping them very low for years, monetary policy contributed to the housing bubble. That is not to say that other factors -- including financial instruments that made it difficult to see that the underlying foundation was not as solid as it seemed -- did not play a part too. But once again the Fed has turned out to be a factor of financial instability.

In this context, Norfed's attempt to prove to the Fed that the market is ready to trust private currency backed by gold is a welcome occasion to take a second look at some of the economic institutions we take for granted. Naive and utopian? You bet. But that is probably because of how far the world has moved from the time when money was too important to be left to the politicians.

----

Citing Liberty Dollar, Rep. Paul offers Free Competition in Currency Act

Statement by U.S. Rep. Ron Paul
U.S. House of Representatives, Washington, D.C.
Thursday, December 13, 2007

Statement Introducing the Free Competition in Currency Act

Madame Speaker, I rise to introduce the Free Competition in Currency Act. This act would eliminate two sections of US Code that, although ostensibly intended to punish counterfeiters, have instead been used by the government to shut down private mints. As anti-counterfeiting measures, these sections are superfluous, as 18 USC 485, 490, and 491 already grant sufficient authority to punish counterfeiters.

The two sections this bill repeals, 18 USC 486 and 489, are so broadly written as to effectively restrict any form of private coinage from competing with the products of the United States Mint. Allowing such statutes to remain in force as a catch-all provision merely encourages prosecutorial abuse. One particular egregious recent example is that of the Liberty Dollar, in which federal agents seized millions of dollars worth of private currency held by a private mint on behalf of thousands of people across the country.

Due to nearly a century of inflationary monetary policy on the part of the Federal Reserve, the US dollar stands at historically low levels. Investors around the world are shunning the dollar, and millions of Americans see their salaries, savings accounts, and pensions eroded away by rising inflation. We stand on the precipice of an unprecedented monetary collapse, and as a result many people have begun to look for alternatives to the dollar.

As a proponent of competition in currencies, I believe that the American people should be free to choose the type of currency they prefer to use. The ability of consumers to adopt alternative currencies can help to keep the government and the Federal Reserve honest, as the threat that further inflation will cause more and more people to opt out of using the dollar may restrain the government from debasing the currency. As monopolists, however, the Federal Reserve and the Mint fear competition, and would rather force competitors out using the federal court system and the threat of asset forfeiture than compete in the market.

A free society should shun this type of strong-arm action, and the Free Competition in Currency Act would take the necessary first steps to freeing the market for competing currencies. I urge my colleagues to support this bill.

Liberty Dollar (backed by P.M.)

If you're wondering the reason why the FEDs are trying to knock the Liberty Dollar concept down (before it spreads like wildfire!), then take a look at this short video (made before the FED raid) for your answer...