Attribute to L. Neil Smith’s The Libertarian Enterprise

"Economist F.A. Hayek wrote that it was entirely possible that a high-quality private money could compete with a government money. But who would step out and make the attempt? What entrepreneur would dare come forward and offer up an alternative as a product in the consumer market? Bernard von NotHaus was the man."

—Jeffrey Tucker,
Bitcoin's Brilliant Combination, 11 September 2013

Way back in December 1998, I first got involved with a group that wanted to pay my expenses in digital gold. They asked me to start an e-gold account, so I did. My account number was within 1,600 of the very first of those accounts. Many years later, there were hundreds of thousands of active e-gold accounts and billions of dollars of economic transactions in e-gold, GoldMoney, e-Bullion and similar digital gold currencies. Early the next year, 1999, I attended a conference and met Bernard von NotHaus. He had a really interesting product. His product was silver money.

When I was born, there was silver in the money. Dimes, quarters, and half dollars were 90% silver. After he and his friends organised his succession to the presidency, Lyndon Baines Johnson declared that silver was "too valuable" to be used as money, and demonetised silver. His successor, Richard Milhous Nixon eliminated the last tie to gold, making it impossible even for foreign governments to redeem their USA dollars for gold. Since that time, the middle class in America have been almost entirely eliminated, the disparity between the wealthiest and the poorest has grown greater, and the system of privilege for an elite fraction of one percent of the country's population has become so corrupt as to stink to the very heights of heaven.

When I was ten years old, my very favourite aunt, my great aunt Dori, gave me a silver dime. She told me to hang onto it because it would always mean something. I still have that coin. When I first began working with Spencer MacCallum, he gave me a silver "deka" which was a ten gram silver piece minted for the Atlantis Project by Werner Stieffel. And when I first met Bernard von NotHaus, he sold me some very nice silver pieces that had a suggested value of $10. I still have some of those.

There are three men who saw the need for monetary architecture since the hyperinflation of the 1920s that destroyed Germany and Austria. The first of these men, E.C. Riegel noticed that anyone who actually produced something of value was suitable to issue money, because such a person would always be willing to redeem their money for the things (goods or services) they produced. Riegel pointed out that the very worst entities for issuing money are governments, because they produce nothing, but only take from others. Riegel did not issue any money himself.

In 1976, Friedrich Hayek, a Nobel prize winning economist, wrote "Denationalisation of Money" which he revised in 1990 in his third edition. Hayek pointed out that privately issued money in competition would bring about radical improvements in the features of money. He saw the need for a monetary architect to bring real value to the world. Hayek did not mint any money himself.

Bernard von NotHaus saw the theories, he saw the hyperinflation that was disastrous in Yugoslavia in the early 1990s, he had experience creating silver pieces for the Royal Hawai'ian Mint, and he knew what to do. But many men and women in the world have known what to do, have known what was the right thing to do, and have either neglected to do those things, or refused to do them, or procrastinated. In 1998, Bernard did what others would not. He created silver pieces that were beautiful, that were valuable, and that spoke to the conditions of that time. He put an image of Liberty on the obverse, words about his group the National Organisation for the Repeal of the Federal Reserve and the IRS on the back, and he put a value in dollars on the silver pieces. He also had very well designed paper money issued that represented warehouse receipts for silver in actual storage. They were also one of the few paper monetary instruments that were easily handled by blind persons since each denomination was of a different length of paper.

Hundreds of thousands of people all over America were able to see Liberty Dollar silver pieces or Liberty Dollar paper warehouse receipts, or e-Liberty Dollar digital warehouse receipts. They were able "To Know Value." They were able to hold it in their hands.

One of Bernard's favourite things to do was something he described as "Do the drop." Drop a silver piece into someone's hand, or onto a counter. Let the weight of the silver, the honesty, the integrity of that silver piece be felt in the hand. Let the ring of silver value be heard from the countertop. It was the ring of value heard 'round the world.

It is difficult to describe how much Bernard's courage, fortitude, and willingness to do the right thing has meant in my life. It is clear to me from the people I have met, innovators, inventors, pioneers in the crypto-currency economy, people who have designed systems and built fortunes based on the need to have decentralised money available to the world, who have set about creating true financial autonomy for every individual, that very many of these men and women who knew of Bernard's work were deeply, personally and positively affected by Bernard actually creating real money, actually going out and putting it into people's hands.

The times we live in are disgusting in many ways. Politics has become synonymous with corrupt politics. The same people who overthrew many foreign leaders were responsible for the assassination of Jack Kennedy, his brother Bobby, Martin Luther King, Jr., and many others. Those same people and their successors have committed heinous crimes, murdered vast numbers, and committed outrages on innocent men, women, and children. Any examination of the size of the so-called "national" debt, the ongoing wars in Iraq, Afghanistan, Somalia, Yemen, Libya, Syria, and elsewhere, any thorough-going look at what passes for "national policy" on any number of topics such as drugs, prisons, borders, transportation, food production, pharmaceuticals, or banking (to name only a few) reveals a privileged elite hurting and killing many other people for their personal gain. At the very heart of these matters is a law passed in 1913 by extremely evil men in Congress and signed into law by a monumentally horrid racist war monger, Woodrow Wilson, the Federal Reserve Act.

Many men called for the repeal of that act. Bernard von NotHaus not only said it was time, but showed the way to get beyond a corrupt cartel of evil banking gangsters and have real value in circulation. That Bernard was attacked by those in power and made to suffer for his work, including a year of probation, is what one has come to expect from a system designed to be so very terrible that its seat of power is now widely referred to as "Mordor on the Potomac."

Bernard and I spoke on the phone today. It was great to hear his voice again. He is one of the most honourable souls I have ever met in my journeys on this planet. I have had the honour of having him as a guest in my home, and have worked with him for many years. He has written a new book you can find on Amazon, " One Toke to God" and is writing an anniversary book about his experiences with the Liberty Dollar. Since I have not read either book, it seems appropriate to give them enormous credit as tremendous books—since there are people who have demanded that books they never read, such as Mark Twain's Huckleberry Finn be banned, I see no reason not to encourage readers to find and buy Bernard's books. I will, and when I've read them, will be delighted to review them. Soon.

Meanwhile, if you ever have the opportunity to meet Bernard von NotHaus, you will want to avail yourself of that opportunity. There are people who talk, and there are people who do, and there are a few, a very few, who set forth on the journey to change what is corrupt, decadent, and terrible in our world. The work has begun.

It continues with crypto-currencies, with new blockchain tools for digital gold such as the Hayek and Hercules tokens, and with second generation cryptocurrency systems like Ascension and SilentVault.com. It will continue until the last government-privileged banker has lost his elite banking licences and the last corrupt government official has been removed from office, until mankind is finally free. We who choose to free ourselves, and others, will free the slaves, stop the wars, and end the state.

A man for our times began his most important work in 1998. The counter-top ring of silver value heard 'round the world is more vital than that 1775 shot. Bernard von NotHaus will never be forgot.

 

Jim Davidson is an author, entrepreneur, and world traveller. He has written four books, thousands of essays, and hundreds of business plans. You can find him online if you turn over a few web pages. Some of his sites include indomitus.net and resilientways.net some of his videos are at resilientways.tv and his book on Amazon is "Being Sovereign."