The last time your kid got a bad grade in school from a teacher who could not teach, what did you do? Did you tell your child not to worry about it, it was the fault of the teacher, the pubilc school system or the government, or did you perhaps say to your kid that life is not fair and sometimes you just have to work harder than usual to get the job done?

When your friend (who you know takes a lot of “personal days” off at work) was laid off from her factory job and complained that it was because she was a woman, did you tell her that she shouldn’t sue?

We all do things in the course of our lives that encourage the rest of society to shirk responsibility on a bigger scale to another location. If you really want to keep the Federal Government out of our lives, you need to support officials like Senator Folmer and then start at home where the roots of the grass really grow. Freedom-Choice-Consequences-Accepting Responsibility = More Freedom Teach your children well.

“A good place to get the low down on this would be lew rockwell.com ”

Excellent site Patrick, thank you!

A good place to get the low down on this would be lew rockwell.com or any one versed in the Austrain school of economics. Any way, bottomline is it is not an issue or impairment to growth.

I wonder if going to to gold Standard would force down prices because of current gold/silver inventories. there are 300 million pieces of bread in this country and only so much butter to go around…

The Constitution authorizes the federal government to emit “bills of credit,” but withholds this power to the States. “Bills of credit” are paper notes that promise “to pay the bear on demand” a certain sum of gold or silver coin. During the civil war, the federal government floated interest free treasury notes that promised to pay the bearer at some indefinite point in the future. This was money issued debt free directly by the federal government, by-passing the greedy bankers. No interest on the national debt was incurred. Uncle Sam promised to redeem the notes, but did not say when. People could accept them if they wanted, or reject them.

Later, the federal government wanted to make the notes a “legal tender.” A “legal tender” means that the creditor MUST accept them, or the debt will be extinguished. For example, if I contract with you to pay 100 ounces of gold for your building me a factory, if I tender payment in watermelons, you can reject it. I have not made a “legal” tender. A legal tender is one that meets the terms of the contract. An essential principle of contract law is that a creditor or promisee cannot reject a legal tender, and if he does the debt will be satisfied.

The effect of the federal government’s making treasury notes a legal tender was that all creditors had to accept them at penalty of their debt being extinguished as a matter of law. Thus, a contract to pay in gold or silver could suddenly be paid with treasury notes (paper) with no certainty they would ever be redeemed. Quite the boon for debtors! Imagine being able to pay off you mortgage by mailing your lender a roll of toilet paper!

Naturally, this was challenged in court as a “taking without due process.” The U.S. Supreme Court first ruled it unconstitutional. Then, through a court packing scheme and the opening up of a seat or two through the death of other sitting justices, the very next session the case was overturned! Now, suddenly the federal government had power to annul private contracts by making worthless, irredeemable paper a legal tender. (See the Legal Tender Cases.) With this precedent in place, it was only a matter of time before the “promise to pay the bearer on demand” disappeared from our money altogether. Further, by getting legislation in place giving the power of the U.S. Treasury to a private central bank (The Federal Reserve) all limit on the power of the federal government to spend, spend, spend was removed.

Now, instead of taxing us to get money, the federal government just borrows paper notes into circulation. Because they are a legal tender, people must accept them. Now, by flooding the economy with paper the relative value is reduced proportionately the more that is put in circulation. This is a principle of supply and demand, sort of like watering down the milk. Government no longer has to come to us through taxation to get real money (gold or silver) to run itself, it just prints, prints, prints away. And the banksters collect interest on the whole thing when if the Treasury was issuing the note there would be no interest at all!

This allows government to engage in out of control growth and out of control spending. There are no limits to what it can do…that is, until they flood the economy with so much money that it loses all value totally. That is were we are today. The dollar is doomed to crash and all of us with it.

Only by a Constitutional Amendment specifically prohibiting the power to declare money a legal tender and promising the people the right to coin and circulate money of their own can accountability be kept in place and an honest money system be preserved.

And the size and power of government will be restrained and freedom ring!

But economics definitely ain’t my forte, so I’ll quit right there.

Commodity money (gold/silver) is the only true money and since government cannot create wealth, to get real money government must levy taxes, which there is a definite limit political realities will allow. Witness California. The voters refused to be taxed more and because California cannot print money, it was forced to cut back on the size and expense of govenrment. The same is true of Washington: Shut down the printing presses and government will be returned to WE THE PEOPLE. However, once money is divorced from gold or silver, the government can do ANYTHING it wants by borrowing monetized debt into circulation. This is what has been happening in the US for decades under the Federal Reserve System, and it is this, not the income tax, that has brought our nation to the brink of ruin.

If we want to get our nation on sound financial and monetary basis, we must abolish the Federal Reserve and reinstitute a gold or silver standard, as called for by the Constitution.

“No State shall coin money, emit Bills of Credit [paper money], make nay thing but gold and silver coin a tender in payment of debts” Art. I, Sec. 9.

The federal government can emit bills of credit (sometimes a necessary evil in times on war when money and credit are tight), but to make paper money a “legal tender” unbacked by gold or silver it has no legal authority to do. Moreover, since the Federal Reserve is a consortium of private banks and not part of the government, it violates the Constitution which gives Congress alone power to “coin money and regulate the value thereof.” (Notice that “money” is ultimately coin – gold & silver coin, not irredeemable paper.)

One useful thing we can all do to help this process along is to ask our Congressman to be a co-sponsor of Ron Paul’s HR 1207 to audit the Federal Reserve. There are 186 co-sponsors right now from both parties. There will never be another opportunity like now to make a fundamental change in our system. Please ask your congressman to co-sponsor HR 1207.

Next, we should realize that Washington is almost certainly beyond reform. The fix is in at the top for presidential campaigns. No true conservative who is serious about restoring Constitutional government to America will ever get near the White House. The last presidential campaign was a perfect example. Out of the available candidates, not one (except Ron Paul) even talked about restoring the Constitution. Huckabee, Giuliani, Romney, McCain are all establishment, politicians who would only have continued “business as usual” in Washington: More government, more print & spend fiat money, more loss of reserved States’ Rights.

Moreover, the idea that a Republican Congress can save us is pretty wishful thinking. Most republican candidates don’t have a clue about economics or the printing press money. Most Republican candidates are little better than “soft” Democrats, “moderates” who would compromise principle to broaden their appeal and win control. In short, more George Bush Sr.’s and George Bush Jr.’s who together have destroyed the Republican Party and delivered the White House to a radical socialist (who does not even appear to be a Natural Born citizen of the U.S. or at least is resisting all attempts to see his long form birth certificate which alone can settle the question) – a radical socialist, we say, who only the day before yesterday declared June “Lesbian, Gay, Bi-sexual, and Transgender Pride Month.” Thanks George!

No. We must demand a Constitutional Convention called by the States to propose Amendments. A Constitutional Convention cannot enact Amendments, it can only propose them. Any Amendment to the Constitution – whether proposed by Congress or by the States in a Convention – can ONLY be ratified by 3/4 of the State Legislatures. Hence there is no danger from a Convention. Just the opposite: certain ruin lies ahead if we do nothing.

We need Amendments radically down-sizing Washington DC and returning our Constitutional form of government back to the ORIGINAL INTENT of the founders, rather than the perverted thing 100-years of bad case law and federal usurpation have straddled us with. Anything less than this and we are just fooling ourselves and wasting our time.

If this doesn’t work, I believe our only remaining option is to work for State Secession from the Union. We simply have no interest in Washington’s agenda, its “new world order”, its print & spend economics, its anti-Christian policies, its abortion on demand, its “gay pride”, its trillion-dollar world empire, or its impending economic ruin and collapse.

States like Texas and others need to break away and gain their independence – for our CHILDREN’S SAKE – for it is they who will suffer most if we continue with “business as usual.”

God’s blessings,

Where you’re going wrong is that the constitution does not authorize such a scenario. And I very highly doubt that a single state in this union grants that kind of power (which is really a legislative, not an executive function) to its chief executive officer.

I appreciate the work and efforts of the people at FOAVC, but we disagree on a couple of fundamental issues. For instance, the main jist of the FOAVC site is that Congress is denying the States an Article V Convention when the states have met the constitutional requirements for calling a convention on numerous occasions. Well, that is true to an extent. But if you’ll look at the petitions themselves, they span decades and decades of time. There’s not been a concerted effort by the states to petition Congress to call a convention for proposing amendments that is within a reasonable timeframe – say 20 years, just for the sake of argument. So, is it that Congress is actually denying to the states what the states want and demand, or, is it that Congress simply doesn’t pay any attention to it because, as I said, these petitions span decades of time. The folks at FOAVC would argue (I know because I’ve argued with them about it) that it doesn’t matter how many decades of time, nor how many generations come and go, the petitions are on record and Congress is bound by the provisions of Article V to call a convention, therefore. That’s the end of the discussion as far as they’re concerned.

So, in my opinion where you’re going right is more important than where you’re going wrong. And that is that there needs to be a concerted movement among the States within a reasonable timeframe in order to make such a thing happen. Congress would listen then, I can guarantee you.