Alabama Senate Unanimously Passes Bill to Help Encourage Use of Gold and Silver as Money

By Michael Maharrey

Earlier today, the Alabama Senate unanimously passed a bill that would exempt the sale of gold and silver bullion from state sales and use tax, encouraging its use and taking the first step toward breaking the Federal Reserve’s monopoly on money.

Sen. Tim Melson (R-Florence) introduced Senate Bill 156 (SB156) on Jan. 11. The legislation would exempt the gross proceeds from the sale of gold, silver, platinum, and palladium bullion in the form of bars, ingots or coins from sales and use tax in the state for five years after the date of enactment.

The Senate passed SB156 by a 26-0 vote.

similar bill is moving through the Alabama House.

Imagine if you asked a grocery clerk to break a $5 bill and he charged you a 35 cent tax. Silly, right? After all, you were only exchanging one form of money for another. But that’s essentially what Alabama’s sales tax on gold and silver bullion does. By removing the sales tax on the exchange of gold and silver, Alabama would treat specie as money instead of a commodity. This represents a small step toward reestablishing gold and silver as legal tender and breaking down the Fed’s monopoly on money.

We ought not to tax money – and that’s a good idea. It makes no sense to tax money,” former U.S. Rep. Ron Paul said during testimony in support an Arizona bill that repealed capital gains taxes on gold and silver in that state. “Paper is not money, it’s fraud,” he continued.

The proposed law’s impact would go beyond mere tax policy. During an event after his Senate committee testimony, Paul pointed out that it’s really about the size and scope of government.

If you’re for less government, you want sound money. The people who want big government, they don’t want sound money. They want to deceive you and commit fraud. They want to print the money. They want a monopoly. They want to get you conditioned, as our schools have conditioned us, to the point where deficits don’t matter.

Practically speaking, eliminating taxes on the sale of gold and silver would crack open the door for people to begin using specie in regular business transactions.This would mark an important small step toward currency competition. If sound money gains a foothold in the marketplace against Federal Reserve notes, the people would be able to choose the time-tested stability of gold and silver over the central bank’s rapidly-depreciating paper currency.

BACKGROUND INFORMATION

The United States Constitution states in Article I, Section 10, “No State shall…make any Thing but gold and silver Coin a Tender in Payment of Debts.” States have simply ignored this constitutional provision for years. It’s impossible for a state to return to a constitutional sound money system when it taxes gold and silver as a commodity.

This Alabama bill takes a step towards that constitutional requirement, ignored for decades in every state. Such a tactic would set the stage to undermine the monopoly of the Federal Reserve by introducing competition into the monetary system.

Constitutional tender expert Professor William Greene said when people in multiple states actually start using gold and silver instead of Federal Reserve Notes, it would effectively nullify the Federal Reserve and end the federal government’s monopoly on money.

Over time, as residents of the state use both Federal Reserve notes and silver and gold coins, the fact that the coins hold their value more than Federal Reserve notes do will lead to a “reverse Gresham’s Law” effect, where good money (gold and silver coins) will drive out bad money (Federal Reserve notes). As this happens, a cascade of events can begin to occur, including the flow of real wealth toward the state’s treasury, an influx of banking business from outside of the state – as people in other states carry out their desire to bank with sound money – and an eventual outcry against the use of Federal Reserve notes for any transactions.

Once things get to that point, Federal Reserve notes would become largely unwanted and irrelevant for ordinary people. Nullifying the Fed on a state by state level is what will get us there.

WHAT’S NEXT

SB156 will move to the House for further consideration.

Michael Maharrey [send him email] is the Communications Director for the Tenth Amendment Center, where this article first appeared. He proudly resides in the original home of the Principles of ’98 – Kentucky. See his blog archive here and his article archive here. He is the author of the book, Our Last Hope: Rediscovering the Lost Path to Liberty. You can visit his personal website at MichaelMaharrey.com and like him on Facebook HERE

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3 Comments on "Alabama Senate Unanimously Passes Bill to Help Encourage Use of Gold and Silver as Money"

  1. Disregarding the material costs/benefits of taxes/interest, a serious question: How is taxing “money” wrong when applied to capital gains, or gold or silver, but perfectly fine to “tax” money in the form of interest charged on borrowed money?

  2. When Ron Paul says, “Paper is not money, it’s fraud,” he himself is perpetrating, or falling for, a fraud that has long been entrained in the mass mind by Elite programming. That is the notion that money itself must have some imagined value (store of value), instead of being what it should be, merely an accepted medium of exchange (standard of value).

    Specie has no intrinsic, that is, survival, value, as do food, water, land, and so on. It has only that which is assigned to it by programming or agreement. It’s just as much a fiat currency as paper. In fact, the acquisition of specie costs the environment so much damage that any influence that would increase demand for it threatens planetary integrity in a major way. There are few human activities more damaging to ecosystems than gold mining – and mining in general (copper also especially bad). If cost to the planet were figured into the value of gold, it would come up negative. It is only by lying to ourselves that we can regard specie as valuable.

    But cost-to-planet is never figured into the costs in Economics 101 gobbledegook or any system predicated upon liquidating our source of life, converting it into things, to drive a toxic and suicidal consumer orgy. It’s not fundamentally different from ‘daddy’ leaving his son a thriving business which he proceeds to turn into cash and fritter away.

    With due respect to the Constitution, things were very different when it was written. Gold and silver as money is now massively impractical. Can you imagine the drudgery of transporting amounts of gold in “regular business transactions”? And it blows my mind that one could consider amassing huge amounts of it in a vault to ‘back’ a paper currency a sane idea. Using, or returning to, gold as currency is NOT the “small step” needed to overcome the Fed. All this will do is perpetuate a suicidal mentality about economics and hasten the destruction of the planet.

    Gold enthusiasts seem to think gold has ‘mind of its own,’ and is a weapon against tyranny. Nonsense. Who, do we think, manages the mining, refining and marketing of gold, if not the same force that orchestrates the corporatocracy, runs the banking establishment, governments, and society itself? I’d wager the Cabal is holding more gold than most countries and could crash the value of it any time by dumping it on the market.

    The Fed, per se, is not the ‘enemy,’ it’s a symptom of it. Needed much more is widespread realization that our way of life is a toxic, decadent program and has led directly to the production of a child with cancer every hour in the US—just to mention one small thing. Needed also is realization that ‘sustainable development’ under eternal economic growth with finite resources and space, and the ‘green-energy future’ are Elite psyops designed to keep their profitable Earth-sacrifice going, while they deliberately poison, sicken, dumb down, sterilize, and murder us.

    Brzezinski told us in “The Grand Chessboard” that Middle East chaos is a long-range plan for control of the resources of “Eurasia,” essential for global control, the penultimate step to global control. We should be much more concerned about that insane, satanic Agenda and the fast-approaching technocracy (also posited by “Zbig”), wherein thoughts and feelings will be monitored and changed remotely by push-button digital control.

    Maybe we need to consider that we’re so far down the wrong road, not just politically and governmentally, but in our fundamental beliefs and sense of reality, population levels, and techno-addicted way of life, that attempting to rescue government, economics, and finance prior to a remarkable evolution in mass consciousness will be like trying to fix a watch with a pipe wrench. Preventing such an evolution is a primary Elite goal. What they fear the most is widespread realization that the reality they’ve been selling and nurturing is a prison and death trap—even when it has appeared to work properly and been entertaining.

  3. Unfortunately, gold and silver are only good as “investments” when the world is functioning. When the electric stops and the looting starts, you won’t be able to get a single meal for a pound of gold. Metal is worthless in times of crisis. Shelter, food, and clean water is what you will need. Sell your gold now and fortify your home, buy guns and ammo, and stockpile food and water. When the end comes, it’ll be too late.

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