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posted by on Sunday April 16 2017, @10:06AM   Printer-friendly
from the raid-on-fort-knox dept.

Submitted via IRC for TheMightyBuzzard

A bill recently introduced in Texas seeks to obliterate the Federal Reserve's much-maligned monopoly on currency by establishing gold and silver as legal tender — but the groundbreaking legislation, if passed, would also prohibit those precious metals from being seized by State authorities.

[...] Senator Bob Hall introduced the bill last month, which, the Tenth Amendment Center explains, "declares specifically that certain gold and silver coins are legal tender, and prohibits any tax, charge, assessment, fee, or penalty on any exchange of Federal Reserve notes (dollars) for gold or silver. The bill authorizes the payment of taxes and fees in gold & silver in certain circumstances. It would also prohibit the seizure of gold or silver by state authorities."

Would this matter in a nation where money is mostly plastic nowadays anyway?

Source: http://thefreethoughtproject.com/texas-bill-gold-silver-money-federal-reserve/


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  • (Score: 2) by HiThere on Sunday April 16 2017, @05:49PM (1 child)

    by HiThere (866) Subscriber Badge on Sunday April 16 2017, @05:49PM (#494877) Journal

    Well, if it lost a quarter of its value then, it might NOW be a safe investment.

    FWIW, there *is* no safe investment. Not really. There are safer and riskier investments, and you also need to consider time frame and predicted events. If you're expecting civilization to collapse, then whiskey or rum might be the best investment. Or a collection of seeds. I don't worry about that, because I wouldn't live through it anyway, nor would nearly anyone living in a large city. Fires and hungry neighbors would ensure that. If you live in a really remote area, you might stockpile firearms, or even build a good blockhouse (think castle, and remember that the dungeon was mainly used for storing food). You'd best disguise it as a fancy barn, though, as you don't want to invite attack.

    For lesser collapses, currency metals are overpriced. But non-currency metals are hard to store and hard to dispose of. And if you ask someone else to store them, you've got to trust that someone else. Real property can be taxed by the government. Etc. There are multiple reasons that the stock market is considered the best investment, despite it's volatility. Banks are guaranteed to pay less than inflation, and currently that seems to include treasury bills. Bonds are relatively low risk, and often pay off at better than inflation, but the money is inaccessible if you need it.

    Basically all forms of money are social agreement, and those agreements change as circumstances change. Were I to invest in a hard currency, the safest one I can think of is monocrystaline silicon, but that's definitely subject to technological change, and we may be close to the transition where it will be replaced by something else, perhaps sheets of flawless diamond crystal ... though I'm not sure whether the nitrogen needs to be embedded at the time of construction or not. Even so, that transition won't happen until the cost of those sheets of flawless diamond drops considerably, so now's an extremely poor time to buy them. It'd be like buying aluminum in the late 1800's.

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  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday April 16 2017, @09:03PM

    by Anonymous Coward on Sunday April 16 2017, @09:03PM (#494943)

    Buying gold is speculation, not investing. Gold is too expensive to have much industrial use and non-industrial uses are mostly wearing and storing for trade later. It's a rather huge risk that only makes sense if society collapses in which case freeze dried food and ammo might be more helpful.