When I first saw this little story on the Consumerist, I thought it had to be a joke. But out of curiosity, I googled it — and came up with 113,000 hits, a flag-waving liberty dollar nutbar website, and a too-strange-to-be-true article in the Washington Post:
Once upon a time, a “monetary architect” named Bernard von NotHaus decided to make his own money.
[…] Liberty Dollars were coined by von NotHaus and an Evansville, Ind.-based group called Norfed, which stands for (sort of) the National Organization for the Repeal of the Federal Reserve Act and the Internal Revenue Code. In the late 1990s, the group began hawking its money as a hedge against inflation, and as a way to compete with the Fed. Von NotHaus makes the pitch online, using a raft of statistics and graphs that he says show the greenback is well nigh worthless.
[…] Norfed struck the first gold- and silver-backed coins — which, to avoid charges of making its own money it calls “rounds” — in 1998 at its private mint in Idaho. Today the group claims to have more than $20 million in Liberty coins and notes in circulation, and about 2,500 merchants who accept Liberty Dollars for goods and services from doughnuts to tattoos.
As it turns out, von NotHaus — whose name alone is almost too silly to be real — was about 90% nutjob and 10% visionary. Though he did accurately predict the U.S. dollar’s rapid decline into the toilet — something that seemed to catch most of the world’s top investment bankers totally off guard — his conspiracy theory about the greenback being part of a global scheme to defraud the world secures his spot in my nutjob book.
Oh, and governments don’t like it when you try to undermine their currency. The legal penalty for using von NotHaus’s “liberty dollars” in a shop is the same as it is for trying to pass off any other fake cash as the real deal: up to five years in prison.
But for some reason, that’s not where von NotHaus ended up. According to the Consumerist, he “quit the Liberty Dollar business and founded the ‘Free Marijuana Church‘ in Hawaii,” which claims to be “devoted to the religion of higher consciousness” and invites you to “open your door of perception and discover the God within your own mind with one free toke of marijuana.”
Okay, maybe I’ll give him 20% visionary.
2 responses so far ↓
1 Andy // Nov 22, 2008 at 4:00 pm
Why do you propose that Norfed coins are illegal? Of course, they are not “legal tender” (the whole point of legal tender is that a court can compel you to accept it as payment for goods or services).
It’s merely a voluntary scheme that allows vendors to choose to accept payment with liberty coins/dollars. So long as they don’t refuse to also accept customer’s Fed notes then they aren’t doing anything illegal so far as I’m aware.
BTW. The Fed also make silver and gold coins - I have a “liberty dollar” minted by them from the early 90s, though it’s metal is worth considerably more than US$1 so I wouldn’t spend it.
2 mark // Nov 22, 2008 at 8:13 pm
To be fair, I’m not sure it’s reasonable to threaten someone with jail time for minting non-official commemorative “money,” even if a few shops here and there decide they’re going to accept it like the real thing.
That said, when you mint coins, stamp “$20″ on them and bill your creation as an alternative to the national currency, you’re pretty much guaranteed to run into some legal difficulties…
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