Tuesday, November 20, 2007

That's interesting logic

Via WaPo - In Paul They Trust (The Feds May Differ)
Federal agents on Thursday raided the Evansville, Ind., headquarters of the National Organization for the Repeal of the Federal Reserve Act and Internal Revenue Code (Norfed), an organization of "sound money" advocates that for the past decade has been selling a private currency it calls "Liberty Dollars." The company says it has put into circulation more than $20 million in Liberty Dollars, coins and paper certificates it contends are backed by silver and gold stored in Idaho, are far more reliable than a U.S. dollar and are accepted for use by a nationwide underground economy.

[. . .]

News of the raid lit up Ron Paul online forums yesterday, the latest unlikely episode in a campaign that began as an idiosyncratic bid by the veteran congressman but has grown into a cause with the potential to influence the GOP contest. Paul, 72, has attracted droves of disaffected Republicans and independents to his platform, which includes ending the war in Iraq, abolishing the Internal Revenue Service and adhering to a strict libertarian interpretation of the Constitution.

[. . .]

"People are pretty upset about this," said Jim Forsythe, head of the Paul Meetup group in New Hampshire, who said he recently ordered 150 of the copper coins. "The dollar is going down the tubes, and this is something that can protect the value of their money, and the Federal Reserve is threatened by that. It'll definitely fire people up."
So let me get this straight, this is an organization that is trying to undermine the US dollar in an attempt to bring back the gold standard or silver standard or some non-fiat currency. They have been circulating their private currency for some time now, as a way to undermine legal US currency. They are now using the falling exchange rate of the dollar as justification for their actions. This seems like self-justifying logic to me: "we can try to make something bad and then complain when it turns bad." Yeah, that's reasonable.

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