Apparently, according to a recent discussion I’ve had on RPF, it is legal to have your own currency as long as it doesn’t resemble legal tender. Allegedly, the liberty dollars were seized because of the likeness they had to the US Mint’s commemorative US election dollars.
So here’s my idea: why not create our own Mises Institute dollars? It might be expensive, but don’t you think LvMI could just sell such coins and make a profit? Or maybe instead the LvMI could accept payments in gold and silver?
So were liberty paper dollars not also seized? They looked NOTHING like FRNs. But I would support this. Or, perhaps the LvMI could form some sort of agreement with the Lakota people.
It is possible. There are TONS of privately minted coins, just for keepsakes or collectors items. I am not sure about the currency laws, but we should be able to barter the coins for goods and services.
I just thought of something. I am not sure how this would work but the U.S. Mint does mint bullion dollar coins. Technically, these ARE legal tender. Let us suppose I owned a business selling automobiles and offered a “discount” for payment in gold or silver legal tender. This could have enormous tax benefits. Because technically the price of the car would be much lower. On paper I will have sold the car at an enormous loss. Has anyone done this sort of thing?
The government hates competition and really hates competition for its seniorage from other currencies. Right now there are plenty of evil laws on the books to make any competing currency unusable and if someone creates something like a Liberty Dollar and manages to get around these regulations then the government will simply make more regulations until they break one of them or the government will make something up. Or it will just break into the place with jackbooted thugs, confiscate all the equipment, currency and anything else it can get its hands on then force the rightful owner
The government will not let a currency compete with its currenency as it will lose all of the money it gest from reducing the value of the currency.
You can try to use gold or silver but that will not work as there are capital gains taxes on transactions for these metals. The government considers metals capital goods because metals used as money have the great property of alternate uses. So if the price of the metal goes up the alternates for the metal become more attractive thus putting downward pressure on the price. Similarly if the price of the metal goes down then the alternate uses click in to keep the price higher.