Feds Seek $7m In 'Liberty Dollars'

They secretly are just trying to take all of his silver and this is their only excuse to do so. :)

Never mind the dubious pricing (see the article linked by jbuck), I have to suspect that the motivation for the persecution (I mean, of course, prosecution) was to ensure that commerce is only ever conducted in official currency. Not because there's anything illegal about a barter "currency" per se, but simply because the govt was afraid of the emergence of a private barter currency that might impact their ability to collect taxes on everything a person does.

Other countries have had alternative currencies circulating at the same time as their primary currency, and haven't suffered as a result. Germany has a bunch of them, for instance.

Domestic terrorism? That prosecutor needs to get out his law book/dictionary and start reading because he is coming off as sounding very foolish.

I agree the 'Domestic Terrorism' claim is ludicrous. The guy seemed like a he was trying to make a quick buck though. And putting dollars on the coins was argued as his attempt to make them 'legal tender'. That being said, using specie, or precious metals as legal tender is a right granted to the states so we don't have to be bound by the corrupt Fed's currency.

Congress has the right to create legal tender....whether they have the right to delegate that to the privately owned and operated Federal Reserve is another story.

i wonder if it would be legally permissible for, for example, Starbucks or any other market entity to sell their goods / services for other than legal tender?, or if 'selling' on such terms would be illegal, engage in business activity only on 'barter' terms, so that any customer would not 'buy' something but 'change' it for a certain amount of... gold for example (e.g. "our company will change this cup of coffee for a 1/1000 oz of gold")...

Because it doesn't say that. It says no STATE can make anything but Gold or silver a legal tender. No such restriction is placed on the Federal Government so they are free to make anything they want a legal tender such as an unbacked paper currency. Perfectly legal under the Constitution.

I've been following this story and waiting for any comment from the Feds about how von Nothaus is cheating people by using something other than silver in his coins, using a lower purity silver than the government to make his coins, or by putting less silver in them than the government does. So far, I have not seen a single comment from them or anyone else that this case constitutes fraud. Seems to me that if anyone wants to make silver coins out of .999 fine silver and put a full amount of that in their coins, what's the problem? Clearly, this is an authority issue and not a fraud issue.

The recent Utah law about allowing people in Utah to use gold and silver coins as legal tender could provide an interesting twist to the von Nothaus escapade. What if states, like Utah and Colorado, were to create state medallions made from 1/10, 1/4, 1/2, and 1 ounce of copper, silver, and gold that had nature scenes from their state and the state seal on them? These would not be called money, would have no denomination on them, would have weight, metal type, and purity on them, and would not contain any words that appear on official US coins. What would there be to stop the citizens of those states from actually using these medallions as money? Nothing that I can see.

Jealousy. Someone who stood to gain from this man's non-existence is grinding him.

So the purity is .999 on these coins? I looked at some Jackson half ounces in hand the other day. They seem off but that's because I've never seen them before. The skeptic in me said RUN AWAY