Article I, Section 10 of the Constitution is pretty straightforward stuff.

“No State Shall…make any Thing but gold and silver Coin a Tender in Payment of Debts”

It doesn’t take much to see that this isn’t being followed, and hasn’t been for a long time. The ability to “print” money allows the Federal Reserve to wield massive power, and a constitutional tender system would make things pretty difficult for those people to keep ripping you off.

But is there any hope in stopping the Fed? “End the Fed” efforts didn’t have much staying power, and soon morphed into “Audit the Fed.” And even that’s pretty much fizzled out. I agree with the concept in principle, but in practice, it’s just not happening. There’s no evidence to indicate that the imperial congress is ever going to turn off its money supply.

As I wrote in a previous article, a nullification effort can actually stop the federal reserve, and there’s already a template for how to do this:

On the other hand, in contrast to attempts to put a stop to the Fed at the national level, a paper that William Greene presented at the Mises Institute’s “Austrian Scholars Conference” proposes an alternative approach to ending the Federal Reserve’s monopoly on money. The “Constitutional Tender Act” is a bill template that can be introduced in every State legislature in the nation. Passage would return each of them to the Constitution’s “legal tender” provisions of Article I, Section 10

Both James Madison and Thomas Jefferson (two pretty qualified guys), were quite explicit in calling for state-level resistance to unconstitutional or just plain bad federal acts. If the Fed doesn’t fit into both categories in your opinion, you’re going to have a hard time arguing they don’t fit into at least one.

What’s next?

1. Get a copy of the legislation and urge your state senators and representatives to introduce it.
http://tracking.tenthamendmentcenter.com/constitutionaltender/

2. Build a strong grassroots campaign in support.
http://grassroots.tenthamendmentcenter.com

Michael Boldin

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