Liberty Dollar Article Part 2

Yesterday, at the strip mall where Mr. von NotHaus's operation is housed, nearly a dozen Paul supporters carried campaign signs in an apparent protest, a television reporter for the local NBC affiliate, Brandon Bartlett, told the Sun. A spokesman for Mr. Paul's campaign, Jesse Benton, said the campaign wasn't "really paying that much attention" to the raid. "We don't have any official association" to the currency, he added.

The reason behind the raid is unclear. The Justice Department's position, according to a year-old consumer alert on the Web site of the United States Mint, is that using Liberty Dollars "as circulating money is a federal crime." Mint officials said the Liberty Dollar looks similar to legal tender, with inscriptions that say, "Trust in God" and "USA."

It's not clear, however, what the Justice Department's view is on the legality of possessing the coins for novelty or as protection against the declining value of government notes.

Mr. von NotHaus said he suspects the raid is in response to "the competition" his currency poses to the U.S. Mint. His Liberty Dollars, whose value is the price of the coin's metal, have proven a better investment in recent years than government issued notes, whose value has plummeted in relation to the price of gold.

"This is an example of Bernanke trying to protect his own nest because he knows it's got holes in it," Mr. von NotHaus said, referring to Ben Bernanke, the chairman of the Federal Reserve. "He can't have something like the Liberty Dollar running around competing with his currency. It points out the fallacy of the fiat monetary system. They had to do something. Their currency is losing and we're going to the moon."

Even into this century, long after government notes replaced the private notes of banks, private currency has long been a cause of certain influential figures, such as the economist Friedrich Hayek, a Nobel laureate who died in 1992.

Part 3: http://libertyreservedirect.com/articles/article-8.html