In a sad story about a mentally ill “sovereign citizen” who killed two police officers, there was this detail:
This is where Mr. Kane made a show of cutting his long grass with a pair of scissors when police officers came to his property to enforce city codes, a neighbor recalled. This is where he demanded to be paid $100,000 a day in gold or silver, “the only legal form of payment in the Constitution,” when he was sentenced to community service for traffic violations. This is where Mr. Kane’s brother has a plaque on his porch with a fake gun affixed to it. “We ain’t dialin’ 911,” it says.
And this is where Mr. Kane drew his son, who the authorities said participated in the shooting, into his web of conspiracy theories and suspicion of authority. By age 9, Joseph, who was home-schooled, could recite the Bill of Rights from memory and carried a realistic toy gun everywhere he went, Sheriff Gene A. Kelly of Clark County said.
I couldn’t find any reference to gold and silver in the constitution except this:
No State shall enter into any Treaty, Alliance, or Confederation; grant Letters of Marque and Reprisal; coin Money; emit Bills of Credit; make any Thing but gold and silver Coin a Tender in Payment of Debts; pass any Bill of Attainder, ex post facto Law, or Law impairing the Obligation of Contracts, or grant any Title of Nobility.
(bold mine)
What does this mean exactly?
Update. Atrios explains:
It just means that states can’t declare that debts can be paid in seashells or ReaganDollars, though they can, if they want, declare that debts can be paid in gold or silver.
I suppose that “Thing” here means something other than regular federal currency.
akaoni
Maybe that states can’t make their own money to pay off debts?
Nimm
It means New Jersey can’t go creating “Jersey Bucks,” or require that its debtors pay it off in some other idiosyncratic way.
Apparently it could require that its debtors pay it off in gold or silver coins though, if it wanted to for some reason.
TR
It means the states can’t make their own cash to pay off federal debts; they have to pay in gold or silver (or in a federal currency backed by gold or silver).
pat kelly
A state can’t declare that something other than gold or silver is money, i.e, no beads or whatever.
Urza
Not a constitutional scholar, and would like the rest of the section, but I think I agree with akaoni that it means states can’t make their own money, paper money. Which is kind of funny because up till the Civil War i’m pretty sure every state and even every bank in a state was making their own money. Lincoln that silly republican helped clean that mess up. There were attempts prior to the Civil War to make those changes but Andrew Jackson had alot to do with stopping those.
DougJ
@Nimm:
Yes, I realize it is only talking about states. I’m just curious what it is getting at.
Linda Featheringill
I think it means that states cannot honor paper money.
I suppose this could be extended to include bank credits, exchanged by way of checks or credit cards.
Jack
DougJ,
IIRC, it was a preemption of what happened during the RevWar and the Articles period, where script speculators cornered markets using the State legislatures.
It’s been a long time since high school, but that’s what my brain dredges up.
Lynn Dee
States can’t print their own money. Does it also mean, though, that they can insist that debts be paid off with gold or silver?
chaucer
i’m pretty sure it means that money should be based on gold and silver backing the currency. this country did indeed start out on the gold standard.
arguingwithsignposts
It means they were mentally ill. SATSQ.
kommrade reproductive vigor
States can’t mint their own coins.
Non-federal governments can and do make their own paper money (Example).
It is widely interpreted as meaning our currency system hasn’t been legitmate since we went off the gold standard.
(Says the poor SOB co-habitating with someone who is gibbertarian-curious.)
Jeff
It seems to me–no constitutional lawyer– that the plain meaning of Section 10 is to limit the authority of the individual states–i.e. they can’t make their own treaties, alliances etc, coin their own moneyor do other things that are denied the Federal government,
It seems part of the Teabagger mindset to fetishize the Constitution, and rip tiny shreds out of context, much like the fundamentalists do with the Bible.
Nimm
@DougJ:
Well, IAAL, but not a Constitutional legal-tender specialist (enormous field that it is…)
And from my 10 whopping minutes of research, I don’t see that there’s much more to it than what’s right there on the surface. States can’t force their debtors to pay them off with some currency of the state’s own designation, unless it’s gold or silver coin-based.
Jersey can’t announce that it’s only accepting Jersey Bucks (although it could voluntarily accept Disney Dollars, or chickens, if it wanted to).
Ash Can
It seems to me this sets up sort of a catch-22 for states regarding legal currency — gold and silver coin for currency only, but they can’t mint their own, either. By default, then, they must use federally-minted currency as the sole legal tender. At the same time, like pat kelly says above, the states can’t declare other things legal currency (beads, bottle caps, cowrie shells etc.) to get around using the federally minted stuff.
IANAL, but that’s my take.
cleek
it means states can’t force you to use chickens to pay your medical bills
Mike Kay
It means someone stole all the gold bullion from Fort Knox.
http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&client=firefox-a&hs=nEu&rls=org.mozilla%3Aen-US%3Aofficial&q=fort+knox+conspiracy&aq=2&aqi=g10&aql=f&oq=fort+knox+c&gs_rfai=
No really. The History Chanel has done “documentaries” on the Fort Knox conspiracy.
Emma
Federalist Papers #14 right here. Whilst the alloy and value depended on the general authority, a right of coinage in the particular States could have no other effect than to multiply expensive mints and diversify the forms and weights of the circulating pieces. The latter inconveniency defeats one purpose for which the power was originally submitted to the federal head; and as far as the former might prevent an inconvenient remittance of gold and silver to the central mint for recoinage, the end can be as well attained by local mints established under the general authority.
Doug
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Legal_Tender_Cases
Here you go. There is an argument that paper money is unconstitutional. In fact the Supreme Court held that it was unconstitutional, but then reversed that decision.
Thinking paper money is unconstitutional now is now a crazy person’s position according to no less an authority than Robert Bork.
Punchy
What’s with the Founders just randomly capitalizing random words, randomly?
If I saw a resume like that, it’d be bounced in a second.
Maude
It means that they don’t trust the gubmint. Come the End Times, they need gold or silver to survive.
aimai
I’m reading a book about this early period right now. Jane Kamensky’s “The Exchange Artist” Its a sort of real life “Conspiracy of Paper” by David Liss.
Here’s the synopsis:
Its about the early bank based fradulent trading in paper. Basically, the entire economy was working off of barter, odd bits of hard coin, and letters of credit. Anyone *could* issue a letter of credit, but it wouldn’t necessarily be widely accepted. A variety of brokers and bankers worked to create acceptable chains of letters of credit both to do business at all and to defraud people by issueing letters of credit which they hoped would never be redeemed. The way it worked is that banks would charter themselves, with some or no hypothetical reserves (sometimes the reserves themselves would be in the form of paper scrip) and then pledge to accept back their own scrip at face value, or to accept other people’s scrip at some discount from the face value. This was so common that various banks and their scrip were listed in the daily papers with the percentage paid off of face value–a kind of daily exchange rate. Generally speaking paper traded at a higher value the closer you were, physically, to the actual bank because the more likely you were to know the guarantors (or think you knew them) and the more likely you were to have experience with whether they would actually redeem the paper.
The book I’m reading is focused on one massive fraud in the system around 1808 and its not explicit about a lot of basic facts and issues because you are sort of assumed to know them. But its really gripping–especially the section on the massive credit, cash, and state legislature based frauds surrounding land grants in the various “western reserves.” More importantly, the author also reminds us just how old, and how well seated, anxieties about the “realness” of money and even real estate were. There were always people, both at the top and the bottom of the system, who had no idea what the value encoded in paper was supposed to be or how that value came to be encoded in paper. Economies: work, labor, products, could be freely exchanged and grow very large without anyone knowing that there was anything backing the paper money. And then crash, overnight, after a crisis of faith or a single incident created a run on the banks.
Twas ever thus. Its really worth reading.
aimai
Fanshawe
@Punchy:
They capitalize all nouns. As was the Style at the Time.
john.h
english used to capitalize all nouns, i believe german still does. we probably stopped doing it for freedom… of course.
Scott
What always gets me is — I wonder if the gold-and-silver fanatics have ever stopped to wonder how long that kind of system would last.
There’s a finite amount of gold and silver in the world — and the reason it’s so valuable is because of its rarity. How long will everyone in the country be able to get paid before you run out?
How will you manage standard purchases? Are you going to expect grocery clerks to calculate how much gold dust is required for every purchase?
I suspect a lot of these guys think they’re going to be able to swim in their own money bin, just like Scrooge McDuck. ‘Cause “Duck Tales” wouldn’t lie!
Scott de B.
It’s not random. Early English writers used to capitalize nouns, as the Germans still do to this day.
Quackosaur
@Punchy:
Notice that it’s only the nouns that are capitalized.
I blame the Germans.
RSA
I don’t know about that bit, but I will mention that when I read the first news articles about the shooting, Kane didn’t sound especially rational:
He “entered into commerce” with the justice system? That’s an odd way to talk or think about the world.
FormerSwingVoter
It means crazy people are crazy.
Really, I think people spend too much time and effort trying to find a logical progression for insane beliefs. There isn’t one. That’s how you can tell that they’re crazy.
Face
FWIW, DougJ — Atrios just added his 2 cents.
Cutting grass with scissors, eh? This guy wasn’t the sharpest tool in the garage, was he.
Culture of Truth
George Will said on “This Week” that we as a nation have settled issues like racial discrimination and free coinage of silver.
That was before Glenn Beck, George!
Zuzu's Petals
From Findlaw’s Annotated Constitution:
Joshua Norton
I understand that some people think there’s an exemption for poultry.
Keith G
Simple. as others have said. Art. I Sec 10 = Powers denied to the states.
*They* may not pay their debts in script of their making.
Some above have neglected to realize that this section applies only to the states.
Dork
OT:
Anyone else really worried that the North Koreans are about to do something really, really stupid, setting off a big mess?
Or is it all standard posturing?
Jay in Oregon
@Jeff:
Two sides of the same coin.
They claim to follow the original intent of the [Bible|Constitution] which must be interpreted exactly as they insist.
ThatLeftTurnInABQ
It means that Burl Ives was one of the Founding Fathers.
Vance Maverick
True, that 18C style capitalizes most nouns. Question is, which nouns? Scanning the text, I see “defence” and “age” are lower case. Probably it simply wasn’t systematic.
Professor
Please learn a bit of history. To put your mind at ease, go and read something about the Mississippi Company/ The Banque Royale. You may find something on it on Wikipidia. This goes back to 1716 before your glorious revevolution.
Gregory
@cleek: cleek ftw.
Joshua Norton
So, apropos of nothing at all, what’s with tendency to use an “s” that looks like an “f”? Sometimes in the same word. Like “Congrefs”.
I’ve never understood that one.
DougJ
@aimai:
Very interesting.
DougJ
@ThatLeftTurnInABQ:
Lavender blue, dilly dilly.
ccham44
@kommrade reproductive vigor:
FYI. The story you linked is about the “currency” in the town where I grew up.
The “Berkshares” are not actually currency, even though that is how they are typically described, so no Constitutional issue here. In reality they’re just a 5%-off voucher that a few hundred local businesses have volunteered to accept in order to encourage people to buy locally instead of online… and to get some press coverage.
I believe this is an entirely private enterprise; the local government is not involved.
http://www.berkshares.org
chopper
@kommrade reproductive vigor:
that town in western mass isn’t an example of a government printing money. apparently the local banks are making and accepting it for local business use. this idea is pretty old actually.
Joe Buck
The Founders didn’t randomly capitalize words. They capitalized nouns, which was once common practice (though 18th century English spelling was very inconsistent). It’s still the practice in German.
Keith
Angle’s also rumored to be a Scientologist, FWIW.
Citizen_X
Yes, this guy was crazy, but what is the dividing line between him and Glen Beck and all his fans, or between him and the Paulites? There isn’t a clearly defined line, is there?
And as crazy as he was, he was able to suck his son into his craziness, unto the death. Paranoia’s not hereditary. However, other relatives seem almost as paranoid. I suggest the kid would not have been dragged in without support and confirmation from relatives and the the wider American rightwing culture of paranoia.
Vince CA
@Punchy: The Style during that Era was to capitalize proper Nouns. Juſt like modern German. Aſlo, long eſſes when s is initial or medial.
cleek
@Joshua Norton:
the long S:
Vince CA
@Joshua Norton: It was the style of the time to use long s when medial or initial, just like modern Greek uses sigma, like this “σ” when initial or medial, and sigma like this “ς” when final. The founders were a wee bit over-educated in the classics, but the return to long s wouldn’t be that bad. Capitalizing proper nouns would take more training, but I won’t read Jonathan Swift without them.
kommrade reproductive vigor
@Scott: The really odd thing is a lot of these Gold Bugs are so interested in gold because they expect the economy and civilization to go kablooie. So far as I know, none of them is willing to address this key question:
WTF good is a bag of gold going to do you when everyone is in survival mode?
Short of appeasing the criminals who are too dumb to realize you can’t eat it, heat with it or build shelter with it, I don’t know. Seriously, no one is going to be thinking: Gosh, I’m not going to eat these two rabbits I caught, I’m going to take them and my day’s supply of fire wood and find someone who’ll give me gold for them.
But somehow, Gold = Survival.
mark
I was outside the grocery store in S. Tampa waiting for my uncle when a fat dorky-looking early 40s? man came by with 2 sacks of groceries mumbling something about “white liberals are ruining everything” and looking right at me. I’m a big guy in my 50s with a SteelyDan tshirt but nothing that looks liberalish. I say to him “What the hell are you talking about?”.
He turns around and pushes his cart about 40 yds. to his bike and rides off still mumbling.
Its crazy guys like this all over America being brainwashed 24/7 by AM radio and Fox that half the people in this country, the liberals, are traitors.
But lets don’t bring back the Fairness Doctrine because Rushand the cowardly Republicans will get mad!
kommrade reproductive vigor
@ccham44: My bad. But what I got from that story (which I assume is the story I was looking for) is you can’t mint coins.
someguy
The style was to capitalize nouns, just like the Germans do.
In the future, people using a social historical MindloadUplink – the Apple version of course – will wonder why 15 assholes made the exact same response to a question in blog comments in 2010, as if the participants were oblivious to the rest of the thread. After a short discussion about whether all people were just stupid them, and a counterdebate not to judge the bloggers of yore based on modern standards of intelligence and decency, the consensus response will be, “that’s what Amurricans did, just like the Purplovians do today.”
That answer, of course, will be repeated several hundred times over the course of the thread.
Keith G
@kommrade reproductive vigor:
Not to mention the notion that the entire liquid assets of most of these tools, when converted to gold, would be quite easy to lose in the lining of their camo jacket.
Jeff
@Joshua Norton: That was a way of denoted doubled s’s much like t he German es-sett which looks like the greek beta
Martin
Yeah, that’s my thinking too. This guy doesn’t sound any different than Beck to me. ‘Nazi checkpoint’? That just means ‘government checkpoint’ in Beckanese.
Hob
Vince: Pretty much, but by the 18th c. it had become more of a style thing than an actual spelling rule (and English had always had much loosy-goosier rules than German anyway) and they tended to do it more with nouns that they thought were important, sort of Emily Dickinson-like. Thomas Pynchon does pretty well with this in Mason & Dixon.
DougJ: It’s a particularly good example of Patriot loons trying to sanctify the Real Constitution even though their interpretation leaves just about no room for having a federal government at all, in which case why would you need a dang constitution in the first place. I mean, if you read “No state shall… make any thing but gold and silver coin etc.” as limiting what the U.S. can do, then that very same sentence must also mean that the United States government can’t enter into treaties. At all.
Quackosaur
@Joshua Norton:
That S that looks like an F is just the long S, which is used for S at the beginning or in the middle of a word. The S we use today was usually reserved for S in the terminal position. It’s the same way that lower-case sigma in the Greek alphabet is σ, except when it’s ς at the end of a word.
The long S is actually still around as the German ligature ß, though its usage (as opposed to ss) depends on sounds and vowel length as opposed to position.
ETA: And I see that all of my points have been covered already. Oh well…
All About the Washingtons
@john.h: We ftopped doing it for the felf-fame Reafon we ftopped using that “s” that looks like an “f”–it was a Pain in the Afs.
All About the Washingtons
@john.h: We ftopped doing it for the felf-fame Reafon we ftopped using that “s” that looks like an “f”–it was a Pain in the Afs.
DPirate
It simply means that states’ use of federal reserve notes is unconstitutional. Or possibly, that if any state were to make a law declaring federal reserve notes to be legal tender it would be unconstitutional. By the document, each state should be demanding it’s taxes and paying it’s debts in gold and silver coin or -backed securities, and spurn the use of federal notes.
Federal Reserve Act, while perhaps not unconstitutional itself, mandated the violation of the constitution by individual states. Catch-22.
Ash can above is about right, I think. However, it is the federal govt stating in law that we must use their money which sets up the situation. Otherwise, any state could declare some foreign coinage to be tender for them.
@Scott: Well, gold currency lasted a good deal longer than paper. Sure, paper is still going yet, but only time will tell. Besides, the argument is usually for gold-BACKED, not necessarily gold itself.
Oscar Leroy
You don’t have to be mentally ill to be an extreme right-winger, but it helps.
Joey Maloney
The difference is Glenn Beck pulled down $32 megabucks last year; he won’t be having his terminal shoot-out with law enforcement in the parking lot of a fucking Wal-mart, for FSM’s sake. How déclassé.
QuaintIrene
And that ‘Buy Gold!” appears to be one of the few advertisers left on Glenn Beck’s show.
rickstersherpa
From Cornell’s Law Institute “Annotated Constitution,” discussiong this clause of Section 10, Article I,
“Legal Tender
“Relying on this clause, which applies only to the States and not to the Federal Government,1809 the Supreme Court has held that where the marshal of a state court received state bank notes in payment and discharge of an execution, the creditor was entitled to demand payment in gold or silver.1810 Since, however, there is nothing in the Constitution prohibiting a bank depositor from consenting when he draws a check that payment may be made by draft, a state law providing that checks drawn on local banks should, at the option of the bank, be payable in exchange drafts was held valid.1811” http://www.law.cornell.edu/anncon/html/art1frag93_user.html#art1_hd283
Thereby making the drafting and accepting of checks legal. I wonder how well things would work without that legal authority?
This clause was directly related to the experiences of states printing currency during the Revolution and post-Revolutionary period where they would essentially due what is being talked about now if Greece leaves the Euro, default on the state’s war debt by paying it off through printing lots of paper with pretty engraving. The wealthy classes that loaned the original sum were not amused (and many became ex-wealthy as result as there are several examples of patriotic merchants and manufacturers who were ruined by the end of the revolution because bill were not paid or paid off in depreciated currency here in Fredericksburg, VA).
Keith G
@DPirate: No. Not the case.
Paul in KY
@Face: That was his version of paying a debt (a large one) in pennies. Or having a debt & paying a dime a week (thus showing ‘good faith’ in paying down your debt).
Pococurante
@kommrade reproductive vigor: The smart crazies found a way around the “can’t eat gold” thing. http://boingboing.net/2010/03/09/glenn-beck-advertise.html
/droll
WereBear
@Citizen_X: I’ve been coming to the conclusion that there is a cranky, frustrated, paranoid mindset which created these theories because they fit the template of a particular kind of diseased mind.
Then other diseased minds find a prefab group which fits their template. Even if there is some dissonance, the lure of the group, with its store of literature and lore which Explains It All, will smooth out the edges, and you have a whole bunch of people who believe the same crazy things.
And then it’s beef jerky and ammo for everyone!
Citizen_X
@Martin:
Also, that was near Carrizoso, NM; I wonder if it may have been at one of the Border Patrol checkpoints, where they query all drivers, that can be found within 100 miles of the Mexican border. Where the government’s looking for, you know, the illegal Mexican immigrants the right’s always on about.
Pococurante
@someguy: By then wearing yellow onions from the belt will be cool again. I have seen it!
Ron Mexico
One of the main motivations for the Phil. Convention was the states’ reaction to an economic crisis brought about in part by bad monetary policy. The Treaty of Paris required US debtors to repay debts in hard currency (gold or silver), and owners of Continental and State paper were receiving interest payments in gold and silver (from paper that had been worthless during much of the Rev. war). States were also attempting to repay their Rev. War debts, and many states (e.g. Mass.) passed new levies payable in hard currency to raise the money. Thus large quantities of currency were either being hoarded or leaving the US, causing deflation. Taxpayers, farmers, and debtors in nearly every state demanded their state legs. issue paper money, and many did (PA and NY e.g.) while others refused (MA). This exacerbated the already difficult economic conditions; creditors/merchants were reluctant to accept the new state paper money, some fled to non-paper money states. RI passed a law requiring merchant accept their paper money; in other states crowds forced shopkeepers to do the same. This led to two separate attempts to “Regulate” state govt by revolt, the most famous is Shays’ Rebellion in MA, 1786-87. The section in the Const. insisting on federal control over money derives in part from this experience. As an earlier poster noted, prior to the middle 19th century most economies worked on barter supplemented by comparatively small quantities of hard currency and many types of paper money or credit notes. It was standard practice for govts to issue paper money for emergency expenditures and pass new levies, payable in that paper, to remove it from the economy before inflation became a problem. The big difference between then and now is, of course, that all we use is fiat money, instead of using it as a supplement to other media of exchange.
ericblair
@Citizen_X:
I’m quite sure that’s it: it used to piss me off in Arizona that I’d have to go through border patrol every time I drove down the highway. I’d breeze through these things, ‘cuz I’m pasty white. My wife isn’t Hispanic but could pass for it, so she got a couple of questions. But I’m sure there was no racial profiling, nosirree, and as Citizen X says, that’s what the wingnuts want anyways.
Geeno
@Punchy: They don’t capitalize randomly. The style then, as it still is in German, was to capitalize all nouns, not just proper nouns.
Geeno
@Joshua Norton: S used to have three forms. Capital, medial and final. Those f’s, which are actually uncrossed f’s, are the medial form. At the end of the word, the s is always in the final form.
akaoni
Adverts for Goldline are now appearing on the front page of the blog! Glenn Beck would be proud!
Geeno
@someguy: No they’ll deduce that readers of this blog had the attention span of gnats and could be derailed by the smallest things.
Jay
Whenever I hear about these “sovereign citizen” types these days, I am reminded of Walton Goggins flashing his big teeth on the first few episodes of “Justified,” just as he often did as the dirty cop on “The Shield.” It’s always important to point out that these people are just straight hicks.
cervantes
It is trivially obvious that this provision imposes restrictions on the states, not the federal government, no matter what else you think it means.
Robert Waldmann
As usual, the founders had a specific recent problem in mind when they wrote that. IIRC Rhode Island had introduced its own fiat money and required people to accept it.
The key point is that this is a restriction on States not on the Federal Government which can make sea-shells or Reagan dollars legal tender.
However, if the Federal Government were to forbid the use of gold coins (as Roosevelt did) State Governments could have opted out of the gold free zone. None did, but they clearly had the authority under the constitution. Gold coins are legal again, so the issue doesn’t arise (and you know that some states would declare gold coins legal tender if private ownership of gold (beyond a bit for jewelry) were still outlawed).
Jay C
The far-right loony-tunes’ obsession with “The Gold Standard” (backward and unworkable as it may be) is probably not unconnected to their propensity to invest in gold itself. Whether prodded by the incessant advertising they’re force-fed on right-wing media, or by osmosing the half-baked gold-standard idiocy which is a standard component of wingtard propaganda, we shouldn’t discount good old-fashioned greed as a motivation. After all, if you’ve siphoned off a considerable portion of your capital into a box full of Krugerrands or Double Eagles (probably stored in your gun locker), the vision of your thousands of invested dollars (miraculously) turning into hundreds of thousands by dint of “currency reform” might seem like a brilliant vision.
Of course, the irony that gold had been a good investment over the long term as a commodity is probably lost on the teabagger crowd: the prospect of becoming the only “rich folks” in Gold-Standard Libertarian Utopia via specie magic is a much more attractive notion…
Randy P
I’m surprised none of you picked up on this provision:
So that means we’ll never have a Duke of Pittsburgh, I guess.
Or a King of Comedy/Rock and Roll/Late Night, come to think of it.
Steaming Pile
@Urza: The difference between then and now was that paper currency wasn’t literally money. These were bearer notes that people assumed represented actual gold or silver on deposit at the issuing facility. This assumption was of widely varying validity depending on which bank’s name was on the note, which was one reason why the Federal Reserve came to be, and banks were no longer allowed to issue their own currency.
john.h
y’all should google “sovereign citizen”. it makes glenn beck & co. look normal.
asiangrrlMN
Man, do I ever learn a lot from the BJ commentariat. Thanks, guys. As for the crazy guy, yeah, just two shades offa Beck, sounds like to me.
de stijl
@Randy P:
I’m the Duke of New York, A-Number One.
ThatLeftTurnInABQ
@de stijl:
And I’m the “Duck of Death”.
Joey Maloney
And I’m the Dork of New Uke.
Chuck Butcher
Many years ago, long befor this nut’s time, I lived in Springfield, OH. My memory says that the neighborhood around his address was old houses and lower income. He went to South High School which was the largest, oldest, and not real well respected one and the school with the largest black population. I graduated from a county school 13 yrs before he did and was long and far gone by then.
Springfield was a bit different in certain respects, it had a large southern immigrant or southern descended portion of population – particularly Kentucky/W VA. That was economics driven by the post WWII – 70s power house that Ohio was. In the 60-70s that particular portion of the population seethed with cultural resentments. It was very much the same thing that has happened in the south in a different direction.
I am less than surprised to see that there appear to be a number of the loons there and associated with him.
For rockers interested in trivia, Buffalo Springfield Roadroller Co is in Spfld and was the basis of the name of the band, one of whose father worked for them.
trollhattan
How is this different than kids in madrassas being taught to recite the Koran? American Taliban, baby. Don’t be treadin’ on ussins.
James
This provision simply means that the Constitution reserves to the Federal Government any and all powers to make anything OTHER THAN gold and silver into Legal Tender; it is ONLY the STATES who are prohibited from doing so.
The idea that this somehow requires gold or silver payments is the sort of deranged interpretation of simple English is dispositive of the bible-thumper AND wingnut metabolism, IMHO.
Ash
@trollhattan: Well homeschoolers in general are in their own little world that can’t really be compared to anything else. They all have their own wacky rules.
btw, are you from Trollhättan? Interesting town.
[/random]
gocart mozart
@Randy P:
Duke Blue Devils are unconstitutional!
licensed to kill time
And I’m the Sheik of Araby, your gold and silver belongs to me.
Though I’m pondering being the Duke of Ukulele.
Altoid
What the clause does is forbid states from *requiring* private and public parties to take anything but gold or silver. If you owe me 20 bucks, the state can’t force me to take payment in chickens. So when you try to pay me in chickens, I can take the chickens, or I can bargain over how many chickens it takes to make 20 bucks’ worth and take what we settle on, or I can refuse and take you to small claims court to get paid in money.
It does forbid the state from requiring us to pay taxes in some obscure commodity or coin, as many people mentioned earlier, but it isn’t primarily about how we pay taxes. It’s about what kinds of payments are enforceable in the state courts, whoever you owe the money to– public entity or private party. Whether debts have been paid legally or not is something courts ultimately decide.
A modern analogy for what Ron Mexico is talking about (@74) would be a state declaring only rupees or rubles legal tender. How the devil are you or I going to get either one? (Why, from someone with the franchise to exchange our currency for them– not so far from what corporate America pays big bucks to lobbyists for. Or the deal the East India Company got in the Tea Act.)
What Rhode Island did was to declare as legal tender paper that claimed to represent an underlying physical asset but didn’t really, and circulated in huge amounts. That was easy on buyers, who had no way to get “real money,” but it killed the merchants and shopkeepers, who couldn’t use that stuff to pay for their stock (because it came from out of state or overseas). It would be like declaring CDOs legal tender, if they were circulating in huge amounts.
In either case, if it’s legal tender, you’re compelled to accept it as payment, which means the debtor has to be able to get it and use it at some point. Private parties and public entities can always take something else and agree that the debt is settled– we do this all the time– but the debtor can only *force* the creditor to acknowledge payment when the debtor uses legal tender.
Thanks to aimai (@22) for the reference. What just happened with CDOs and CDSs and all that crap is pretty much the same thing and a good reason why we have to limit leverage in the shadow banking system and get all that stuff on the books. There’s always immense pressure in the banking and monetary system to make up more paper and use it to take over real assets and there has to be adult supervision.
Ken
Jay C @83 wrote:
I’m not so sure about that. In my experience, a lot of the gold bugs are also fixated on a particular exchange rate, either $20 per ounce or $35 per ounce. Going on that version of the gold standard is going to hurt anyone who’s holding metal (bought at $1100/oz) rather than currency.
Hmm… I wonder if the states could insist on payment of taxes in gold, and also set the exchange rate to $20/oz? It would plug a lot of holes in state budgets.
trollhattan
@Ash:
Nah, just my car. “Built by trolls.”
shargash
Well, according to Atios’ interpretation of the clause in question, it is only states that cannot grant Titles of Nobility. The federal government would be fully authorized to create a Duke of Pittsburgh, or any other place it felt so inclined to.
It might be a good fund-raiser. I wonder how much (gold?) Lloyd Blankfein work pay to be declared Archduke of New York.
sigyn
That’s about what I figured when I heard he was 16. Poor kid didn’t stand a chance.
DPirate
@Keith G: What’s is not the case? Did I use an uppercase when I ought to have used a lowercase?
DPirate
@Randy P: I wonder if Poet Laureate qualifies?
DavidTC
shargash
No.
Article 1, Section 9:
No Title of Nobility shall be granted by the United States: And no Person holding any Office of Profit or Trust under them, shall, without the Consent of the Congress, accept of any present, Emolument, Office, or Title, of any kind whatever, from any King, Prince, or foreign State.
Which is, of course, yet another nail in the coffin of the idea that the previously quoted section applies to the states and the federal government…it’s somewhat odd to prohibit things twice. (Of course, that sort of inane reading is required by fundementalists.)