Posted on 02/28/2009 1:23:00 PM PST by wolfcreek
"Worst of all, the power which Congress delegated to the President enabled him to make criminals out of honest American citizens whose crime would consist only of trying to protect themselves from official debasement of their money. In more fundamental terms, Americans henceforth would be "under the gun" for exercising a fundamental, inalienable right: the right to deal with their own property as they saw fit. Gold, no matter what its special characteristics, is, after all, just another form of property."
(Excerpt) Read more at users.rcn.com ...
BTW; Not an expert in this field. Seeking thoughts/opinions
read
Might want to ping your list.
If Roosevelt could do it Obama could as well.
definitely going to ping this for later reading.
Also, there were two primary reasons for gold confiscation:
Number one, the most obvious, is to get the gold!
Number two is alot more subtle. As long as gold was in circulation as legal tender, then it in a sense “competed” with FRN’s. Government was restricted in the amout of FRN’s they could print, because to print too many would mean they would devalue vis-a-vis gold.
So by removing the only widely recognized “money” that FRN’s could be compared to, the window was open for government to print as many of them as they wanted.
As many of them as they wanted.
I doubt confiscation will happen again. I would be surprised if five out of a hundred Americans own any gold, besides jewelry.
One in a hundred might have a five dollar gold piece that there grandfather left for them. It would be way, way too much trouble for government to try to take it. And J6P AIN’T GONNA BE HAPPY if the guv can give HUNDREDS OF BILLIONS to the banks for their parties and bonuses and Lexuses but knocks on his door and demands any gold the guys got!
If the guv tries to seize the ETF’s that would make you wonder.
I wouldn’t forget about it.
The way confiscation would come about would be if the dollar crashed and a small minority of gold holders (and speculators) were spectacularly successful (in crashed nominal dollar terms) at maintaining their purchasing power. The government would happily confiscate it to score points with the jealous, and this shows there is precedent. It wouldn’t have to be because of a return to the gold standard.
Roosevelt set up the confiscation at at time when generally the law was more respected, so there’d be no compunctions about doing it now. Note that the states of emergency, once declared, lived on virtually forever. ALso, I find it interesting that JFK outlawed gold posession by American citizens anywhere in the world outside of American boundaries in 1962. All contracts involving gold payment were abrogated (bye bye commodity hedges and gold ETFs).
No, we’re not going on a gold standard soon, but never underestimate the increasing mendacity of the government in money matters.
I believe one way around FDR’s confiscation was to collect rare gold coins, as distinct from bullion. The Kennedys were reputed to have a considerable collection of such coins which they could keep.
It did under GWB. The continuation of *emergency* acts.
Made it so no one could really own property (real estate, etc.) again.
I think land patents still exist and you can get alloidal title to property, but it probably wouldn’t be anything anybody except a real, real, real determined person could do.
“Prior to 1913, most Americans owned clear, allodial title to property, free
and clear of any liens or mortgages until the Federal Reserve Act (1913)
“Hypothecated” all property within the federal United States to the Board of
Governors of the Federal Reserve, -in which the Trustees (stockholders) held
legal title. The U.S. citizen (tenant, franchisee) was registered as a
“beneficiary” of the trust via his/her birth certificate. In 1933, the
federal United States hypothecated all of the present and future properties,
assets and labor of their “subjects,” the 14th Amendment U.S. citizen, to
the Federal Reserve System.”
http://www.apfn.net/Doc-100_bankruptcy.htm
Next month do the same thing until it's paid.
“If Roosevelt could do it Obama could as well”
Maybe Barry’s going to go *1* better.
I notice that gold and silver were prohibited. What about other precious metals (say platinum)?
This was about property rights. Platinum = Property
Not particularly convincing since the dollar was not being debased during the Great Depression, when they abolished the private ownership of gold. Rather, we were in a period of sustained deflation.
Seems to me that if the globalists goal is destroy American independence via destruction of our currency and banking in order to integrate us into a new global order, what is to say that other nations and currencies wont be swept away as well? Taken a bit further, if a global economic system were to be unified along the lines of universal electronic credits, then even gold could be done away with and made valueless since no other economy could receive gold as a way of protecting wealth and liquid assets. Black markets are parallel markets - they must communicate with the above ground market via some kind of currency mutually liquid in both realms. A global credit system would negate gold, foreign bank accounts and black markets, too - well, except for barter items.
Just my $2.00 worth.
I don’t believe that particular story. This would blow up quick if discovered.
Like I said, I’m not an expert in this subject.
What I see is Communism at work then and now. Property rights were stolen.
“except for barter items.”
Even seen Mad Max?
read later
Agreed, but I personally don’t think gold had much to do with it. The reason FDR banned the private ownership of gold was that gold was the source of money those days since we were on the gold standard, and he wanted to use every bit of the nation’s gold supply he could get his hands on to increase the base for the issuance of paper money. We were in a sustained deflation, and increasing the supply of money was the way to get out. Since we were on the gold standard, there was no way to do it other than for the government to take control of all the gold it could lay its hands on. In retrospect, a better way to handle the matter would have been just to print more money, but the philosophy of the age was against that.

Bump to read later; thanks.
You could be correct.
At least 2 links I know of, have disappeared.
bumpforl8r
I don’t know what the motive would have been, though, other than what Roosevelt said it was. There would have been no reason for the government to own all the gold but the reason they gave. On the other hand, their strategy ultimately did not work. They still did not increase the money supply fast enough, and ultimately, they began to buy silver as well, and even that was not enough.
The biggest mistake that the New Dealers made was in assuming that they could stimulate the economy by manipulate the price structure, particularly the wage structure. It’s pure nonsense. All you do is cause inefficiency. It has no positive macroeconomic effect. To some degree, Obama is making the same mistake.
OMG, that's a long one I'll have to put back for a later read. I presume it discusses yet another in a long list of feral government usurpations???
Keynes wrote:
“Lenin was certainly right, there is no more positive, or subtler, no surer means of overturning the existing basis of society than to debauch the currency ... The process engages all of the hidden forces of economic law on the side of destruction, and does it in a manner that not one man in a million is able to diagnose.”
http://www.modernhistoryproject.org/mhp/ArticleDisplay.php?Article=FinalWarn02-3#Gold
It was Communism at work then, as it is now.
Except that we can own gold now. And we’re more communist than ever.
Galt's Gulch is calling me. I'm done with American'ts.
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