States Move Towards Gold (Again)

What if Russia just moved to a gold and silver currency? How would that affect the world and influence their allies? Well, if Texas was a country, it would be the 8^th largest global economy in nominal GDP. This exceeds Canada, Australia and even Russia. The conservative hub and economic powerhouse has been taking a major interest in gold and has just taken another step towards embracing the precious metal.

Texas voters in March will be voting on ballot propositions. One standout proposition is to create a program that allows access to the state's precious metal depository that was created in 2018. The access would be for Texans to use the depository’s gold and silver as legal tender.

Any US state using gold and silver should not be a surprise, since it is the law:

“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 ...”

-Article 1 Section 10 Clause 1 – US Constitution

Note that the above paragraph has a major flaw: It is only regarding a “state”. It is technically not enforceable for a city (which is why some U.S. cities have their own legal fiat currencies to this day). It also is not technically enforceable against a privately run bank (they really missed out by using the word “state”!).

Laws can be great, but only if people know about them and fight to uphold them. Also, people do what is practical and what has supporting infrastructure in place. The fact that Texas voters are aware of the importance of gold and are pushing to build more supporting infrastructure is extremely promising.

So how speculative are these ballot propositions? Let’s look at 2022 when 10 different propositions were voted on. Every single one of them passed.

Texas is not the only state pushing to keep gold and silver as practical legal tender. Utah and Arkansas already consider gold and silver to be legal tender, in line with the supreme law of the land. Missouri and Oklahoma have just filed bills to eliminate state capital gains taxes on the metals. It’s quite clear that these taxes were put in place to niggle away at the practicality of using metals as money and keep them on the path of federal reserve notes.

As Representative Ron Paul has stated:

“We ought not to tax money – and that’s a good idea. It makes no sense to tax money.”

“Paper is not money, it’s fraud.”

These statements were given at a testimony which led to Arizona removing capital gains taxes on gold and silver.