legal tender

What interesting timing. Now and again someone will object to my goldbug monetary rants by saying, "But anyone is perfectly free to negotiate trades in gold or silver or Monopoly* money if they want!"

The implication is that my objections to Federal Reserve Notes are nonsense. They're not imposed on us. We just prefer them.

Well, even without legal tender laws, there would be plenty of problems with that argument, but it's also important to point out to people just how many of their assumed (and always untested!) freedoms are denied by the state -- just how jealously the state guards its monopolies, from "first-class mail" to coinage and well beyond ...

See blog.mises re the Fed crackdown on the Liberty Dollar.

My own comments on the Liberty Dollar idea are here.

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* By capital-M "Monopoly money" they mean, of course, the play money from the board game Monopoly^TM -- not the notes from the Federal Reserve monopoly ...

You got that, right?