Our great-grandparents might have had to walk uphill in the snow both ways to get to school and back, but they also paid a lot less for things like gas and milk. And that’s okay; for the most part, most of us have accepted increasing prices over time as a fact of life.
But not Bernard von NotHaus, founder of the National Organization for the Repeal of the Federal Reserve and Internal Revenue Code, or NORFED. His theory was that it was the devaluation of the U.S. dollar causing rising prices, and furthermore, that devaluation was down to the antics of the Federal Reserve.
So what was his solution? “Let’s just introduce a new currency,” he said. And thus, the Liberty Dollar was born.
The Liberty Dollar was an independent, private currency that was backed by precious metals like gold, silver, and copper. It worked like this: we could go to any NORFED regional office with our icky U.S. dollars and exchange them for spiffy new Liberty Dollars. We couldn’t spend Liberty Dollars at stores or anything—they were never considered legal tender—but we could rest easy knowing that our unspendable money was backed by a physical commodity.
This currency was issued from 1998 until 2009, when the government charged NotHaus and his cronies with several federal crimes (like counterfeiting and fraud) and made them shut the whole operation down.