RFK Jr.’s Stump Speech at Bitcoin 2024
Presidential candidate RFK Jr. gave a keynote speech at the 2024 Bitcoin conference (YouTube.com/watch?v=ssYCRVpzcxc). Very quickly, his rhetoric convinced me that he was buying Bitcoin voters with promises of Executive Orders he would make to benefit them if elected President. Disappointed, I quit watching in disgust. I returned and finished watching it a week later planning to write an article (now a chapter in my soon-to-be-released book The State Remedy - Part I) exposing his tactics. I am glad that I returned; there is much more to discuss than is first apparent.
Readers will observe from my earlier published articles that Kennedy and I are in agreement on numerous topics (RCReader.com/authors/Lydia-Electrum). Kennedy elaborates extensively on how transactional freedom is as important as the right to privacy and the right to free speech, protected by the Fourth and First Amendments, respectively. Inflation is rampant due to excessive printing of Federal Reserve Note (FRN) currency; we have weaponized the FRN dollar via the SWIFT system and awoken a sleeping giant (BRICS) who seeks de-dollarization. If we fix our broken monetary system, we will “defund the war machine” by forcing government to raise money by legitimate taxation and the borrowing of actual money; we will strike a massive blow to government corruption; we will “achieve again our promise as a moral authority.” If only we had a sound monetary system, the middle class and the lower income working class would have the ability to “live more abundant lives.”
I highly respect and commend Kennedy with the spirit of and his ultimate objectives to defund war and to tame the FED & inflation; it requires a lot of courage (to threaten) to take on the military industrial complex and the banking system. I simply disagree on his approach, namely his lack of attention to legal tender gold and silver.
Unfortunately, Kennedy loosely uses the terms “currency” and “money,” intentionally. Given his statement that “my uncle President John F. Kennedy signed an Executive Order [11110] that put silver coins in competition with the notes issued by the FED. His intention was to reign in FED discretion” and the inferred link of that order to JFK’s assassination, where thereafter the “government immediately stopped issuing those silver coins, and power returned to the FED,” RFK Jr. undoubtedly understands the difference between money and currency. Note: According to this article, JFK’s order merely temporarily transferred his powers to issue silver certificates to the Secretary of the Treasury; the certificates were already being phased out because the federal government was believed to be at risk of having insufficient silver to back up redemption of the certificates (i.e., the U.S. government was going to default on their debt, again). The order did not expand upon the quantity of certificates to be issued; and JKF also signed a bill giving the FED authority to issue notes to replace the silver certificates (Web.archive.org/web/20130226053000/http://www.advisorone.com/2010/02/01/the-fed-and-its-enemies).
Kennedy is appealing to the average person who, at best, is aware of only half of the problem. Executive Summary: money in the United States and the several States per the Constitution is gold and silver coin (and bullion); currency is that which circulates as money, either money or money substitutes (fiat = unbacked credit like modern FRNs, credit = some thing backed by money like original FRNs issued between 1913-1933), and actual money). All money is currency, but not all currency is money. RJK Jr. simply gave a stump speech. Or did he?
Day One of RFK Jr.’s Presidency
Set aside the critical nuance between money and currency, the fact that Bitcoin (and all cryptocurrencies) have no intrinsic value and RFK Jr.’s keynote speech claims of Bitcoin’s potential “to protect our environment” and that it is “uniquely able to harness” the “methane from landfills” – which is nonsense, gas reciprocating engines “harness” and convert “methane” for consumers, Bitcoiners, and others. Assume, arguendo, that Bitcoin is a “hard asset” even though it is merely a virtual token whose virtual existence and ownership are attributed to a computer executing calculations of a publicly available algorithm to digitally mine a virtual coin from a capped quantity of available coins.
What is Kennedy’s actual plan to save the dollar and what does it have to do with Bitcoin? As to which dollar – importantly, the dollars that he intends to save are currency dollars (paper dollars), not true money - gold and silver coin dollars.
Kennedy promises on day one of his Presidency to sign multiple Executive Orders.
* The first will “direct the Dept. of Justice and the U.S. Marshalls to transfer ~200,000 Bitcoin held by the U.S. government” (acquired mostly through confiscation of property) “to the United States Treasury to be held as a strategic asset.”
* The second will “direct the U.S. Treasury to purchase 550 Bitcoin daily until the U.S. has built a reserve of at least 4 million Bitcoin.” That is ~19 percent of the total Bitcoin that can ever exist; his intention is to match the U.S.’s percentage of the world’s gold reserves that is presumably stored in Fort Knox after FDR’s gold confiscation in 1933. His plan is to establish “a position of dominance that no country will be able to usurp” so that the “cascading effect will move the evaluation of Bitcoin to hundreds of trillions of dollars” – that is an increase in value of ~10,000 times!
* Thirdly, he will direct the IRS to “give public guidelines that Bitcoin to dollar transactions be unrecordable transactions, and by extension non-taxable”; and the IRS will be directed to “treat Bitcoin as an eligible asset for 1031 exchange into real property”, which is like selling your home and rolling over the gains into another home without having to pay taxes on the gains.
* He also pledges to ensure “self-custody”, prevent government blocking of the “Fourth Amendment right to privacy enhancement technologies” and to “prevent CBDCs”; he supports the idea to “build a Bitcoin Fort Knox,” and plans “to back U.S. Treasury bills, notes and bonds with hard assets including gold and Bitcoin.” He critically omitted backing Federal Reserve Notes.
* Sadly, he also omits mentioning silver – the legal tender money and coin by common law, by resolution of the Continental Congress under the Articles of Confederation, codified in the Constitution and the 1792 Coinage Act that a fixed amount of silver is the proper and only standard of value for what is a “dollar”, which Kennedy infers his uncle President JFK died attempting to restore.
Kennedy also advised that the United States take notice and apply lessons learned in El Salvador with it being the first country to adopt Bitcoin as a legal tender in 2021, requiring businesses to accept it as payment. RFK Jr. missed an important distinction. In El Salvador, Bitcoin does not back the U.S. dollar as Kennedy proposes to do in the United State. Instead, El Salvador’s holdings of U.S. dollars back the government’s holdings of Bitcoin. Perhaps Kennedy and El Salvador should take note of Scotland’s success [“Haud Yer Weesht!”, Lydia Electrum, River Cities' Reader, November 2023].
Is Bitcoin the "Silver" Bullet?
Again, I disagree on Kennedy’s approach, namely his lack of attention to legal tender gold and silver. True, Bitcoin has benefits as a decentralized cryptocurrency (currently 1 of ~9,000 active cryptocurrencies; ~4,000 are inactive). But the decentralization is achieved with blockchain technology; Bitcoin is not a technology itself – it is the thing that is protected by blockchain technology. It is itself merely a virtual token or coin. Yes, Bitcoin possesses the ideal characteristic of being independent of any and all governments in the world, at least to the same extent as gold and silver are - Bitcoin because of blockchain and gold & silver because of mother earth. Sadly, even Bitcoin and its use of blockchain is insufficient to protect your (perceived) wealth.
Like all cryptocurrencies, including those that are gold-backed, Bitcoin is not free from government’s reach. Otherwise, RFK Jr. would not need to promise to make a single Executive Order.
Like the Bill of Rights, Bitcoin cannot protect itself for your enjoyment. The people must exercise and defend their property and privacy rights; a decentralized ledger system will not guard against government stomping out its use in society through regulation and taxation, akin to Congress taxing private State banks out of the business of issuing paper money during the American Civil War and issuing their own as “greenbacks,” or FDR and Congress confiscating the people’s gold and making gold holders criminals in 1933. The United States Congress, the Executive branch and the Supreme Court have effectively eliminated the use gold and silver coin as circulating money. The States and the people failed to defend said coin for their enjoyment, but coin is slowly being resurrected by the people and State legal tender laws.
Day One of Lydia Electrum’s Presidency
I understand that a President cannot legislate, even Executive Orders must honor the separation of powers. But the President is bound by oath to protect the Constitution and the laws in pursuit thereof against enemies both foreign and domestic, including unconstitutional laws and regulations. If an Executive Order has any merit whatsoever, it occurs in such a pursuit. Claiming to be “a constitutionalist,” Kennedy should have followed directly what he perceives and claims to be his uncle JFK’s lead. He should pledge to sign Executive Orders that:
* affirm the historical standard of value for a ‘dollar’ to be a silver coin containing 371.25 grains of silver, unmodifiable except by Amendment (today, no positive law exists anymore to identify the standard of value for a ‘dollar’);
* regulate the value of gold in ‘dollars’ relative to silver as determined by the free-market whereas the same shall be uniform among the several States, until Congress passes a statute consistent with the same;
* direct the Mint to coin gold and silver money at no cost (free) for general circulation, whereas today they only mint them for “numismatic purposes” with a 50-percent markup over spot price;
* direct public and private people and corporations and the State and federal governments that bullion is legally not differentiable from coin - one measures intrinsic value by scale and assay, the other by count [Bronson v. Rodes, 74 U.S. 229 (1868)];
* make manipulating the free-market exchange rate of gold and silver a crime punishable by life in federal prison, a form of counterfeiting, for which Congress and the Treasury are not immune (the 1792 Coinage Act included a death penalty for a lesser crime);
* direct the IRS and the several States to give public guidelines that transactions between gold and silver shall be non-recordable and non-taxable for both federal and State governments, as also shall be transactions between gold or silver and any other thing that Congress declares to be legal tender, e.g., Federal Reserve Notes;
* direct the IRS and the several States to treat gold and silver bullion and US and foreign gold and silver coin as eligible assets for 1031 exchange into real property;
* prohibit as a federal crime all and any predatory or obstructive regulation of gold and silver contracts, transactions, as well as privacy and transactional technology aimed to help State and federal government and non-government actors from infringing on property rights, privacy rights, and all other inalienable rights; affirms that the several States retain sovereignty to prohibiting, prosecute, and punish the same;
*direct all public and private people and corporations and the State and federal governments that debt for unspecified or general dollars shall be paid with the same (FRNs) per the Supreme Court rulings in The Legal Tender Cases and Julliard, unless the creditor consents to another tender of her choice of equivalent economic value.
Exit Strategy with a Choice
The above intends that the public and the federal and state governments should simply allow the FED to co-exist along with its FRNs and private and government obligations of the same due to reliance interests (note, not due to stare decisis, but merely society’s consent since 1913, especially after 1933 and 1971). Congress retains its power to repeal the portion of the Federal Reserve Act that makes FRNs obligations of the Federal Reserve, ultimately U.S. obligations. All the above is intended to support Americans and the world, who by choice make the transition from FRN dollars to use gold and silver coin and bullion dollars in future transactions and contracts – or not. The FED and its FRNs will be sorted out by the ‘invisible hand’ of the free-market until neither of them serve any benefit or purpose, i.e., until contracts for general dollars no longer exist. There shall be opportunity for choice in an orderly exit.
People may equally choose to use Bitcoin or other cryptocurrencies, although none shall ever be legal tender in the United States nor the several States. The Legal Tender Cases only held that Congress may declare its bills of credit to be legal tender, and Article I Section 10 Clause 1 of the Constitution bars the States from “mak[ing] any Thing other than gold and silver Coin a Tender in Payment of Debts.”
I whole heartedly agree: “Fix the money, fix the world,” not “Fix the currency, fix the world.”
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