 Hello again, this is Jim at the House of Poo Corner again, and we are still continuing our discussions about money in particularly and in particular how money is created and monetary reform and how to use alternative currencies and everything associated with that and how that is so much more preferable to the debt money that we are accustomed to with the Federal Reserve note. So we have a particular example today that has a very interesting history. And our guest, Wayne Hicks, is going to be telling us about that particular kind of money called the Liberty Dollar, and its history. I have a few of the original ones at home, and Wayne Hicks will show you some of the ones that they are issuing now. You may be aware of the Liberty Dollar, you may know something about its history, but you're going to know a lot more in a few minutes. And after we have spoken about the current uses of the Liberty Dollar, which as I understand is even reaching international proportions, we will then talk about how it can be exchanged and how it can be integrated into an organization called the USA Republic, which we have spoken about before with John Root. So here we go, and thank you so much, Wayne Hicks, for being our guest. And off we go. So tell us a little bit about yourself and your relationship to the Liberty Dollar. Well, thank you for having me, Jim. I'm just an old guy who happened to be in the right place at the right time. Back when Bernard Von Notehouse created the original Liberty Dollar back in 1998, I happened to be involved a little bit in the Patriot movement, and I was doing some journalistic work at the time. And I stumbled across the Liberty Dollar and got very interested. So I contacted Bernard and managed to interview him on my internet radio program at the time, and he was just a delightful guest to interview. He had a number of wonderful stories to tell and the enthusiasm he had for the Liberty Dollar was just absolutely contagious. So contagious that I decided I wanted to get involved with it, and I did. So in 2003, I was in a little town called Berryville, Arkansas, and I was starting to introduce people to the Liberty Dollar. And I got creative. I started doing a little advertising on the local radio stations and going out and talking to the merchants around the area. And within just a few months, I had every merchant in town, except for the big stores, like, you know, those big box guys, but every merchant in town was taking it just like cash and loving it and giving it back in change. And people were happily accepting it and going back and spending it again and again and again. So it was circulating just like any other money. Well, I happened to be talking to Bernard on the phone, and I told him, I said, I got the whole town taking it. He said, you're lying. I said, no, seriously, the whole town takes it. So he came to see me in Berryville. I spent the day running around with him and just watching him laugh as he went and bought a t-shirt with Liberty Dollars. He bought Gasper's car. He took me out to lunch at two different restaurants. We had to eat lunch twice that day because he just wanted to see that he could actually spend Liberty Dollars anywhere in town. And he did. And it began spreading even outside of Berryville. So a good part of Northwest Arkansas was taking it. Well, Bernard got so excited. He said, you've got to teach other people how to do this. So we created what we call Liberty Dollars University. And the people from all over the country would fly into Northwest Arkansas and spend a week in Berryville with me. And I put on a little class to teach them how to emulate what I'd done and get it into circulation. But when I got started with it, Bernard said he had $5 million in circulation. Two years later, after we'd launched the Liberty Dollars University, there were $5 million in circulation. And that's when the government decided to take notice. Now, up until that point, there was actually an extension on the, I believe it was the Treasury Department phone number, that if you called the number, and it was actually our local police chief who told me about this, if you called the Treasury Department or Secret Service, one of them, and listened to their menu, you would say, if you're talking about this, press two. If you're talking about that, press three. If you're talking about the Liberty Dollar, press seven. So I called it, and I listened, and I pressed seven. And it said, the Liberty Dollar is a perfectly lawful alternative currency. It is backed by silver and issued by an organization known as Norifest. That's where all his stuff cracked me up. So I murdered and I told him about it. A couple of days after that, I happened to be sitting in my office listening to Paul Harvey on the radio, when Paul Harvey starts talking about the Liberty Dollar and how it was offering competition to the Federal Reserve. Everything to snowballed at that point, but then a few months later, the U.S. Justice Department issued a statement that it was illegal to possess or use Liberty dollars. That wasn't true. It was not illegal to own them. It was not illegal to use them, except for one little flaw. That flaw resulted in our offices being raided, right along with a bunch of others at the time, including the, I remember you might remember, E-Gold and E-Bullion. Everybody got raided around the same time. Can you repeat? Can you please? They confiscated all the Liberty dollars. I'm sorry? Can you please repeat what you said the flaw was because we had a gap in the sound? You said except for one little flaw. I was getting to that. After the raid, the government decided they were going to prosecute Bernard and several of his employees for counterfeiting. Even though it didn't look like anything like regular money, even though nobody ever thought it was regular money, they got a couple of people to say they were confused and that was their evidence of counterfeiting. Well, when it got to trial, it turned out that most of the counterfeiting charge was dismissed. The only thing they didn't dismiss was 18 USC 486 makes it a crime for anyone to make, utter or pass any coin of gold, silver or any other metal for use as money. That means whatever you're using in the local area to spend. So that's what they finally ultimately convicted Bernadette of was simply using silver in commerce. The paper warehouse receipts, the court said, were perfectly lawful. And any of the silver Liberty coins that were issued prior to 2008, the court said were lawful because the Justice Department did not make its ruling before they were issued. Once they were issued, however, everything 2008 and anything later would be considered contraband and could not be possessed. So that was that was quite a blow to the free market money movement. But Bernadette's not a guy you put down easily. He appealed his conviction. The government wanted to put him in prison for 17 to 23 years. The judge, however, Judge Richard L. Voorhees, federal judge, was smarter than they were. He said in his decision, there's, it was obvious to him that Bernadette never intended to violate any law. He had consulted with attorneys about what he was doing. And those attorneys had had advised him that he was perfectly lawful. But they were in error because they didn't consider 14 a, or excuse me, 18 USC 486. When they did, they told Bernadette that simply meant he couldn't call it a coin. Well, that wasn't the case that said it could not issue a coin or bar of gold, silver, or any other metal. So it didn't matter what he called it. It was still in violation of that code. That was the problem as far as the Liberty dollar was concerned. But the judge said he knew that Bernadette didn't intend to violate that law or any other and therefore refused to sentence him to prison. Instead, he sentenced him to three years of probation with six months of house arrest. And that was the end of it. In fact, it ended even sooner when the same judge after the first year of probation decided that was enough and eliminated the other two years and let Bernadette go free. Now that to me is a very inspiring story. Bernadette wasn't done. He, he knew that there was still a lot to do about the free market money movement. And he kept talking and writing and telling people about it. His son, Extra, created a cryptocurrency a couple of years ago called Liberty dollar to it's still in its infancy and then perhaps one of these days it'll actually get somewhere. But then one day he was going out on a tour around the country and I hadn't defined his phone number and I called him and said, well, you know, it'd be nice to get together again. Well, these days he said, yeah, he said, I'd love to. He said, but you know, I'm getting ready to head out on a trip around the country, but I won't have time to stop through Arkansas. I said, well, that's okay because I don't live in Arkansas anymore. I live in Florida. He said, Florida, so do I. And he decided he was going to make his first stop on his tour at our house. And he came by a few days later and sat and visited for a couple of hours. We had a wonderful time with him being my wife, Kathy. And then he went out on his tour around the country and visited friends for about a month. And then he decided he was going to make his last stop back at our house. So on October 1st of 2018, 20 years to the day after he launched the original Liberty Dollar, Bernard stopped at our house. And before I knew what was happening, he had gotten my wife, Kathy, so excited about Liberty Dollars that she agreed to relaunch them as the Liberty Dollar Network. And now I work for her as a consultant just trying to help her make the Liberty Dollar what it's supposed to be. That's our history. Wow, well that's a wonderful story. Now I have a question. The Liberty Dollars that I have have a little touch of silver in them. Was that one of the problems that the legal system was throwing at Bernie? No, that was not considered using actual silver because you can't scrape enough silver off of a hundred of those to actually have more to make a value. So that didn't really matter. It was just silver coins that they went after, the silver liberties. All right. And I've never seen one of those, but they were in plentiful circulation in your town, in Arkansas at the time. We used both. And they were all over the country. We have people to this day that contact us because those certificates were redeemable in silver. Those paper certificates were redeemable in silver. And Bernie was still redeeming them to this day. He's still distributing the silver to people who have them. And a lot of times they contact us to try to find out how to reach Bernard. So one thing that you mentioned on a phone call with those of us at the USA Republic, and ladies and gentlemen, we'll talk a little bit more about that and how you can get in touch with me if you're interested further in the USA Republic. And you mentioned that there is now a warehouse somewhere, I forget. In Arkansas, I guess, a warehouse of goods which are exchangeable for liberty dollars. Can you talk a little bit more about that? Well, here in Florida, and we have launched the Liberty Dollar General Store, which is an online e-commerce store that accepts liberty dollars for its merchandise. Okay. We've also got another thing coming soon. It's called the Republic Trust Marketplace, which will allow people to sell their own wares for liberty dollars. All right. So what was that site again, the website? It's libertydollargeneral.com. All right. Okay. That's easy to remember because of Dollar General, which has come up like mushrooms everywhere. I think sooner or later they're going to notice us and get mad that we kind of played off of there. But until they do, we're going to use it. Well, except that you had the term liberty dollar long before they did. They did. And so by adding the word general, yeah, we'll see whether people get confused. But it helps you both. Yeah. That's one of the reasons why I'm sometimes confused about these ridiculous lawsuits. When both parties are helped, when another party comes in with a basically unrelated product that sort of uses the name. But anyway. It would be nice if we could take calls on this program because in particular with this issue, I would think a lot of people have calls, have questions along the way. But unfortunately, we aren't able to do that. So we will try to think of questions that people might want to ask. Can you tell us a little bit about the extent, the breadth of the reach of Liberty dollars? The original Liberty dollars, they were spreading around the world pretty well. We're just getting good and started. We've been up a little over a year now, and we do have we have members in other countries. But we've got members in, oh, let me think, Mexico, Ireland, Germany. We've got one lady in Dubai in the United Arab Emirates that is just a Liberty dollar fan. I know there are others. Oh, Australia. We've got somebody in Australia. We've got we've got people from all over the world that are interested in trying to get them into circulation and how we've had a break up again. How does the word trust fit into what we're talking about? Because we we operate in the private side rather than the public. The Liberty dollar network is a common law business trust. It's not a corporation. It was an LLC. We disbanded that and became a common law trust. We also have the Republic Trust, RepublicTrust.com, and that's Republic with a K on the end. So R-E-P-U-B-L-I-C-K Trust.com. And that is our exchange service. It operates similarly to a bank, but for Liberty dollars only at the moment. The you mentioned earlier, the replicas will be introduced through the Republic Trust and will be exchangeable with Liberty dollars. It's just a great website, a great program that helps people out. For instance, if you've got local merchants in your town that take Liberty dollars and they take in the paper certificates, but they need it to be converted to the electronic in order to make purchases through the internet, they can literally go to the nearest Republic Trust office and essentially deposit those paper certificates into their accounts. And then they've got electronic Liberty dollars, or ELD as we call it, that they can use through the internet to make purchases anywhere. Likewise, if they've got more ELD and they need the paper, they can go there and make a withdrawal. Alright, so this Liberty dollar that you just mentioned that is digital, will that morph, as it were, into the crypto currency that your son is working on? There will obviously be some relationship between the two. Well, no, the Liberty dollar to that's Bernard's son that created that is entirely separate from the Liberty dollar network. It's two different entities where we're not combined at all. The the electronic Liberty dollars, we are not using cryptocurrency specifically because their crypto currency crypto mining as they call it, literally creates coins out of thin air. And when you have a currency that's backed by a commodity, you can't risk that happening. We can't keep extra silver or commodities sitting around to back the new currency that appears out of thin air. So we don't get involved in crypto at all. We're strictly a digital alternative currency. Alright, so that cryptocurrency will float in value the way Bitcoin floats in value? Anything crypto is likely to do that, yes. Ours is backed by the value of an ounce of silver at $25 per ounce. So if you've got $25 in ELD or in paper certificates, you've got an ounce of silver. When the price of silver goes up, we can adjust the base so that you don't lose any spending power. Alright, so in the USA Republic, each state has the right to create its own state currency, which will be spent for taxes and fees and whatever. That's a distant future, perhaps. Hopefully it's sooner than later. That is different than the Liberty Dollar because the Liberty Dollar, at least at this point, cannot be spent for any governmental fee, tax, service, or anything else. Is that correct? That's correct at this time. However, the nation states in the Republic can choose to use any currency they want to. So because of the stability of the Liberty Dollar, we anticipate it being widely accepted through the nation states. So you would think that many of the nation states, and we'll define that for you in a minute, folks. It goes back to the Articles of Confederation, and anyway. We've sort of already defined that with John Root earlier, and you know John Root, Wayne. So where was I? Okay, so different states will probably choose the Liberty Dollar because of the different currencies that we've spoken about on telephone conversations. Among those, the Liberty Dollar seems to be the one that's most palatable, I would say, to people who are in commerce. Would you agree with that? Because it has a stable value. There's always a value behind it. It can always be redeemed for something that we've got in the warehouse that they want. And you may or may not know, Wayne, that I'm a monetary historian. And I've read David Graber's book, Debt the First 5,000 Years, and I followed the creation of money for 5,000 years and the creation of debt for 5,000 years. And any currency in my book, any currency that escapes the web of debt, attracts my interest greatly. And could you tell us a little bit about how the Liberty Dollar is definitely different than the Federal Reserve note and how it is or isn't outside of the Federal Reserve system, which is a debt system? Of course, the Liberty Dollar has an intrinsic value. There's something backing every Liberty Dollar that's issue has something backing it. The difference I like to cite is that Liberty Dollars are backed by silver and the value of silver. The Federal Reserve notes are backed by the full faith and credit of the United States government and I don't give them any credit and I don't have a whole lot of faith in them either. But the way we're outside the Federal Reserve debt cycle is very simple. The only debt involved in Liberty Dollars is that when someone brings into our warehouse an item to bail in and we give them Liberty Dollar warehouse receipts in exchange for it, we have a debt responsibility to them that whoever brings in those certificates can redeem the item in the warehouse. That's the only debt involved in Liberty Dollars. So there's no interest involved in that? There's no interest or compound interest. We do have a bailment fee. When we bail things in there is a bailment fee. It's just a flat 15% of the value and basically what that allows us to do is for instance say someone wanted to buy a car. They can bail in the title of the car. We're going to charge that 15% bailment fee. We're going to give them the Liberty Dollars that they need to go pay for that car and then over time they're going to redeem that title. They're going to make payments back to the Republic Trust to redeem that title. People say well the bailment fee is like interest. It is in a sense but it's a flat rate interest. It doesn't compound every year. There's a big difference between a fee and interest by the way folks. Yes. And I'm very much interested in that because the person's got the car. You've got the title. The person's got the car but that person isn't paying interest on exorbitant interest on a car loan in the meantime. Right. Okay. So that's a wonderful system. We have a program for instance for helping small start-up businesses. We can take a security interest in their future and generate Liberty Dollars against that. They have the responsibility to redeem that interest. In other words to pay it off. But it can generate the money they need to get a small business started things like that. Well at some point maybe in the next half hour we can talk about the Franklin Mint and the way Benjamin Franklin created money with his colonial script based on land and farming and that sort of thing. That fascinates me. We have two minutes left in this first segment and hopefully people will be joining us for part two. This is part one part two will be coming up and we are talking with Wayne Hicks about the Liberty Dollar. How it was created and how it survived to this day and how it is expanding because of its commercial value I would say and you could add to that. Is there a value behind it either philosophically or whatever beyond the commercial value? We already got collectors who are often willing to pay more to get their hands on some of our warehouse receipts than the face value. That's happened a couple of times already. So the fact that it's a secure form of money has really caught people's interest. And there's no there's no central bank that has issued it. There's no central bank that has lent it. There's no central bank that is collecting interest or compound interest on it. So it circulates I would say more honestly well much more honestly than a Federal Reserve note because that's most people don't know that the piece of paper you're holding in your hand if you have a Federal Reserve note represents a debt. And it's very hard very hard to explain that to people. But the Liberty the Liberty dollar it looks like at least once it really gets going will not represent a debt. It will resent a credit and a debit. But that's not the same thing as debt. So there's something in the warehouse securing the value of that Liberty dollar. Well thank you folks. House the true corner with Jim Hogue. See you in a minute.