This is one of my favorite quotes from the article.
A core function of government since the beginnings of civilization has been to provide legal tender.
Or, you know, since
1862.
Legal tender is fiat currency to begin with. "Legal", as distinct from lawful, is defined as "having the form and appearance of law,
without necessarily
having the substance of law". It's a term of bureaucracy. All the papers signed correctly, dated, turned in on time to the right people? Great, it's legal. But it doesn't follow that it's also lawful. To be lawful something must also derive from the authorities we the People vested in our government. Thus, lawful money would be gold or silver. We authorized nothing else, and did not authorize the federal government to outsource its responsibility to mint to private corporations like the Fed. "Legal" is typically used by white-collar in-the-know hucksters as shorthand for "will appear legitimate to most people", or more plainly, "looks legit". I don't typically care whether it looks legit; I care whether it actually
is.
This is why legal tender is tendered, and things are purchased now rather than owned. Purchasing refers to being allowed to use something, upon a promise to pay the owner at a later date. As such, items aren't bought anymore. Nor are they owned; instead the would-be owner is considered the "holder in due course" of the item. This is so because legal tender is backed by "the full faith and credit of the people". Literally, all the assets of federal citizens are mortgaged to back Federal Reserve Notes. These promissory notes are promises to pay at a later date, and naturally you can't pay off a debt with IOU's.
I get a sense from his article that there's an analogy between his attitude and the attitude of, say, Britain toward the American colonies - "they're starting to do their own thing over there without our say so, we need to act quick to stamp them down".
Certainly. In this case, without deigning to lend publicity to BitCoin, that author tries to use it as the opportunity to promote acceptance of flawed, corrupt alternatives.
Like the War for Independence, the only remaining option when you can't effectively use brute force to stop an idea from spreading is to convince people they're getting what they want, so they'll relinquish it. The War for Independence never stopped, it simply went from military force to propaganda and rampant public defrauding. It's difficult to stop an idea through force of arms, and if they had kept up they would've had ideas from the Colonies spreading to the citizens back home. A gradual campaign of distortion and corruption over about two hundred years was needed, with the result that the U.S. is now worse than Britain had ever been. But knowlegable dissent, by and large, had been quieted due to the apparent success achieved by the People.
