Bernard von NotHaus Biography
Bernard von NotHaus (BVNH) designed, developed and issued the private gold and silver based Liberty Dollar on October 1, 1998. The new currency became so popular that it was targeted by the federal government who arrested, convicted and sentenced BVNH for counterfeiting US coins in 2014.
Over the past sixteen years, Bernard von NotHaus and the Liberty Dollar have been covered by 1,000 plus articles including the Wall Street Journal, New York Sun, The Washington Post, USA Today, featured on CNN, CNBC, The Learning Channel, Paul Harvey and most major newspapers, numerous books, print media, radio and television.
BACKGROUND:
On September 11, 1974, von NotHaus self-published his first economic research paper: To Know Value. In 2003, American Financial Press published The Liberty Dollar SOLUTION to the Federal Reserve, a 500-page monetary treatise. In 2007 he wrote Free Market Gold Standard – the world’s first working model for a private organic gold standard currency.
For 25 years, from 1974 – 1999, BVNH was the Mintmaster at the Royal Hawaiian Mint and studied monetary economics in search for a value-based solution to the poorly performing US dollar. On October 1, 1998 he founded NORFED (National Organization for the Repeal of the Federal Reserve Act and the Internal Revenue Code) and introduced the Liberty Dollar to exemplify the principles of a free market, value based, private currency that was not controlled or manipulated by the US government. From a meager investment of $6300, the Liberty Dollar became wildly successful, issuing between $65 to $85 Million Liberty Dollars over a ten year period.
But the US government did not like the popular, inflation proof currency and in September 2006, the US Mint issued a warning that the use of Liberty Dollar currency was illegal! So BVNH sued the US Mint, Secretary of the Treasury and the Attorney General of the United States in early 2007. The government retaliated later that year by raiding Liberty Dollar and seized over nine tons of gold, silver, platinum and copper.
The world’s foremost expert and activist for private currencies and alternative economics did not back down. He thought it was ludicrous that the government could prohibit the American people from using their own gold and silver in any manner they wished and penned his Second Law of Money: Any law that purports to prohibit an American citizen from using a piece of gold or silver (or, for that matter, anything) in voluntary transactions between consulting adults is preposterous, antagonistic to a free market, and totally without legal merit.
The federal government did not take kindly to the competition or BVNH’s outspoken advocacy for a private money owned by the people it served. On March 18, 2011, von NotHaus was convicted of two charges of counterfeiting and conspiracy that transformed the monetary activist into a monetary criminal. The FBI’s press release even branded BVNH as a domestic terrorist. The country was shocked and hundreds of sympathetic news articles covered the Liberty Dollar and BVNH’s peaceful slogan for a solution:
Change the money / Change the country.
On December 2, 2014, BVNH was sentenced to six months of home detention and three years of probation – a sharp rebuke to the government’s request for 22 years in prison. Judge Voorhees also stated that BVNH was not motivated by personal profit and did not demand any restitution as there were no victims. Currently, the would-be monetary criminal writes a monthly newsletter for the Liberty Dollar organization, a non-profit, free enterprise entity that issued approximately $85 million “inflation proof” Liberty Dollar when revalued to the $50 Silver Base to over 250,000 Americans to protect their purchasing power and bring a peaceful change to the corrupt US fiat monetary system.
Bernard von NotHaus, the Rosa Parks for monetary rights, is well known in the numismatic, hard money and alternate currency communities as an original thinker who relishes the type of complex problems he encountered while designing, developing and popularizing the Liberty Dollar (1998 – 2008), a private value based currency owned by the people, not the Federal Reserve.