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Earlier this month, the Washington Post published an infommercial in the guise of a news article: “New State Laws Pave the Way for Using Gold as Legal Tender” (July 17, 2025). As Graham Hubbs noted on Bluesky, the article devoted nearly 500 words to “the monetary equivalent of being anti-vax” before turning to American University economist Gabriel Mathy for an expert opinion. Since neither Hubbs nor Mathy seems to be writing anything more about this, I did.
The US Constitution (Article 1, Section 8) explicitly gives Congress the power to coin money, borrow money, punish counterfeiters and pirates, and “make all Laws which shall be necessary and proper for carrying into Execution the foregoing Powers.” Ever since the monetary standard debates of the 1870s-1890s, “small government” advocates (and worse) have argued that Congress oversteps its powers if it uses this authority to assign monetary value to something that “doesn’t really have it.” It doesn’t cost a hundred dollars to make a $100.00 bill and the materials it contains aren’t worth that much, so why should anyone accept it for that much, they say. We should have money with “real” value, they continue—and then point invariably to gold (and sometimes silver, copper, or platinum) as substances with “actual” value that can be minted into coins. Historians, social-justice activists, and most economists respond by observing that the market value of all those metals varies enormously, that the supply of those metals is in the hands of a few big mining consortia, and, most important, that money is a public good, created by governments to facilitate trade, compensate labor, and, make the world go ’round. Money works not because it is “backed” by something but because we expect to be able to use it in the future.
Today’s cranky libertarians and self-styled “Christian nationalists” object, of course, to the idea of governments doing anything for the public good (and to the idea of a future that is more fair, more just, more caring than the past or the present). They have attacked and gutted food and healthcare programs, national parks, and federally funded scientific research; now, they’re taking aim at the US dollar. As the Washington Post article noted, lawmakers in five states have passed legislation making gold and silver bullion into money at the state level. Speaking from a podium labeled “Financial Sovereignty,” Florida governor Ron DeSantis said in May: “We are using our authority … protecting your economic independence… making sure that gold and silver function like real currency… So you can conduct transactions in gold, you can conduct transactions in silver.” Texas Policy Research Initiative (a far-right Libertarian advocacy group) makes the point even more bluntly: “If you don’t trust the Federal Reserve or the long-term value of the dollar, this bill [Texas HB 1056] gives you a legal and functional way to opt out, without going off the grid.”
The new Florida law (2025-100) authorizes the state to accept gold (99.5% pure) and silver (99.9% pure) in payment of all taxes, charges, or dues and establishes a state legal framework for privately-operated depositories where individuals can store their precious metals. Like similar laws passed in Texas, Arkansas, Louisiana, and Missouri, it neither requires that taxes, parking tickets, etc. be paid in gold or silver nor does it oblige any private business or individual to accept payment in same. But since such laws pander to the idea that a monetary system based on metals is somehow better than any other (“Texas Brings Back Sound Money” reads the TPRI headline) they potentially open the way to further moves in that direction.
Proponents of these laws speak predictably enough about gold protecting people from inflation (even though gold’s price is hardly stable) and being the “original” form of money. Like most goldbugs, they get their history badly wrong. A common rhetorical move is to hold up a Greek or Roman coin while saying future archaeologists aren’t going to be finding US dollar bills—but the oldest evidence of money in the Ancient Near East comes not from coins but from debit-credit transactions recorded on clay tablets or papyrus.
Rep. Doug Bankson (R-Apoka; police chaplain and founder of a K-12 private school), who introduced the Florida legislation, later told Fox News he did so because “we had gold and silver money for 190 years”—he was apparently calculating from the Articles of Confederation to Nixon’s ending of dollar convertibility in 1971. Bankson conveniently forgot the Free Banking era (1836-1864) in which dollar-denominated paper notes issued by literally thousands of different state-chartered banks formed (along with personal IOU’s, business coupons, and an occasional Mexican coin) the country’s circulating medium. Each note was meant to be redeemable for coin at the issuing bank, but there was no central authority, no standard design, and states varied wildly in what they required of issuing banks in terms of collateral, capital, or reserves. Imagine the consternation of a Wisconsin farmer paid with a note issued by a bank in Virginia or New York! Since the notes were all, in effect, private promises to pay, and since accurate information was difficult to get, counterfeits proliferated and so too did bank failures.
National “greenbacks”—issued by the United States to fight the Civil War—eventually drove the notes issued by private banks out of circulation and “Free Banking” into the history books. There it should have remained, but libertarians hostile to government regulation of anything (even money) re-discovered ‘Free Banking’ in the 1980s and 1990s. Supporting Friedrich Hayek’s call to privatize and denationalize currency was, a few decades ago, an obviously crank position, but the growth of cryptocurrency, the industry’s outsized involvement in the 2024 election, and paranoia about a potential central bank digital currency (“the government’s going to know everything you buy, they’re going to say ‘you had enough caffeine today, you can only buy herbal tea’; they’re going to say ‘you have enough ammo, you can’t buy more,’ etc.”) has made this into a MAGA hot-button issue. And thereby increased the chance of scams, failures, and general monetary chaos.
Congress passed the United States’ “Legal Tender Act” in 1862, mandating that greenbacks be accepted for all debts public and private—an action later upheld by the Supreme Court in the “Legal Tender Cases” of the 1870s and 1880s. In calling their own legislation “Specie Legal Tender Act,” today’s agitators are challenging both the Nixon Administration’s closing of the gold window and the measures that made it possible for the Union to fund, fight, and win the Civil War. Their hostility to the Federal Reserve and “fiat currency” is about more than money: as historian Michael O’Malley first demonstrated, goldbug sentiment in the United States—anchored as it is in the idea that some metal, because of its appearance, has more intrinsic value than another—goes hand in hand with racism and white supremacist thinking.
In Texas, the law making gold and silver “legal tender” comes on the heels of one that created a state bullion depository (to be privately operated); the sponsor of that legislation, recently disgraced Rep. Giovanni Capriglione (R-Southlake) also introduced this year’s legislation creating a Texas Bitcoin Depository. Despite its frequent representation as a shiny coin, Bitcoin has neither gold’s age nor its atomic properties and one might expect a real goldbug to be skeptical of anything so newfangled and digital. But cryptocurrency and metals are both private and non-governmental. Today’s ultra libertarians are so opposed to the idea of public services of any kind—education, healthcare, support for children, the disabled, and the elderly, etc.—that they even want to privatize money.
While legislation is being passed at the state level and the issue is framed as one of individual rights, this is a national effort, one backed by the far-right National Association of Christian Lawmakers and propelled along by Kevin Freeman (host of “Economic War Room” on the fringe right-wing network Blaze TV). The NACL website hosts model “legal tender” legislation and prominently features a video of Freeman discussing this year’s successes. More than one state legislature has called Freeman—energetic and well spoken, with impeccable conservative credentials (his father hosted Phyllis Schlaffley) and a BA in Economics from Tulsa University—as an expert witness in support of “specie legal tender.” Freeman was in Apoka when DeSantis signed the legislation.
In the short or even medium term, this legislation probably won’t wreak as much havoc as the crypto-favoring “Genius Act” or even Trump’s tarriffs. But this is a pet issue for a small and tight network of people, one that overlaps with other attacks on the federal government, and that is likely to put money in a few pockets and take it from many others. The Tenth Amendment Center, for instance, is a small for-profit “educational” venture with the slogan “Nullify everything” (a clear reference to John C. Calhoun’s position in defense of slavery). Its Communications Director, Mike Maharrey, is also listed as a “journalist and analyst” for the Money Metals Exchange.
The rhetoric is loosely inclusive—before signing, DeSantis specifically hailed the bill for making gold and silver into currency for real people not just an investment vehicle for the wealthy. In reality, the impetus probably has much more to do with defining gold and silver as money so that their sale (by wealthy investors!) will no longer be subject to capital gains tax. Rep. Bankson, who introduced the legislation in Florida, said on local Fox News that his next ambition is to abolish state property taxes. Florida already has no state income tax.
By any objective measurement, this is a fringe movement: Kevin Freeman’s YouTube channel has less than a fifth the subscribers of one devoted to Swedish grammar and pronunciation; Glint, a Mastercard that allows people to debit from their precious metal holdings, has not even a quarter million registered users worldwide. But it is also one that preys, like crypto, on desperate people, poor people, and people who feel that “the system” does not work for them. So-called “freedom of money” isn’t going to work for them either.