2.5 Money and Financial Markets

2.5 Money and Financial Markets

We favor free-market banking, with unrestricted competition among banks and depository institutions of all types. Individuals engaged in voluntary exchange should be free to use as money any mutually agreeable commodity or item. We support a halt to inflationary monetary policies, the repeal of legal tender laws and compulsory governmental units of account.

Once again, a clear vision of property rights. Clearly your money is, in fact, yours. As a virtue of being yours you have the right to dispose of it as you wish. Money is not any different from any other object. You should be able to trade and use it just as you would anything else.

The last part is where the plank gets more interesting. The halt to inflationary monetary policies (and I presume that means fiscal policies as well) would be a radical break from the last 100 years or so of bi-cameral uniparty policy. It would mean the government would have to stop printing money on demand, and it would have to stop spending money like crazy. Neither of these things are in the mind set of the current politicians in Washington.

Going even deeper you see "... the repeal of legal tender laws and compulsory governmental units of account.", which is lawyer speak for what appears on the front of your federal reserve note, commonly, erroneously, called a "Dollar", which reads "This note is legal tender for all debts public and private." This little sentence sums up the power of the government to require someone to accept payment in dollars, even if a contract was for other items, like gold.

The value of doing away with the legal tender laws is not immediately obvious, but Gresham's law is in operation under the tender laws. (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gresham%E2%80%99s_Law) The effect of this law is that those things of objective value will be replaced by those things of dubious value as a result of the government enforcing this law. The end result is that people end up using the fiat money for trade rather than money of real value.

The dangers of fiat money are well known and do not need explanation here.

It's an ambitious plank, and completely unrealistic at the moment, but I would leave it in because it will become utterly indispensible once the party begins to have success and shows the country via its tax policies that it has a much better grasp on economics than the bi-cameral uniparty.