The following summary was written by the Congressional Research Service, a well-respected nonpartisan arm of the Library of Congress.
3/15/2011--Introduced.
Free Competition in Currency Act of 2011 - Repeals the federal law establishing U.S. coins, currency, and reserve notes as legal tender for all debts, public charges, taxes, and dues. Prohibits any tax on any coin, medal, token, or gold, silver, platinum, palladium, or rhodium bullion issued by a state, the United States, a foreign government, or any other person. Prohibits states from assessing any tax or fee on any currency or other monetary instrument that is used in interstate or foreign commerce and that has legal tender status under the Constitution. Repeals provisions of the federal criminal code relating to uttering coins of gold, silver, or other metal for use as current money and making or possessing likenesses of such coins. Abates any current prosecution under such provisions and nullifies any previous convictions.
How should the first sentence be interpreted: "Repeals the federal law establishing U.S. coins, currency, and reserve notes as legal tender for all debts, public charges, taxes, and dues." That dollars are not longer legal tender, that they are no longer the ONLY legal tender, or what is meant here?
Also what about "Repeals provisions of the federal criminal code relating to
uttering coins of gold, ..."? American's can't currently talk about gold coins?
Do these 'repeals' only mean that this bill overrides previous bills?
With the federal laws repealed, or with a court willing to read the clear language of Article I, section 10 of the Constitution, no currency would have any special legal status. This would be the prompt demise of Federal Reserve Notes, because those are only used because federal law says that people
must accept them for repayment of debts.
Basically a dollar was once a silver coin of a given weight. Eventually, we had silver certificates that were redeemable for silver coins. Fractional reserve isn't exactly a new invention, so people wouldn't always accept these paper dollars. So, they added a legal tender law. Before the tender laws, if you borrowed silver dollars, your creditor could make you repay with silver dollars, and a court would enforce a judgment against you if you didn't pay in kind. After the law, the courts recognized the paper dollars as extinguishing any debt, no matter what the note said. So, your creditor no longer had the option of suing you to force repayment in metal.
That law is pretty much the key to inflation. Paper money can be debased without limit, because it looked just as worthless before as it does after. Metal debasement is a bit harder to do, because people can easily spot differences in metal coins of different compositions. Not that it stopped the Romans from reducing the silver in their coins from nearly 100% down to homeopathic levels.
Wikipedia has a decent article on
Legal Tender. The section on
United States gives a very abridged history of how it played out here. If you want a complete history of these games, you'll have to dig up a copy of
Pieces of Eight by Edwin Vieira.
Oh, and
uttering is related to forgery.