A bill submitted to the lower house of the Alabama legislature proposes to eliminate sales taxes on gold and silver bullion and coin transactions, will promote their use and will be the first step towards breaking the Fed’s monetary monopoly.
On February 16, Republican Representative Lynn Greer introduced Bill 238 (HB238). The bill proposes to exempt gross proceeds from the sale of bullion and mint precious metals from state sales and use tax.
Imagine that you asked a store employee to exchange a $5 bill for you and he charged you 35 cents for it. Nonsense, isn’t it? You ended up just exchanging one form of money for another. But that’s how Alabama’s sales tax on gold and silver works.
By removing the sales tax on certain transactions involving gold and silver, Alabama will go ahead and treat precious metals as money instead of a commodity. This is a small step towards establishing the role of gold and silver as legal tender and breaking the Fed’s monetary monopoly.
From a practical point of view, the complete and irreversible abolition of taxes on the exchange of gold and silver will enable citizens to start using precious metals in everyday circulation. This will be an important step towards the introduction of currency competition. If hard money manages to gain a foothold in the market against Federal Reserve Notes, people will be able to choose the time-tested stability of gold and silver over a rapidly depreciating central bank paper.
