The Dollar in Your Wallet

But first — you’ve seen Dumb and Dumber. Remember this scene. Lloyd Christmas hands a briefcase to the villain he’s cheerfully named “Mr. Samsonite” (the name on the briefcase). The case once held a fortune in large denomination dollar bills. Lloyd spent it all and stuffed the briefcase with receipts with handwritten IOUs instead:

“That’s as good as money, sir. Those are I.O.U.s. Go ahead and add it up — every cent’s accounted for.”

Andre opens it expecting wealth. He finds paper receipts.

Now look down at the bill in your hand.

Read the top. It does not say “money.” It does not say “wealth.” It says “Federal Reserve Note.” A note — in plain financial English — is a debt. An IOU. A promise to pay. The name stamped across the top is the confession, hiding in plain sight your whole life.

Read the front. It says “This note is legal tender for all debts, public and private.” Stop and hear what that is. It is not a promise to pay you gold, or silver, or anything at all. It is a notice that the law requires you to accept it. That is Lloyd’s line — “that’s as good as money, sir” — except it is backed by statute instead of a smile and the intention to repay. There is no intention to redeem the “note”. It is an IOU NOTHING! You will take & use the IOU nothing, because the government says you must, at the point of a gun.

See the signatures. Treasurer of the United States. Secretary of the Treasury. See the serial number. It’s signed and numbered — exactly like the slips Lloyd dropped in the briefcase. Same form. Same function.

Now here’s what your grandfather’s bill said, and yours doesn’t. The old notes carried a line: “will pay to the bearer on demand.” You could walk it up to the window and redeem it for real money — silver, gold, something that existed. That line is gone. Quietly deleted decades ago. Today’s note promises to pay you… nothing. It’s an IOU that’s been legally stripped of the “I owe you,” leaving only the implied statement “you must take it.”

The same instrument as the bill in your wallet — a Federal Reserve Note — Series of 1918 (James Madison). Read the top line: “Will Pay to the Bearer on Demand.” That promise has since been quietly deleted from the note you carry today.

And here is the promise in its purest form — a 1934 Gold Certificate (Woodrow Wilson): “One Hundred Thousand Dollars in Gold — Payable to Bearer on Demand as Authorized by Law.” A literal receipt for a real thing, sitting in the Treasury.

Now do the arithmetic. That “$100,000” bill was a claim on roughly 5,000 ounces of gold. At today’s gold price, that gold is worth about $20 million. The bill’s number never changed — but the dollars behind it lost more than 99% of their gold value. The number on the note stayed the same. The dollar’s purchasing power has been systematically destroyed.

Same country. Same Treasury. The only thing they removed was the promise.

So consider the comparison honestly: Lloyd fully intended to reimburse Mr. Samsonite, down to the last cent. The dollar in your hand has been relieved by law of ever paying you back at all.

Lloyd was the honest one.

When did the window slam shut? Not in 1971 — not for you. For American citizens it slammed shut decades earlier. On April 5, 1933, Executive Order 6102 diktated by FDR made it a crime to own gold; Americans were ordered to surrender it at $20.67 an ounce. The Gold Reserve Act of January 1934 — the very year stamped on that $100,000 certificate — ended the right to redeem a dollar for gold, then revalued gold to $35 and cut the gold value of every paper dollar they’d just been handed to 59 cents. The government booked the difference — about $2.8 billion — as profit, stolen directly from US citizens. Citizens turned in gold at the low price, then watched the paper they got for it devalued. Americans were robbed by their own government on the way in and on the way out. Americans would not be allowed to legally own gold again for forty-one years.

1971 was the year that the central banks of the world got the same treatment because of the profligate money printing of the US. Until that August, foreign governments could still redeem their dollars for gold at $35 an ounce — the last tie to anything real. When Nixon shut that window on August 15, the final connection of the US dollar to gold was cut, and the dollar became what it remains today: a pure fiat paper currency — backed by nothing, redeemable by no one. Paper (now largely digital) money backed by a gun.

And here’s what an unanchored paper/digital IOU nothing does. In 1971 the entire U.S. money supply was about $685 billion. Today it’s roughly $23 trillion — more than thirty times as many of these notes, written against a vault that holds nothing. Every new one quietly bids up the price of the car, the house, the gallon of milk. That’s the inflation you feel. It isn’t weather. It’s the briefcase, refilled thirty times over. Rendering everything you need to buy as unaffordable!

The men running the press aren’t even lying, any more than Lloyd was. They sincerely believe the IOUs are good. That earnest, total conviction is the whole monetary priesthood at our Universities and in Washington — and it’s why the trick works on three hundred million wallets at once. Please read the quote of John M. Keynes available in the Sound Money section of the campaign site. It is short but devastating.

So put the bill back. You’ll still need it; the law says so. But now you know what it is.

On the campaign website, in the Restore Sound Money section, I’ve posted a short clip. Three minutes. I’m telling you in dead earnest: watching it is the equivalent of a PhD in monetary economics. Everything else is a footnote to Mr. Samsonite opening that briefcase.

▶ Watch it in the Restore Sound Money section →

Then ask the only question that matters: who’s holding your briefcase — and what’s actually inside it?

Do you trust the other candidates to fix this or perpetuate the theft of your purchasing power?

Restore Sound Money! Vote for Mike…

We’re going to open the books. All of them.

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Michael R. Stoddard Libertarian Candidate for Congress, Utah’s 3rd District

Open the Books, Mr. President!