Gold & Silver: The State of Sound Money In The US (Uncut) 02-15-2025

Gold & Silver: The State of Sound Money In The US

So that’s why our C3 was created to educate people on sound money and financial literacy so they can be free. Because when you’re financially free, you’re in that living paycheck to paycheck, which unfortunately, 78% of Americans are living paycheck to paycheck and don’t even have $1,000 to their name, which breaks my heart. And that’s why this movement and this mission is so important.

Welcome, everyone. This is David Morgan, TheMorganReport.com. And today, Daniel Diaz, Executive Director of Citizens for Sound Money and also Sound Money Movement is with me, and we’re going to go through a few things. Daniel, I’d say half my audience is familiar with you already, but there’s probably another half that are tuning in and really don’t understand Citizens for Sound Money or the SMM.

So why don’t you give a background on yourself and both the Citizens for Sound Money and the Sound Money Movement? Yeah, absolutely, David, and thank you for having me on. And thank you for accepting to be on our advisory board of Sound Money Movement, our 501c3. So a little bit about me first.

I’m going to use the same story I always use. Our late founder, Jim Forsyth, said it’s probably one of the most powerful testimonies in why I’m doing what I’m doing as Executive Director. So I’m a first generation Cuban American.

My family fled Cuba in 1965 after everything was taken away from them, their businesses, their land, and the straw that broke the camel’s back for my family was when my grandfather was taken to jail for buying extra meat from the butcher. You can’t do that when everything is rationed. So the minute he got out of jail, he’s like, we got to go, we got to pack.

So they got to the Havana airport, and they literally confiscated everything from them except for the clothes on their back. When they got here to Miami, if it wasn’t for friends and family already here, they would have been on the streets. My family lived in a small studio apartment in Miami.

My grandfather had a construction business in Cuba, but he had to start all over in Miami, pouring sidewalks throughout the city. From the 60s to the 70s, my grandfather worked through that construction company to the point where he bought it, he sold it in the 80s, and he retired in his 50s and left an inheritance for my family. So I grew up hearing about all the opportunities that America provided my family to rebuild their lives, and all the atrocities that happened with communism and socialism in Cuba.

I’ve dedicated my life at the age of 16 to never allow what happened in my family’s country to happen in my country. So I have a 26-year career in politics. I started lobbying, doing legislative work, running campaigns at 16.

Between that time, I took a sabbatical from politics, got my master’s, I became a stockbroker, insurance agent, really got into the finance of things. After grad school, got back into politics, and COVID hit, and I started a couple businesses, had a business partner, and that business partner started telling me about cryptocurrency, blockchain technology. For your listeners, it leads to gold and silver.

So give me a second to explain. And I told her, I’m like, no. I went through the, got my series seven, understood the global monetary system, the fiat monetary system.

And I’m like, no, there’s the Bitcoin, that’s like the tulip situation. Forget about it. I’m not going to buy it.

But when she told me about Bitcoin for the first time, I think Bitcoin was around $3,500 to $5,000 in March of 2020. I’m kind of kicking myself. But by the time I started to change my mind, I was telling her and my friend she recruited to try to convince me to buy Bitcoin and cryptocurrency.

I told him, look, stop. I’m never going to buy Bitcoin. My friend Dan called me.

He’s like, hey, let me come over and show you two videos. If you’re still not convinced about cryptocurrency, we’ll stop talking about it. I didn’t even need to watch the second video.

The first video was a video by Don Tapscott. I think the title was How Blockchain is Changing the World. And three, everything was cool about Bitcoin and everything, and they didn’t really convince me until it got to the part about the immutability of the blockchain and how it can store data and documents and it not being deleted because of the vast amount and strength and security of the Bitcoin network.

So Don Tapscott was talking about how 70% of the world’s population have tenuous titles and deeds, meaning that most people around the world don’t own their land. They lease it from the government. Like in China, you don’t ever own land.

You lease it for nine, nine years or whatnot, kind of like what the UK did with Hong Kong. And he gave an example in Nicaragua during the Contra era, where the communists would actually destroy land deeds and titles that are in the government records, put their communist friend’s name, go in trucks with guns, go to landowners, point it at them and say, hey, this land is no longer yours according to our documents. Get out.

And he’s like, now imagine if they would have put that blockchain technology existed then and they would have put the land deeds and titles on there, no government could delete or change records. And that was like a light bulb that went off in my head. I’m like, holy cow, if we had blockchain technologies in the 50s and 60s and the communist regime was overthrown, we can go back to the blockchain and prove that my family owned the businesses and land that the government took away and we could either get it back or get reparations that the Cuban regime ever felt.

So that made me realize that blockchain technology, not Bitcoin itself and not the cryptocurrencies, but the technology could change everything. It could provide more economic, political and individual freedom at the time, this is what I believe, than any political activity of man or any political activity I’ve done. So in September of 2020, I completely changed my mind on blockchain technology and crypto, bought my first crypto, went down the rabbit hole to figure out how it all worked.

By November, I was already mining cryptocurrency. By January of 2021, I had started a blockchain consulting and crypto mining company. And for three years, I was a blockchain consultant and crypto miner.

Fast forward to 2023. December 2022, I made some really good money buying and selling NFTs. And I wanted to figure out, I was loaning cryptocurrency to NFT holders and some of the more experienced lenders told me, hey, be careful, don’t do long term loans because anything can happen, the NFT goes down to zero.

So the question in my head was, how do we prevent NFTs from going to zero? So I talked to a developer friend of mine, and he’s like, and I asked him, is it possible to attach PAXG or tether gold to an NFT, which guarantees it will always have a value and not crash? He’s like, yeah, absolutely. So I a project with gold and silver and to get around FEC regulations on violating the Securities Act of 1930, I think it’s 33, of it being a security, there has to be an effort of others versus just effort of an individual versus effort of others. So we wanted it to be a learn to earn system where people would learn about financial literacy and sound money principles, but I didn’t know anything about sound money.

I didn’t really get into the gold and silver space. So I knew a lot of people in the crypto space for their board of advisors, but I needed to find out what gold was all about, what silver was about. So I reached out to Citizens for Sound Money.

I typed in sound money education, Citizens for Sound Money popped up. I reached out to Marion Ward, who was executive director then, and Jim Forsyth. They didn’t respond to me at first, but I’m pretty persistent.

They finally answered me and they had an interview. In that interview, I explained my position on sound money, on Bitcoin. And shortly after that interview, there was a Texas bill in 2023, a transactional gold and silver bill.

I’m like, hey, I have some contacts in Austin. Let me reach out and see if we can do anything. This was probably late April, early May of 2023.

We helped out. And the board of directors of Citizens for Sound Money were so impressed with me just volunteering my time to lobby, they offered me a position as legislative director in mid-May. I accepted that position five months later.

They were so impressed. They asked me to take over the organization on October 1st of 2023. From that time when I was legislative director to executive director, we had made a lot of inroads in New Hampshire, South Carolina, Missouri, and we started lobbying.

Fast forward today, the Sound Money Act, along with our coalition of partners, Economic War Room, Missouri Freedom Initiative, Sound Money Defense League, and ourselves, we covered around 27 states that had some form of sound money legislation, whether it was getting rid of capital gains, sales tax, or the Sound Money Act, or the Constitution of Money Act, as it was called in Missouri. Only seven states of those 27 got something passed. The only state that made gold and silver legal tender last year was Louisiana.

New Jersey got rid of sales tax, and the rest of them, I think, got rid of capital gains. Fast forward to this year, we had a real hard push in Florida. Florida was our top priority because it was the 14th or 13th largest economy in the world and the third largest economy in the country.

Again, Florida is our top priority. Even though we couldn’t get it through last year because of the Senate president at the time blocking it and not giving it any traction, we were able to get a $200,000 appropriation to study the impact and effects of gold and silver in the state of Florida. That study is still going on.

We’re expecting it to be released mid-February sometime, mid-February, late February with the report. So far, the report seems to be positive because the CFO was opposed to the Sound Money Act last year, but he came out on December 11th with a press release saying that he’s in favor right now. It seems like the report is showing some positive impacts on the state of Florida by making gold and silver legal tender.

So we redoubled our efforts. We started lobbying again in December, and we’re getting a lot of good feedback from leadership. For those of your listeners that don’t know how the political system works, yes, we’re a democratic republic and we vote for our legislators, but the legislature itself and the government, really, there’s only three people that make decisions.

To explain what I mean, last year of those 27 states with our coalition partners, those 20 states that everything failed, there was one common link. It was one of three people that killed legislation. It was either the Senate president, the Speaker of the House, or the governor, and the governor usually vetoes it.

And it was just a common thread. So before Jim Forsyth, our founder, passed away, he passed away tragically in an accident on March 15th of last year, him and I discussed opening up a super PAC so that we could influence elections and also help do fundraisers and everything to help us get favorable results from leadership or any type of politician, and if we have to, raise money to run against people who are opposing sound money and helping sound money advocates get elected. That’s just how the system works in America.

There was a Supreme Court case in 2010 called Citizens United, and what Citizens United did was redefine corporations as persons, and that also allowed corporations to raise an unlimited amount of money and fund any campaign and contribute unlimited amount of money as long as they don’t coordinate with the candidates. So that is when we as a country went from being a democratic republic to now, in my opinion, we’re more of a corporatocracy. The more money a corporation has, the more money they can spend, the more they can influence the legislature.

If you watch the recent confirmation hearings at RFK, Tulsi Gabbard, Patel, they talk about this corruption and they talk about how the senators and the body of Congress are owned by corporations and special interests. That’s exactly what they’re talking about, and it’s the same thing at the state level. That’s why at Citizens Sound Money, we started the Economic Freedom PAC, a super PAC to help us with sound money legislation and trying to get people, good people elected and supporting people who support sound money.

Back to Florida. So we have had a lot of success in Florida. We talked to over 100 legislators last year.

We’ve talked to most of the freshmen this year, and pretty much everybody is on board, but the most important people are leadership. We met with Senate President Albertan in Florida four times already, personally, and we met with staff a fifth time. He was really excited about our legislation.

We’re not 100 percent certain where the Speaker of the House of Florida is, but we’re hearing positive feedback. We feel a lot more confident this year in getting sound money legislation passed in Florida. Right now, if your audience wants to look at what the bills are, it’s SB 132, which is the Legal Act, and SB 134, which is a repeal of the sales tax.

Florida is the only Republican state in the country that still has a sales tax on gold and silver. There are only five states. The other four are Democratic states.

Florida’s sales tax is the most aggressive because it only charges sales tax for the first $500. If you buy $500.01, there’s no sales tax, so it impacts those who can’t really afford to buy $500 or more gold and silver. We’re really excited about Florida, and not just Florida.

We’re working closely with the Missouri Freedom Initiative. Patrick Holland, who is one of the founders of the Missouri Freedom Initiative, was supposed to be on, but he couldn’t make it. We got confirmation from the governor that he’s on board.

We also heard from the new Speaker of the House that told the sponsor in Missouri, Representative Bill Hardwick, that the bill is definitely going to get passed through the House. Now, in the Senate, this Constitutional Money Act passed in 2023 in the Senate. It passed last year in 2024, but this year, Senator Cindy Crawford said that she’s going to hold the Constitutional Money Act in her committee for three weeks because it’s, quote, unconstitutional.

So, you know, it blows my mind some of the political games legislators around the country play. But we are working very closely with the Missouri Freedom Initiative. We have Senator Matt Lieber in South Carolina.

He filed the Sound Money Act in South Carolina. We don’t have a bill number yet. I just reached out to the New Hampshire delegation we worked with last year.

They’re interested in filing an amendment and attaching the Sound Money Act on a bill in New Hampshire since filing dates have already passed. So, we’re doing a lot of work around the country, but we still need help. You know, the way that your listeners can help is by calling their legislators that have sound money legislation and ask them to vote for it.

And most importantly, call the Speaker of the House’s office, the Senate President’s office up first. Don’t call the until the legislation passes. Once the legislation passes, call the governor and ask them to push forward and make this a top priority because if it isn’t top priority for leadership in your state legislature, it’s not going anywhere.

And so, that is my recommendation if you want to get involved and try to make gold and silver legal tender in your state. Find out where there is legislation. We’re updating our website.

We have our old list from last year of states that had sound money legislation. We’re taking off the states that don’t have legislation. And you can find that information on our website, www.citizens, the number four soundmoney.org citizens, the number four soundmoney.org and go to the state or go to legislative, I think it’s legislature or legislative.

Let me see what it actually says. Where is it? I don’t have it. Well, there’s a legislative section.

Scroll down, state list, and then you’ll find it there. But that’s what’s going on right now. That’s a little bit about my background.

And I went through all that history. I didn’t even explain what our organization does. Citizens Sound Money, the mission is to promote the use of sound money and protect people’s rights to do so.

So, we promote sound money, every form of it, asset-backed digital currencies like load tokens, Kinesis tokens, TetherGold, PaxG, those are asset-backed digital currencies. We also promote physical gold and silver. We protect your rights to use gold and silver by legislation.

And that’s our primary focus. Now, sound money movement is our 501c3. Our mission there is to educate people of all generations on the importance of sound money and a sound economy for a free society to exist.

So, we are actually launching, and David, you’re part of our advisory board, we’re putting together curriculum, education, and our goal is to have education from K to the university level so that you can learn about sound money principles and learn about financial literacy. That is the sole purpose of the C3 because we find that the number one issue when we’re lobbying, and with anybody just on the streets, they don’t know what sound money is. And a lot of people don’t have financial literacy or how to save, how to diversify, and so forth.

So, that’s why our C3 was created, to educate people on sound money and financial literacy so they can be free. Because when you’re financially free, you’re living page to the paycheck, which unfortunately, 78% of Americans are living page to the paycheck and don’t even have $1,000 to their name, which breaks my heart. And that’s why this movement and this mission is so important to help people, not just around the country, but around the world.

We have a chapter in Turkey, we have a chapter in Israel, we’re a chapter soon in Canada and Australia. So, we’re doing a lot of work, we’re trying to educate as many people as possible, and we’re trying to push the legislation. But we need the help of everybody involved, not just from the people at the top who have money who can fund the Super PAC, but we need the grassroots as well.

Very, very good. Well, I have a couple of comments. One is, thank you publicly for inviting me to be on the board of directors for the movement.

And it’s with great joy that I accepted, as you know. You touched me on your story, and it’s rather ironic that one of my long-term clients, I’ll give his first name, Domingo, escaped from Cuba with a very similar story to yours. And he actually went through that story with me yesterday or the day before, in the last two days.

I’ll try to be brief. But he went back to the bakery that his grandfather had owned, which was in the capital, Havana, and it was huge. And they provided bread and pastries for tons of restaurants and the everyday public, but it was both commercial and retail.

I mean, just pumped it out. So, he went back there for a visit years and years later. And the people that were in there were all decrepit.

They were making by hand about 10 loaves a day. And so, he went through the fact that they once owned that, and they lived above the bakery, the families. And so, he basically got down to, well, why is it so bad here? Why is it that it’s so decrepit? Why is nothing fixed, nothing repaired? There’s no motivation.

And the guy just looked at him and kind of quizzically had said to him, well, nobody owns anything. And I think that really is the best I can do to give us and our viewers feedback. Because when you don’t have the pride of ownership, if you don’t have something in it, then you are not motivated to do anything.

So, these people basically made some bread to, I guess, just get by, but you get paid for doing nothing the same as you get paid for doing anything. So, basically, people are not motivated to do anything. So, I’m going to digress a little further, but I have about four contacts like that.

They’re going to do in a roundtable where I just moderate. One’s from one family’s from Czechoslovakia. One is from Poland.

One is from Cuba. And Paul Militovich, I’m not sure, but Eastern Europe. And I’ll try to keep it under an hour and say, hey, you guys escaped.

Your families escaped. You left because why? Give the story like you just gave us and then say, what do you see in America now? And unfortunately, you know as well as I that it’s going that direction all over again. So, thank you for letting me digress.

I don’t really have much to add. Is there anything that you want to do in summary? I will say I went to the website. It’s called legislation.

You click the legislation word and you get the state level. So, it’s all laid out. Couldn’t be simpler.

And, you know, people say, well, you know, look, I’m not a big believer in government. But I’d rather make that phone call and say this is the top priority of anything. And that make that call.

What’s going to take you? Very little time. And certainly, they get enough calls. It’s going to happen.

And as you said, you know, these three people that can block it. I mean, I was fortunate enough to stand behind the governor of Utah when he signed the legislation in the law. So, I guess I’ll have one question for you.

And then you can summarize or add whatever you’d like. I find it a bit ironic that we need to, what I would call, reinforce what’s already on the books. In other words, people say, well, we’re doing this.

Well, you don’t really need to if you read the Constitution correctly. Because as it says in the Constitution, no state will accept no gold or silver for payment of debts. And I’ve always thought about playing the devil’s advocate with the tax assessor here.

And just calling up and say, I’m very, very sorry. I’m afraid I’m going to jail. I just paid my property taxes.

And I realized I may have been fraudulent. But what do you mean? I go, well, according to law, I paid you with a private corporation script for my property taxes. And it’s my understanding that I have to pay in gold or silver in order to pay my property tax.

Am I in trouble? See what the heck that would do to legislators. But, you know, I think I have a few people who have tried that. Have you got any feedback from it? No, not yet.

I think they just silence. Goes over their heads or under it or whatever. Well, let me turn it back to you.

It’s been very eloquent. You’re a great, you know, you’re spot on. You’re very confident, as you should be.

And, you know, in your heart of hearts, you’re doing something that is very vital for everyone. People that don’t understand it don’t need, you know, I wish everyone would understand it and have that big why and why it’s probably the most important or one of the most important things you can do. But regardless of whether you get it or you don’t get it, we’re going to march on and we’re making headway.

So I’ve overtalked it. Let me go back to you, Daniel, and let me give you the floor and see what else you have to enlighten us with. Yeah.

Well, you know, we have a membership program. If you want to support the work that we’re doing, do you mind if I share my screen and show people the website? Oh, please, please. Send requests.

I think you have to give me permission to share. There you go. There we go.

All right. There is our website. So if you go to Citizensoundmoney.org up here, there’s a button become a member.

If you become a member, it’s $25 a year and you get access to metal markup. Jim Forsythe in October of 2023, he worked out a deal where we purchased metal markup. It’s a bullion aggregator.

In fact, this bullion aggregator most of the time is cheaper than findbullionprices.com. So you get that exclusively as a member. You’ll also get legislative updates, quarterly video reports about what’s going on with C4SM and around the country. And if you do the $100, not only do you get access to everything, we will also send you an ounce of digital gold through Kinesis.

And that is just a thank you for becoming a supporter and donating at $100. And our vision for the, we call it the pioneer membership, is to create state chapters. So once we get enough people joining, we will create a state chair, we’ll have a state organization to help grassroots lobby across the country, across the state that you live in, and we will help in any way that we can.

One thing that we do at Sound Money is we like working with everybody. That was something that Jim Forsythe did very well. He did something that most people in the gold and silver industry think was incredible.

He was able to bridge a gap between competitors and make them work together towards the Sound Money movement. That’s why we call Jim Forsythe the modern founding father of the Sound Money movement, because he did something most people didn’t. As a state senator in New Hampshire, he was only a one-term senator, and he passed some of the most robust legislation.

He was the first Republican state to pass medical marijuana. He also did school credits. There was another piece of legislation that he passed, he was proud of three pieces of legislation, I can’t remember the third.

But one thing that he was known for was never giving up and always trying to find a way to work with people. That is the legacy of Jim Forsythe. He did that.

He brought Lode together, Kinesis, the gold-backed UPMA, a bunch of competitors together to work towards a common cause. We’re all still working together with all these companies and all these organizations. That’s why we have the Sound Money Defense League, JP Cortez, Missouri Freedom Initiative, Economic War Room.

Jim helped cultivate a lot of these relationships. In fact, David, after Jim passed, I reached out to you. I reached out to all the CEOs and influencers that Jim had a relationship with to build that relationship.

The reception was amazing because of who Jim was. We’ll always love Jim. He’s the chairman emeritus forever in our organization.

We’re going to have some grants and scholarships named after him. We’re doing a TV show as well. I can’t talk too much about it, but we’re doing a TV show.

It’s going to be dedicated to him as well because it was really his excitement and vision that had us really push forward to do this TV show. If you want to support what we’re doing at Citizensoundmoney, go to citizensoundmoney.org and become a Pioneer member. If you want to support our education efforts, you know what? Let me pull that up and share that as well, soundmoneymovement.org. We have multiple initiatives.

I’m waiting for it to load. Share. This is our C3 website, soundmoneymovement.org. If you click on donations, you’ll see, I believe it’ll pop up.

Let’s see. Let’s go to initiatives. Here’s some of the areas you can donate.

You can donate to our Sound Money Scholarship and Grants Fund. Our goal this year is to raise $50,000 to provide grants to people who are students that want to learn about sound money. We’re going to have an essay contest and other ways that we provide grants.

If you want to help finance a TV show, you can donate to our TV show. It’s going to be an educational platform. It’s going to be 12 episodes long.

We have a curriculum development, which David and our entire advisory board, Zhang is on there, John Williams from Shadow Stats, Nathan Lewis, who was a sound money economist, Jacqueline Dawson, who’s the president and COO of Zhang Enterprises. She’s on our advisory board as well as David. We have our Sound Money Academy, which is our learning module system that we’re going to be building to help people educate themselves.

If you want to help us with the education side, it is tax deductible. We are a 501c3. If you want to help us with the legislation or if you want to help with both, that would be fantastic.

Please go to our websites, choose an initiative, and donate to our causes. I think I’m going to go ahead and wind it up there. Thank you for your time.

Let’s come back on board and revisit this and see what other states have come on board. Just give me a little bit of a perception of where we were, let’s say, in 2024 versus where we were a couple years prior. Do you think momentum is moving towards sound money? More people are wising up? More people see the purpose and understand why it’s important? Yeah.

So 2024, 2025, the excitement is there for change. There’s, I think, at least 10 states that have filed Bitcoin strategic reserves bills. Two years ago, people were afraid because of the Biden administration.

They thought that if they tried to make gold and silver that they were going to be sued. States are being challenged, some of the smallest states. That might be some of the reasons why the bills failed.

But it was a lot tougher last year. Plus, our legislation was a little more robust than this year. This year, we pared it down.

We only have making gold and silver, physical and digital gold and silver legal tender, and repealing taxes. That’s it. We had a lot more last year.

This year, I mean, because we did such a great job educating so many legislators across the country, and the fact that Donald Trump got elected, and he is doing a phenomenal job on the economic side so far right now, people are excited. Now, I don’t want to ignore the fundamental economic issues that are underlying our economy that I think there’s a big bust coming. But overall sentiment, and the reason why the stock market and everything keeps going up, and why I think a lot of legislators are so bullish and accepting sound money legislation is because of Donald Trump’s views on Bitcoin, cryptocurrency, which also translates to positive views of gold and silver, because the Justice Department isn’t going to be used to attack legislators, or the state, and so forth.

I’m really excited about where we’re at right now, because the overall sentiment around the country, because of Donald Trump getting elected. Now, Kamala Harris got elected. I don’t know.

We’d be in a much different situation. We’d probably already be in a bust cycle. But yeah, I mean, there’s a huge difference between two years ago and today, and I think a lot of that has to do with the administration change.

Okay, very good. I’m going to go ahead and wrap us up there. Again, thank you for your time, and we will revisit this great cause.

Basically, it’s the main purpose of my life. I mean, I’m all into hard money, and writing a financial newsletter focused on natural resources and sound money, but you know, the bottom line is one word, and that’s freedom. Yeah.

And there’s a direct link between free people, free markets, free money, and freedom. And I think we’ve lost sight of that. So you’re bringing it back to all of us.

Thank you so much. Absolutely. Thank you, David.