Did you notice...

[Tim May]

At 7:09 PM -0800 3/23/01, Kevin Elliott wrote:
>At 23:16 -0600  on  3/21/01, Jim Choate wrote:
>>That the one place 'common law' is mentioned in the Constitution it is in
>>direct conflict with contemporanious English common law?
>
>That sounds to me like they we're basicly satisfied with the rest of 
>english common law...
>
>>                                 Amendment VII
>>
>>In suits at common law, where the value in controversy shall exceed twenty
>>dollars, the right of trial by jury shall be preserved, and no fact tried by
>>a jury, shall be otherwise reexamined in any Court of the United States,
>>than according to the rules of the common law.
>
>This brought to mind another interesting question.  When examining 
>this amendment is the $20 in 1700's coinage or in current dollars? 
>How much would that $20 be worth today anyway?

First, there is never any kind of mention of "or in the currency of 
1856 or 1917 or 1987 or 2089 of whenever the law is applied." Trust 
me.

Second, the dollar is defined at one point in the Constitution as one 
twentieth of an ounce of gold. (A one troy ounce gold piece was thus 
a $20 gold piece, or a double eagle, until the dollar was devalued by 
the communists in the 1930s. The dollar was unlinked to gold 
completely by the later communists.)

What all this means in terms of VII is probably meaningless. Arguing 
that taxes can only be collected on "real dollars," expressible as 
redeemable gold, is a favorite exercise of certain kinds of tax 
protestors. While we can be sympathetic to their claims that the 
commies are stealing to distribute to the deadbeats and drifters and 
welfare hoes, using this kind of argument will never result in any 
kind of victory.


--Tim May

-- 
Timothy C. May         tcmay at got.net        Corralitos, California
Political: Co-founder Cypherpunks/crypto anarchy/Cyphernomicon
Technical: physics/soft errors/Smalltalk/Squeak/agents/games/Go
Personal: b.1951/UCSB/Intel '74-'86/retired/investor/motorcycles/guns