James Turk and the New Hampshire gold money bill

This domain once carried a page at /turk.html. The recovered capture shows it reproduced a commentary by James Turk headed "The Quest for Sound Money in New Hampshire", presented as a commentary on precious metals and monetary matters and carrying the masthead of his subscription letter at fgmr.com. The page itself is undated.

The same text is still published on Turk's own site, where it is dated May 16, 2005. An earlier and shorter piece of his on the same bill is dated February 9, 2004. Those two dates are the only dating available for the reproduced commentary, and they come from the author's site rather than from the capture.

Turk describes himself as a participant rather than an author. In his own words he had been participating in a nascent effort to restore sound money in New Hampshire. He names Dr. Edwin Vieira as the drafter of the bill, both in the reproduced commentary and in the earlier February 2004 piece, where he calls Vieira a friend and describes the drafting as his work.

The February 2004 piece adds one concrete act: he writes that he took part in a press conference at the state capitol in Concord to explain the difference between fiat Federal Reserve dollars and to announce my support for the bill. That sentence is quoted exactly as fgmr.com publishes it, including its own elision; this site does not supply the missing words.

His interest in the bill was also a commercial one and the commentary does not hide it. The recovered page names Turk's own digital gold currency service, GoldMoney: he writes, in his own words, that he intended to make GoldMoney the first digital currency provider sanctioned by the New Hampshire state government. The revised bill would have allowed a designated electronic gold currency provider to carry the state's transactions in metal, which is the role his own quoted plan describes GoldMoney filling. That is stated on the recovered page itself, not inferred here. It identifies Turk with GoldMoney; it is not this site's source for who founded it.

They do not show that Turk drafted the bill. Every version of his commentary attributes the drafting to Vieira.

They do not show any official or formal role. A press conference and a published endorsement are what the record contains, and this site does not extend that into anything more.

They do not support the schedule the commentary gives. The reproduced text says the bill was scheduled for a vote by the New Hampshire legislature in January 2006. The General Court's docket for HB 1342 closes on February 5, 2004, when the House adopted an Inexpedient to Legislate report by voice vote, and no New Hampshire record of a successor bill or a January 2006 vote has been located. The commentary is good evidence of what its author expected and no evidence at all of what the legislature did.

What became of the bill is set out on the New Hampshire gold money bill page, which carries the General Court's own record alongside the rest of the recovered material.