Sometimes You Just Have To Laugh

     …and I did:

     A conservative estimate holds that there are 240 billion pennies lying around the United States — about 724 ($7.24) for every man, woman and child there residing, and enough to hand two pennies to every bewildered human born since the dawn of man. (To distribute them all, in fact, we’d have to double back to the beginning and give our first six billion ancestors a third American penny.) These are but a fraction of the several hundreds of billions of pennies issued since 1793, most of which have suffered a mysterious fate sometimes described in government records, with a hint of supernaturality generally undesirable in bookkeeping, as “disappearance.” As far as anyone knows, the American cent is the most produced coin in the history of civilization, its portrait of Lincoln the most reproduced piece of art on Earth. Although pennies are almost never used for their ostensible purpose (to make purchases), right now one out of every two circulating coins minted in the United States has a face value of 1 cent. A majority of the ones that have not yet disappeared are, according to a 2022 report, “sitting in consumers’ coin jars in their homes.”
     It’s crucial that they remain there. Five years ago, Mint officials conceded that if even a modest portion of these dormant pennies were suddenly to return to circulation, the resulting flow-back would be “logistically unmanageable.” There would be so unbelievably many pennies that there most likely would not be enough room to contain them inside government vaults. Moving them from place to place would be time-consuming, cumbersome and costly. (Just $100 worth of pennies weighs a touch over 55 pounds.) With each new penny minted, this problem becomes slightly more of a problem.

     Gee, it sounds almost as bad as the risk of tectonic collapse from all those hoarded issues of National Geographic! But the author proceeds to a conclusion that, regretfully, I must style “inevitable:”

     The necessity of abolishing the penny has been obvious to those in power for so long that the inability to accomplish it has transformed the coin into a symbol of deeper rot. Eleven years ago, President Barack Obama called the penny “a good metaphor for some of the larger problems” of the U.S. government. “It’s very hard to get rid of things that don’t work,” Obama said, adding that eliminating the penny is something a president (for example: Barack Obama, 11 years ago) would “need legislation” for.

     They all do it. Every last one of them. If people save it, the State must abolish it. They don’t reflect even momentarily on why we save pennies… and to a lesser degree, nickels, dimes, and quarters.

     Has this “Caity Weaver” never heard of Gresham’s Law? Is she unaware that pennies are a store of value superior to any other legal-tender product of the U.S. Mint? Why, she even notes that a penny costs $0.03 to manufacture! It’s practically sound money! So naturally We the Great Unwashed will save our pennies and squander our worthless Federal Reserve Notes. With the collapse of the dollar already in progress, no other course would make sense!

     For my part, I have an old pickle barrel that’s two-thirds full of pennies… and another old pickle barrel that’s about half full of nickels, dimes, and quarters. When Der Tag arrives, I expect to find the latter barrel highly useful for reloading shotgun shells. But the former one? Hands off, dude! That’s my patrimony to posterity: a reminder of what people will do when the State messes around with our money. The very least of what people will do, actually.

     Apropos of approximately everything, have a gander at this:

     Pretty good lookin’, aren’t they? I have about fifteen hundred of them. And I expect that, should the dollar finally “go to its fiat-currency reward,” then unless someone’s in need of wastepaper, they’ll be worth a lot more than any Federal Reserve Note. So will my “real” pennies, of course.