Just My Two Cents

John Fund managed to irritate me with his National Review article headline: Against Common Cents.

John, overused puns are lame. Plus, they are my thing. Stay in your lane.

But his topic is also a sore spot:

The Department of Government Efficiency, the new cost-cutting advisory body run by Elon Musk, is already signaling what kind of reforms it may propose.

Its first suggestion is a small but valuable one: get rid of the penny. There are 240 billion pennies lying around the United States — nearly one out of every two coins minted in the U.S. has a face value of just one cent. They sit in coin jars in homes, slip between couch cushions, and litter our streets. The relentless creep of inflation has made the penny effectively worthless, and it’s time to stop its proliferation. Every penny now costs 3.7 cents to make and distribute. That’s an increase of more than 20 percent from last year, largely due to the rising cost of metals, including zinc and copper.

The suggestion is (indeed) "small", but not particularly "valuable". Yes, the U.S. Mint's latest annual report reports that, by itself, the penny has negative "seigniorage", losing $85.3 million last year. Nickels lost $17.7 million.

Yes, arguably, Uncle Stupid is taking raw materials that are worth something, and producing items that aren't worth that much.

The amounts are trivial, though, even though the optics are bad. In comparison to what the government shells out per year, we are talking maybe a couple dozen minutes worth of spending. And the seigniorage losses are more than made up for in the production of dimes and quarters.

And there's a fundamental contradiction in John's argument; if pennies are "effectively worthless", why does the population keep demanding them?

And what does John's argument say about the proper relationship between a government and its citizens? Are we here to pad the government coffers in its provision of a legally mandated monopoly product?

(I speculate that if penny and nickel "melt values" get significantly over their face value, they will magically vanish from circulation all by themselves. The current melt value of 20 nickels is $1.07; I assume a 7% premium is inadequate to make their melt-and-resell conversion worthwhile. Plus, it's illegal. In contrast, a hundred modern, mostly zinc, pennies have a melt value of about 75¢.)

My previous rant about this was back in 2016, aimed at an op-ed by former Senator Judd Gregg.

Also of note:

  • Has he been checked for brain worms lately? The Trump idolaters will not like the WSJ editorialists take: Why RFK Jr. Is Dangerous to Public Health.

    Mr. Kennedy is scheduled to appear before the Senate Finance Committee on Wednesday. Expect him to obfuscate about his ties to trial lawyers, anti-vaccine views, and support for sundry progressive causes. While presenting himself as a truth-teller and slayer of government corruption, he’s as slippery as Anthony Fauci.

    Most troubling is his long record of anti-vaccine advocacy. In the past he has claimed that the measles vaccine causes autism despite reams of studies that have found no causative link, and that the polio vaccine might have killed many more than the actual virus. Deadly infectious diseases disappeared because of better hygiene, not vaccines, he asserts.

    He has tried to soften his vaccine skepticism since being nominated, and he now says he won’t take away anyone’s vaccines. He says he merely wants to ensure that vaccines are safe and thoroughly studied—who doesn’t?—and that Americans have access to more information. In Mr. Kennedy’s case, this means opening the industry to lawsuits by the trial bar.

    The editorial goes on to point out that (among other things) Junior has gotten millions as his cut for referring clients to lawsuit-happy lawyers. So there's more than a slight financial interest at stake here.

  • But there's some good Trump news too. Jeff Jacoby says maybe we are getting Back, at last, to the color-blind principle.

    A FIERCE commitment to racial color blindness — the principle that every individual should be treated by the law and by society without regard to race or color — was fundamental to the Civil Rights movement. That principle was enshrined in the 1964 Civil Rights Act, which unambiguously prohibited employers and unions from discriminating on the basis of race. Indeed, the legislation was so unambiguous that when critics during the Senate debate on the bill said it would lead to racial quotas in hiring, Senator Hubert Humphrey, the bill's lead sponsor, didn't hesitate to refute the claim

    "If the senator can find ... any language which provides that an employer will have to hire on the basis of percentage or quota related to color, race, religion, or national origin," Humphrey memorably vowed, "I will start eating the pages one after another, because it is not in there."

    But it wasn't long before the law's plain meaning was turned inside out. In 1965 President Lyndon Johnson issued Executive Order 11246, which mandated "affirmative action" in government contracting — a directive that eventually grew into an elaborate skein of racial preferences, quotas, set-asides, and "diversity, equity, and inclusion" (DEI) policies that compelled discrimination for the sake of racial balance. Over time, liberal policy makers and civil rights organizations went from upholding color blindness as the highest aspiration of a racially just society — Martin Luther King's storied dream — to disparaging it as bigotry in disguise.

    Bottom line:

    Trump, who was inaugurated on Martin Luther King Day, has moved quickly and forcefully to reestablish as the law of the land the color-blind principle for which MLK lived and died. If he succeeds, Americans of every color and political stripe will be better off.

    Free at last! And It only took sixty years!