Comments (13)

• Francisco Torres

• From the article:

  Still, experts like Ganz say the slight profit is not worth all the trouble.

  "It's very labor intensive, and the price is really not high enough at the present time," Ganz said.

  Uh, if there is no profit in it and not worth the effort, why would it be imperative to place a prohibition on the effort?

  Seems reporters are unable to catch these inconsistencies.

• Published: December 14, 2006 11:40 AM

• Kent Hastings

• Copper may not have much of a markup, but a 5 cent nickel has a 6.99 cent meltdown value. That's a healthy instant percentage increase for any black market criminals who break Treasury regulations. Thank Galt we reached this disgraceful inflationary milestone while a Republican President had a Republican majority in both houses of Congress. Otherwise, the "fiscal conservatives" could blame the Democrats. Instead we got an example of how minarchy failed.

• Published: December 14, 2006 12:07 PM

• Kent Hastings

• Oh, the ABC News story has a higher meltdown markup for copper than nickel (unlike the USA Today story linked from my article on LeftLibertarian--click my name). Still, the late seventies were a time of double digit inflation under Carter. This time the debasement of the low value coins seems more permanent and the difference between the face and meltdown value is likely to grow from now on.

• Published: December 14, 2006 12:22 PM

• Dan L

• If the government can use force to artificially tell me that a penny forever equals 1¢, does this mean debasement has hit bottom? First the Fed takes gold out of circulation outright, then decades later subtly removes the silver, then a couple decades later the copper--where does it stop? Maybe the wooden nickel will come back.

  I read something a while ago on the idea of titanium as a commodity maybe becoming a form of specie, since it's very useful in itself and its value comes less by scarcity and more by the energy intensity of extraction, similar to aluminum at the start of the 1800s.

• Published: December 14, 2006 1:28 PM

• Siggyboss

• As the price of copper increases, the greater the percentage of pre-1982 pennies will be melted down. Eventually, they'll all disappear except those held by collectors. If they can't stop the massive illegal drug trade, is laughable they're going to stop this.

• Published: December 14, 2006 3:23 PM

• Ben

• Ugh, a perfect opportunity for the Federal Reserve to actually institute some anti-inflationary policies, and they blow it!

• Published: December 14, 2006 5:36 PM

• Sam

• I agree with Siggyboss, if you melted the coins down and converted into wiring who'd be wiser? Folks would catch on that coins were going but would any really care?

  Interestly though here in Australia, 1c and 2c have simply been discontinued and you can take the coins back to a bank for exchange to more recent coinage. But the banks still reckon there millions of dollars of 1c and 2c unaccounted for!

• Published: December 14, 2006 8:14 PM

• TokyoTom

• I remeber a recent study showing that pennies' value as coinage presently isn't worth the cost of their minting, so that the economy would save billions if we just stopped making new ones. Those melting them down are doing us all a favor.

• Published: December 15, 2006 6:51 AM

• Sam

• I remember a joke where toilet paper was so expensive that it was $6 per sheet, hence it cheaper to use a $5 note . . .

• Published: December 15, 2006 10:28 AM

• hz

• "We are taking this action because the Nation needs its coinage for commerce," said U.S. Mint Director Edmund Moy in a statement. "Replacing these coins would be an enormous cost to taxpayers."

  right, and silently robbing the taxpayers year-in, year-out by devaluing the currency is presumably okey-dokey.

  Create a problem, focus the blame on the people taking advantage of it, standard MO.

• Published: December 15, 2006 11:03 AM

• Charles Hanes

• This is a perfect example of why circulating currency should have a value based on the amount of a valuable substance, such as copper, silver, or gold, and not a value based on a an arbitrary currency unit such as a dollar. For example, you should circulate a 1/10 oz. copper coin, not a 1 cent coin. Even in a hard money system, the values of the metals shift against each other over time, causing shortages of whichever metal is overvalued compared to the others. This happened with silver and gold several times in US history.

  Now, of course, we have a shift of the value of copper vs. the inflationary fiat dollar. But using circulating coins based on weight would still solve the problem. The accouting and coversion issues would be easy to solve with computerized cash registers and vending machines.

  L. Neil Smith describes exactly this kind of currency system in his novel "The Probability Broach".
  

• Published: December 15, 2006 2:14 PM

• John Law

• Maybe the Treasury will start "clipping" the coinange like in the old days. Imagine smaller and smaller pennies and nickels.

• Published: December 15, 2006 3:09 PM

• radyo

• hımm very interestng :)

• Published: May 15, 2007 1:42 PM