The Cost of Melting a Copper Penny

Let's start with up to $10,000 and add up to five years in prison. That's the base rate in a welfare state.

December 14, 2006
U.S. Mint Moves to Ban Penny Melting
Effective today, the U.S. Mint has implemented an interim rule that makes it illegal to melt nickels and pennies, or to export them in mass quantities.

Violators of these new regulations face up to a $10,000 fine, imprisonment of up to five years, or both.

The Department of the Treasury implemented similar regulations prohibiting the exportation, melting or treatment of silver coins between 1967 and 1969, and 1-cent coins between 1974 and 1978.

This combined with the new restrictions on I-Bonds must mean the welfare state is working overtime lately.

The financial policy of the welfare state requires that there be no way for the owners of wealth to protect themselves. - Alan Greenspan

Surely there must be something we can do. What if I...

There is no safe store of value. - Alan Greenspan

The abandonment of the gold standard made it possible for the welfare statists to use the banking system as a means to an unlimited expansion of credit. They have created paper reserves in the form of government bonds which — through a complex series of steps — the banks accept in place of tangible assets and treat as if they were an actual deposit, i.e., as the equivalent of what was formerly a deposit of gold. The holder of a government bond or of a bank deposit created by paper reserves believes that he has a valid claim on a real asset. But the fact is that there are now more claims outstanding than real assets. The law of supply and demand is not to be conned. As the supply of money (of claims) increases relative to the supply of tangible assets in the economy, prices must eventually rise. Thus the earnings saved by the productive members of the society lose value in terms of goods. When the economy's books are finally balanced, one finds that this loss in value represents the goods purchased by the government for welfare or other purposes with the money proceeds of the government bonds financed by bank credit expansion. - Alan Greenspan

Heck, those other purposes might even be an Iraq War over oil. Stranger things have happened. I am SO stagflationist today. Just thought I'd share that.

See Also:
Gold and Economic Freedom, Alan Greenspan, 1966