Wizard Obama Can Save Us With His Magic Coin

by Mark Horne 


The Democrats in the Senate wrote a letter begging him to “take an lawful [wink, wink] steps” to avoid allowing the Republican Majority in Congress to be allowed to function in their constitutional rule to make policy and vote on the budget. Of course, they didn’t put it exactly that way, but the fact remains that the Democrats have decided that, even though they are the minority in Congress, they should get to make all the rules anyway.  They proposed as a rationale for this illegal and treasonous coup either a fictional interpretation of the Fourteenth Amendment or a trillion dollar coin.
I’m tempted to vent on the legal ramifications of the letter’s request. I noticed in McConnell’s reply he didn’t seem to want to harp all that much on the treasonous nature of the proposal that Congress be stripped of the power granted to it in the Constitution. I did appreciate that he dealt with the coin idea with only one word of description: “Democrats are looking at everything from the ridiculous (printing a trillion-dollar coin) to outright abdication of Congressional responsibility.”

I’m glad the senator didn’t waste more words on the coin, because stooping to argue about it shows too much respect to an idiotic idea. Consider how one non-conservative columnist describes it:

“Finally, in the stupid-government-tricks department, there’s the $1 trillion platinum coin. According to proponents of the idea… an odd provision in federal law would allow the U.S. Treasury Department to create a coin, made out of platinum, in a $1 trillion denomination. Federal assets would suddenly increase by $1 trillion, meaning the U.S. government would no longer be running up against its congressionally imposed debt ceiling. Voila! Problem solved! …this is clown-car politics beneath the dignity of the United States of America. It also would dynamite what little credibility the governing process in this country might still retain, and it’s a mark of our decline that such a concept would even be broached.”

Not just a mark of our decline, but of our desperation. Fiat currency has always been superstitious, but this lays it bare for all to see. Hearing this idea on the news is like waking up and learning that Obama will slaughter a dove on live TV at Noon, Eastern, and will sprinkle its blood on the feed of the statue in the Lincoln Memorial in order to save the economy.  

Indeed, the coin might not only be a mark of our decline, but an accelerator of it. The reason fiat currency works for a time is that people are accustomed to the money. Since I know that other people will exchange goods for the money I must also continue to exchange goods for the money. Everything seems to work. But as fiat currency starts to create greater crises in bubbles and busts, attitudes begin to change. The government counters this lack of credibility by using a variety of forms of propaganda. The Chairman of the Federal Reserve, for example, is always treated with great respect and is listened to even when he literally makes no sense (Alan Greenspan admitted to doing this intentionally).
But publicly suggesting this magic coin is a form of anti-propaganda. It publicly shows the world what kind of stupidity and arrogance are fueling the “economic” theory—that it is nothing more than a superstition. We can become a trillion dollars wealthier as a nation by minting one coin?
You can fool most of the people most of the time but this might be the moment when the American ruling class learns you can’t fool all the people all the time.