Federal Judge is WRONG!
Paper Money is Bad for Everyone – Not Just Blind People
By keeping all U.S. currency the same size and texture, the government has denied blind people meaningful access to money, a federal judge said Tuesday. U.S. District Judge James Robertson said the Treasury Department has violated the law, and he ordered the government to come up with ways for the blind to tell bills apart. Of the more than 180 countries that issue paper currency, only the United States prints bills that are identical in size and color in all their denominations," Robertson wrote. "More than 100 of the other issuers vary their bills in size according to denomination, and every other issuer includes at least some features that help the visually impaired. The fact that each of these features is currently used in other currencies suggests that, at least on the face of things, such accommodations are reasonable," he wrote. He said the government was violating the Rehabilitation Act, which prohibits discrimination on the basis of disability in government programs. The opinion came after a four-year legal fight.
Of course, the real problem is not with the unitary size of the paper money. It is the tragedy of paper money unbacked by any real commodity that should be occupying the minds of treasury officials. Absent paper money being tied to some commodity, government is free to print it cheaply and devalue and destroy existing money in circulation. In other words, if you think counterfeiting U.S. notes is tough, try alchemy.
It should also be noted that unbacked paper money never circulates absent some act of force or fraud by the government. Rather, money emerges through spontaneous self-interested actions of individuals who through voluntary exchange “rate” certain commodities as “more tradable” than other commodities. For, in a system of barter, even if, one wants to trade carrots for beef, one has improved his trading position relative to beef acquisition simply by trading carrots for anything more “tradable” than carrots. By doing so, the carrot holder has increased, by some margin, the number of beef sellers with whom he can now “barter.” This being the case, only highly-desired commodities can emerge in an economy as money. Absent some act of force compelling the use of a non-valued commodity, only commodity money can circulate as a medium of exchange. As for the United States, this initiation of force in the monetary sphere happened most recently in 1933 when President Franklin D. Roosevelt, under threat of a $10,000 fine and a 10-year prison sentence, or both, legally compelled holders of commodity money to surrender it to banks and accept in “exchange” Federal Reserve notes. Executive Order 6102, April 5, 1933. Of course, this action arguably constituted a taking of enormous magnitude, although errantly denied by U.S. Supreme Court at the time.
The negative effect of counterfeiting can be easily understood in the context of the common counterfeiter. Irrespective of whether counterfeiting takes place in the context of making coins that imitate gold or silver or printing money that imitates government-issued paper money, the process of counterfeiting is one in which the counterfeiter always gets the new money first and spends it before prices are increased by new money’s introduction into the monetary system. In short, early receivers of the new money gain at the expense of the late receivers of the new money or those who have no access to new income such as retirees living on savings, on a fixed or some nominal income retirement. Thus, it is from the elderly and others of those who rely on savings that the counterfeiter robs to the greatest degree for they never benefit from the new infusion of money but rather see the value of their savings diminished as prices rise as a result of the money “inflation.” For these reasons, government “counterfeiters” should be understood to be little other than thieves who covertly steal from all those who hold money as a store of value, and especially the later receivers (or non-receivers) of newly infused money.
For a great commentary on what government has done to our money, read Professor Murray N. Rothbard’s, The Case Against the Fed and What Government Has Done to Our Money.
E.K. Hornbeck
