I Found a Penny

I found a penny from 1917.

He was born just a few years after his fate was sealed by the monster from Jeckyll Island. Thanks to the demon born just before him, he had no idea that just ninety years later he would only be worth one per cent of his value at birth. Slowly but surely, day by day, his vitality was being stripped away.

Although he was born under the big-government Woodrow Wilson presidency, he got his first taste of depression when the 1920s hit. He got to see first hand how massive government policy led to a depression. He was also able to see William Harding's approach of limited government intervention in the economy helped end that depression in such short time.

Our penny was able to see the publications of "Human Action", "Economics in One Lesson", "Man, Economy & State", and "How an Economy Grows and Why it Doesn't". Together, these books helped him understand why he felt weaker and weaker each day. Thanks to these books, he understood why he and maybe ten other pennies could buy a newspaper one day, but a few decades later it would take hundreds of them.

Perhaps, as these books came out one by one, he slowly began to realize his ultimate fate. Surely, he was doomed to be melted down to have his base copper metal extracted. For, ultimately, fiat currencies are doomed to collapse.

He had read the Keynesian books, but they said that his sickness was a good thing and perfectly natural. He knew this just could not be correct. Each day he felt weaker and weaker.

Did he recognize the irony? Did this promising young copper piece yet realize the irony of having the picture of Abraham Lincoln stamped on his face? This man was the famous disciple of the infamous Henry Clay who stole wealth from his fellow countrymen. By printing money out of thin air through his Second Bank of the United States, Clay made sure that the standard of corruption had been established.

I wonder if my penny was ever traded in to a bank with 1,999 friends just like him to be exchanged for a twenty-dollar bill? He had come to understand that Andrew Jackson's face was ironically put on the $20 Federal Reserve note even though Jackson killed the Second Bank of the United States for its fraudulence. Despite Jackson's making good on his promise that “by the grace of the Eternal God” he would “rout out” the central bank's “den of vipers and thieves”, his face had come to adorn the $20 bill.

The penny was put into circulation while my great grandparents were going about their lives; he was circulating when my grandparents were born; and he might have been in someone's pocket when my parents were born. Who knows where he was when I was born - some 66 years after his birth. Each year there became a smaller and smaller chance that one of my relatives would have ever seen him.

He spent the first 12 years of his life being thrown around vicariously during the monetary-inflation induced Roaring Twenties until things inevitably went south. He then found himself being passed around helping the poor make ends meet during the Great Depression. What a beginning of a life! Being used for high priced luxury goods one day, then being used to buy basic necessities another.

He likely helped a few make ends meet during the government-induced austerity of WWII. While FDR was too busy provoking war with the Japanese and ignoring the warnings that the country was about to take revenge for the US's intervention, my penny was trying to comprehend the logic of such an aggressive foreign policy. How could the US afford a war while the country was so financially unstable? Were people really so foolish as to believe what Keynes was writing? Why wasn't anyone reading the counter arguments? How could warfare and inflation ever lead to prosperity?

Surely this was to be his end. The mints stopped using copper to make his brothers in 1943. Inflation was running rampant, and copper was too important for the war effort -- surely his time was at hand.

He quietly contemplated how Hoover's “do nothing” policies could still be ridiculed when FDR's New Deal was nothing more than a great extension of Hoover's programs. Could it be true that nothing multiplied by any number could be greater than nothing? Apparently the public could be made to ignore even this most basic of arithmetic.

He was about 16 years old when he heard FDR make his father, gold, illegal.

Perhaps he sat in someone's piggy bank while America delved deeper and deeper into Middle Eastern politics (and deeper into debt). He might have been in someone's pocket when the US overthrew the democratically elected Iranian Prime Minister Mossadegh in 1953. He was being circulated as his mother country kept sending one wave of children after another into these endless quagmires of trying to tell a foreign people how they should live their lives.

He recognized this non-stop warfare as a central principle to Keynes' economic models. However, as my penny was contemplating all of this inside a man's pocket, the man was not. Instead, the man was thinking of 'those darned Reds'.

He sat in someone's pocket when Nixon twisted the dagger in his father's back by completely shutting the gold window. No longer would the United States make good on her promises. Now there was nothing to stop the “den of vipers and thieves” except hyperinflation.

He witnessed the famous Stagflation of the 70s and 80s, which forever proved that John Maynard Keynes was incorrect. Yet, he heard Nixon's famous claim that he had become “a Keynesian in economics”. Was it a coincidence that the US completely gave up on saving and investing for the future about the same time that perpetual warfare became the norm? Of course not. The penny knew why, but his owner did not.

Perhaps he was exchanged for a newspaper talking about a recent Texas election where a principled man named Ron Paul -- who knew about Mises, Hayek and Rothbard -- became a US Representative in 1976. Perhaps there was hope for our good penny yet!

He laid in someone's pocket when the Stock Market crashed and the people who owned him lost their entire savings. Millions gone over night. His owners had to sell him to a bank to keep their lives going. But he had seen this type of thing before when he was young. Each time he found his way into a bank he saw how much more money the bankers had than the last.

Mr. Penny might have even heard that Dr. Ron Paul fellow predict the 2008-9 “Great Recession” back in 2002. He knew to trust Dr. Paul instead of the Keynesian henchmen who were saying that “the fundamentals are sound”.

On May 15, 2007, he watched, from the clear jar he was stashed in, Dr. Paul lecture Rudy Giuliani - and the US as a whole - about loose spending, failed monetary policies, and the consequences of interventionist foreign policies. Hope, indeed! “Imagine that”, he thought, “A President Ron Paul!”

He was being handed to a bank, smirking, as repayment for a dead mortgage, just after the housing collapse in 2008. He was the only one in the transaction that knew what had happened. He wasn't surprised that two crashes happened so close to each other, for, he knew the consequences of monetary inflation. He knew about the master builder. He knew of Ron Paul.

Perhaps he sat in the bank for 4 years because the Federal Reserve Chairman, Ben Bernanke, wanted to encourage banks to save by paying them interest on their reserves. “But where did these interest payments come from?”, asked our penny. “Oh yes, the printing of some $20 trillion out of thin air. Talk about reserves!”

He sat there until I exchanged an Andrew Jackson for him and a few thousand others. I took him out of that bank because I knew what the vipers were going to do to my money. I wanted the copper, not the fiat claim of value.

Whatever its past, the penny has a great story to tell as he nears his 100th birthday. And even though I initially saw him as nothing more than a 95% copper penny worth merely two and a half times his face value, I have found that he and his story are more valuable than even his base metal.

Now he sits in my hand, relieved that he ended his dangerous trek in the hands of someone who has also heard of Mises, Hayek, and Rothbard. He knows that I know his history.

Now he sits in my hand, as I promise him that I will join with Ron Paul, the Mises Academy, and the many others that are launching a campaign to reclaim his vitality back for him.