The Vanishing Pelosi
This article is from the archive of The New York Sun before the launch of its new website in 2022. The Sun has neither altered nor updated such articles but will seek to correct any errors, mis-categorizations or other problems introduced during transfer.
The United States Mint launched its new Washington dollar coin in New York City yesterday with a public relations blitz in Grand Central Terminal featuring a Washington impersonator. But experience has taught that it is going to take more than razzle dazzle to win acceptance for a dollar coin. The Susan B. Anthony dollar coin introduced in 1979 failed to catch on, and the Sacagawea dollar introduced in 2000 can be found mainly as change in stamp vending machines at the post office.
Maybe the mint thought a dollar coin with a man on it would be more popular. But Washington is already on the quarter and the dollar bill, so it seems a bit excessive to put his image on yet a third piece of American tender. Advocates of dollar coins say they last longer than currency and so save the taxpayers the cost of replacing worn bills. Critics say that moving the dollar to a single coin is subtly inflationary, as a unit of value — the dollar — that belonged with the five, the 10, and the 20 is shifted to same category as pennies and nickels.
There is a school of thought about money — we call it the constitutionalist school — that is less focused on the decoration and design of the specie or banknotes than on what the currency represents. The American dollar once represented a stable unit of value — a given amount, defined by law, of gold. Now we rely on the Federal Reserve to keep inflation in check by controlling the money supply and thus making sure that a dollar today is worth about a dollar tomorrow, whether that dollar is on green paper or on mined and minted metal.
The power “To coin Money, regulate the Value thereof, and of foreign Coin” is a power that the Founders of America delegated to the Congress in the same sentence of Article I in which they also delegated to it the power to “fix the Standard of Weights and Measures.” Congress, in turn, has delegated the power to the Federal Reserve. We pointed this out on November 30, in an editorial called “The Pelosi.” We pointed out that on that date the dollar was worth about 1/637 of an ounce of gold. Since then, it has plunged to a scant 1/672 of an ounce of gold. It’s not a moment when we’d recommend focusing on the dollar’s design.
