Just in Time for Its 500th Anniversary, a New Edition of Copernicus on Minting Money

‘On the Minting of Money’By Nicolaus Copernicus500th Anniversary edition 1526-2026 Edited by Ralph Benko The Webster’s Press, 108 Pages“No, you have it wrong, the sun does not revolve around the earth.” Copernicus refined and kept to himself, over a twenty year period, the radical insight that the earth rotated on its axis around the sun. He spent virtually the same amount of time thinking about money — the way to keep it, grow it, and retard inflation by adhering to a gold standard.This new edition of “On the Minting of Money,” translated by Gerald Malsbary and edited by gold standard expert Ralph Benko, is a deft presentation of a scientist who observed carefully not only the heavens but the political economy of his time in which the devaluation of the currency led to disaster.Mr. Benko is as keenly aware of the workings of Copernicus’s mind as any biographer could hope to be. The scientist’s fundamental insights, Mr. Benko shows, remain not only relevant but also neglected in current, much longer writings about money.Like Copernicus, Mr. Benko deplores the tendency of governments to debase currency, a “subtle but highly damaging” phenomenon that occurs slowly and is therefore not perceived as a great threat. Inflation remains a constant worry because of the depreciation of money, even though in the short term devaluing currency may appear to yield a monetary gain. Mr. Benko contends that it is “an irony and an oddity that modern academic economists find themselves falling in with the political provenance of William Jennings Bryan rather than the provenance of Copernicus” and later Issac Newton, Master of the Royal Mint for the last three decades of his life.Bryan’s famous declaration: “You shall not crucify mankind upon a cross of gold,” has had an almost sacred hold on thinking about the gold standard that Mr. Benko deplores, not least of all because “one could drive a prairie schooner through any part of his [Bryan’s] argument and never scrape against a fact or a sound statement,” as one of his contemporaries observed.In Mr. Benko’s view, too many contemporary economists practice an “uncritical acceptance of assertions which have the appearance of being scientific.” He is getting at habits of mind: “It sometimes almost seems as if the techniques of science were more easily learnt than the thinking that shows us what the problems are and how to approach them.”So what are the problems? Copernicus argues that the “debasement of coinage . . . does not operate all at once, and at a single blow, but gradually overthrows governments, and in a hidden insidious way” that “only a few very thoughtful people” notice.The gold standard stems from this simple but essential Copernican principle: “Whatever is taken as a measure has to be stable — must keep to a fixed limit.” That is what gold is for, if I follow him correctly. To do otherwise, he reasons, will disturb the “public order” and “buyers and sellers of things will be cheated many times over,” as if what you bought, for example, kept changing in value because it was put on different scales. Copernicus was not arguing in the abstract. A significant part of his essay deals with the debasement of Prussian currency. The currency — old marks and new marks, for example — kept changing in value as coins contained different amounts of silver, which became not merely a financial problem but struck at the very heart of government:“But woe to you, Prussia,” Copernicus warned: “With your collapse, you are paying the price of a badly administered republic! And now, although both the material value and the valuation of your money are vanishing everywhere, still there is no cessation from the coining of money.” Each successive government minted as it liked, according to no universal standard. Other dire consequences ensued, Copernicus is “ashamed” to say in an essay that remains relevant when everything now seems so expensive — the very word he uses — even as cheap money is “in use,” promoting “laziness, lack of interest and a kind of cowardly idleness.”Copernicus outlines “A Plan for Reform” that I recommend for one’s perusal, but only if one follows up with Mr. Benko’s Appendix II, “A Brief History of Money,” which begins with an epigraph from Senator Nelson Aldrich: “The study of monetary questions is one of the great causes of insanity.”

Just in Time for Its 500th Anniversary, a New Edition of Copernicus on Minting Money

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