Two Cents’ Worth and the Penny Saved (Issue #466)

You may have recently noticed a new penny.

Obviously the penny isn’t worth much, well maybe a penny but not one red cent’s worth of value. The penny pincher knows it hasn’t always been made of pure copper, but since 1962 the “cent” was minted with 95 percent copper composition and only 5 percent zinc. Today the penny has reversed itself, with 97.5 percent zinc and only 2.5 percent copper. The 2010 penny practically blows away, and practically speaking it might as well be the same denomination as a paper bill, a.k.a. Federal Reserve Note. The coin doesn’t jingle so much as clink, like some subway token or cheap fake. The penny is emblematic of the debasement of U.S. currency that has taken place under our very noses. There is more than one reason why passers-by, have long since ceased to pick up a penny, or even a nickel or a dime. There’s no dime’s worth of difference.

Speaking of emblematical debasement, one will also notice on the new Reverse side that Captain America has lent his shield to the occasion. The cartoon reflects the insubstantial and fictitious nature of the cords that bind this Union together, as well as the marshal nature of domination perpetrated by the federal government in the Twenty-First Century. The symbol is actually intended to convey that message.

According to the U.S. Mint, the design evokes Abraham Lincoln’s “preservation of the United States…as a single and united country.” Lest the country get carried away somehow by remembrance of Freedom or Liberty, it was required by the Presidential $1 Coin Act of 2005, Title III of Public Law 109-145. While the obverse or heads side bears the familiar Victor David Brenner likeness of President Lincoln which has appeared since 1909, the reverse now shows a union shield. The shield dates to the 1780s and at first represented the united nature of political resistance to and military defense by Thirteen Original Colonies against British tyranny. The union shield was co-opted and used widely in the North during its prosecution of the War Between the States. According to the U.S. Mint, it is the foregone conclusion and symbolic representation of this shield today that thirteen vertical stripes represent all fifty states joined into “one compact union to support the federal government, [as] represented by the horizontal bar above.” This then becomes the meaning of the inscription E PLURIBUS UNUM—“out of many, one”: that all fifty sovereign states exist to support the Federal Government. Oh great, now that the Federal Government is run by a unitary Chief Executive and his appointed czars, in order to wage wars indefinitely and to command the un-free market economy! Heaven help us.

It would sure be nice if a candidate for Governor, for instance, would start sounding a theme so many Texans are wanting, and waiting to hear; namely, that the 1st and the 10th Amendments still mean what they say, and all the Bill of Rights in between. In terms of policy this could and probably does mean a return of prayer in public schools to help give our children and society the foundational set of values we need to build upon again. From a Constitutional perspective, this is Freedom in fact, and the truth of the matter is that we have not got the sort of Republic our Founding Founders intended. Self-determination is Freedom; and matters of faith and education are left entirely within the purview of the States, according to the Constitution. It is time to ‘Just say No’ to the Federal Government.

The Colonies that united together during the American Revolution did so, on the basis of self-determination and the sovereign political will of their respective peoples. They did not do so because the Federal Government ‘represented by the horizontal bar above’ screwed and bolted them down in a vertical alignment, and declared unilaterally that is how it was going to be. Ironically, the patina on the Statue of Liberty covers copper, rather than zinc, and figuratively that copper is more malleable than a steel rod or iron, intimating the way that separate societies of the several states are supposed to be able to seek and expect an accommodation with the federal government, to pursue those solutions and prescriptions the Constitution had left them free to pursue.