{"id":14889,"date":"2020-07-02T13:36:18","date_gmt":"2020-07-02T17:36:18","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/jimbovard.com\/blog\/?p=14889"},"modified":"2026-02-16T19:42:16","modified_gmt":"2026-02-17T00:42:16","slug":"old-coins-taught-me-to-never-trust-the-government","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/jimbovard.com\/blog\/2020\/07\/02\/old-coins-taught-me-to-never-trust-the-government\/","title":{"rendered":"Old Coins Taught Me to Never Trust the Government"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"\"Mises Institute, July 2, 2020\u00a0<\/a><\/h2>\n

How Collecting Old Coins Taught Me to Never Trust the Government<\/a><\/h2>\n
by James Bovard<\/a><\/span><\/div>\n
\n

Old coins vaccinated me against trusting politicians long before I grew my first scruffy beard.<\/strong> I began collecting coins when I was eight years old in 1965, the year President Lyndon Johnson began eliminating all the silver in new dimes, quarters, and half dollars. LBJ swore that there would be no profit in \u201choarding\u201d earlier coins \u201cfor the value of their silver content.\u201d Wrong, dude: silver coins are now worth roughly fifteen times their face value.<\/p>\n

History had always enthralled me, and handling old coins was like shaking hands with the pioneers who built this country. I wondered if the double dented 1853 quarter I bought at a coin show was ever involved in Huckleberry Finn\u2013type adventures when \u201ctwo bits\u201d could buy a zesty time<\/strong>. I had a battered copper two-cent piece from 1864, the same year that Union general Phil Sheridan burned down the Shenandoah Valley where I was raised. Some of the coins I collected might now be banned as hate symbols, such as Indian Head pennies and Buffalo nickels (with an Indian portrait engraved on the front).<\/p>\n

In the era of this nation\u2019s birth, currency was often recognized as a character issue\u2014specifically, the contemptible character of politicians. S<\/strong>hortly before the 1787 Constitutional Convention, George Washington warned that unsecured paper money would \u201cruin commerce, oppress the honest, and open the door to every species of fraud and injustice.\u201d<\/p>\n

But as time passed, Americans forgot the peril of letting politicians ravage their currency.<\/strong> In 1933, the US\u00a0had the largest gold reserves of any nation in the world. But fear of devaluation spurred a panic, which President Franklin Roosevelt invoked to justify seizing people’s gold to give himself \u201cfreedom of action\u201d to lower the dollar’s value. FDR denounced anyone who refused to turn in their gold as a \u201choarder\u201d who faced ten years in prison and a $250,000 fine.<\/p>\n

FDR\u2019s prohibition effectively banished from circulation the most glorious coin design in American history\u2014the twenty-dollar Saint-Gaudens Double Eagle gold piece. I was captivated by early American coin designs, especially those featuring idealized female images emblazoned with the word liberty<\/em>. I was unaware that George Washington refused to allow his own image on the nation\u2019s coins because it would be too \u201cmonarchical.\u201d Until 1909, there was an unwritten law that no portrait appear on any American coin in circulation. That changed with the hundredth anniversary of the birth of Abraham Lincoln, whom the Republican Party found profitable to canonize on pennies.<\/p>\n

By the mid-twentieth\u00a0century, American coinage had degenerated into paeans to dead politicians.<\/strong> Portraits of Franklin Roosevelt, John F. Kennedy, and Dwight Eisenhower were slapped onto coins almost as soon as their pulses stopped. This reflected a sea change in values as Americans were encouraged to expect more from their leaders than from their own freedom.<\/p>\n

Coin dealing helped me recognize early on that a government promise is not worth a plug nickel.<\/strong> From 1878 onwards, the US\u00a0Mint printed silver certificates, a form of paper currency. My 1935 silver certificate stated: \u201cThis certifies that there is on deposit in the Treasury of the United States of America One Dollar in Silver Payable to the Bearer on Demand.\u201d But in the 1960s, that became inconvenient so the government simply nullified the promise.<\/p>\n

On August 15, 1971, President Richard Nixon announced that the US\u00a0would cease paying gold to redeem the dollars held by foreign central banks. The dollar thus became a fiat currency\u2014something which possessed value solely because politicians said so. Nixon assured Americans that his default would \u201chelp us snap out of the self-doubt, the self-disparagement that saps our energy and erodes our confidence in ourselves.\u201d Regrettably, this particular treachery was not included on the list of indictable offenses that the House Judiciary Committee enacted a few years later.<\/p>\n

After Nixon\u2019s declaration of economic martial law, I lost my enthusiasm for squirreling away one memento from each mint and each year in the Whitman blue coin folders that permeated many 1960s childhoods. I shifted from collecting to investing, hoping that old coins would be a good defense against Nixon\u2019s \u201cNew Economics.\u201d Prices for pristine coin specimens were far higher and more volatile than the value of some of the barely legible slabs of metal I previously amassed. A single blemish could slash the value of a rare coin by 80 percent\u00a0(same problem I had with some manuscripts I\u2019ve submitted over the years).<\/p>\n

Coin values were pump primed by the Federal Reserve\u2019s deluge of paper dollars to create an artificial boom to boost Nixon\u2019s reelection campaign and supplemented by wage and price controls that wreaked havoc. Inflation almost quadrupled between 1972 and 1974, and I soaked up the cynicism and outrage prevailing in coin investment and hard money newsletters. I poured most of the money from the jobs I did during high school into rare coins. Because rare coins were appreciating almost across the board, it was difficult not to be lucky in a rising market. The biggest peril was the endless scam artists seeking to fleece people with false promises of lofty gains or fraudulent grading of rare coins\u2014a pox that continues to this day.<\/p>\n

After graduating high school in 1974, I began working a construction job. When I got laid off, I saw it as a sign from God (or at least from the market) to buy gold. Investment newsletters and political debacles convinced me the dollar was heading for a crash. I sold most of my rare coins and plunked all my available cash into gold and also took out a consumer finance loan at 18 percent\u00a0to purchase even more. That interest rate was the gauge of my blind confidence. Nixon\u2019s resignation in August 1974 did wonders to redeem my gamble.<\/p>\n

My coin and gold speculations helped pay for my brief stints in college, with some greenbacks left over to cover living expenses during my first literary strikeouts. I eventually shifted into journalism and migrated to the Washington area.<\/p>\n

Two weeks after I moved into a shabby group house in the District of Columbia in 1983, I pawned the last gem of my coin collection\u2014the 1885 five-dollar gold piece that my Irish American grandmother had given me fifteen years earlier. She was a dear sweet lady who would have appreciated that her gift helped cover the rent for a few more weeks until I finally consistently hit solid paydirt later that year. (Thanks, Reader\u2019s Digest<\/em>!)<\/p>\n

Wheeling and dealing with coins inoculated me against Beltway-style agoraphobia\u2014a pathological dread of any unregulated market.<\/strong> The market set the price for 1950 Jefferson nickels coined in Denver based on the relatively small mintage chased by\u00a0growing legions of young collectors.\u00a0Nixon boosted the price of milk after the dairy lobby pledged $2 million in illegal contributions. It was nuts to permit politicians to control prices when there was no way to control politicians. Having watched coin values whipsaw over the prior decade, I recognized that value was subjective. The test of a fair price is the voluntary consent of each party to the bargain,\u00a0“the free will which constitutes fair exchanges,” as Senator\u00a0John Taylor wrote in 1822. Seven years ago, President Barack Obama, talking about how the government was losing money minting the lowest denomination coin, declared, \u201cThe penny, I think, ends up being a good metaphor for some of the larger problems we got.\u201d Actually, the collapse of our currency\u2019s value is a curse, not a metaphor. The dollar has lost 85 percent\u00a0of its purchasing power since Nixon closed the gold window.<\/p>\n

For a century, American coinage and currency policies have veered between \u201cgovernment as a damn rascal\u201d and \u201cgovernment as a village idiot.\u201d I remain mystified how anyone continues trusting their rulers after the government formally repudiates its promises. But I still appreciate old coins with beautiful designs that incarnated the American creed that no man has a right to be enshrined above anyone else.<\/strong><\/p>\n<\/div>\n

\n
Author:James Bovard<\/a><\/div>\n
\n
\n
\n
\n
\n

James Bovard is the author of ten books, including 2012\u2019s Public Policy Hooligan<\/em>, and 2006\u2019s Attention Deficit Democracy<\/em>. He has written for the New York Times<\/em>, Wall Street Journal<\/em>, Playboy<\/em>, Washington Post<\/em>, and many other publications.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Mises Institute, July 2, 2020\u00a0 How Collecting Old Coins Taught Me to Never Trust the Government by James Bovard Old coins vaccinated me against trusting politicians long before I grew my first scruffy beard. I began collecting coins when I was eight years old in 1965, the year President Lyndon Johnson began eliminating all the […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":14891,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[1290,2434,240,2437,2435,2438,710,445,289,38,2439,409,2436],"class_list":["post-14889","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-uncategorized","tag-beard","tag-coins","tag-confiscation","tag-george-washington","tag-gold","tag-hoarding","tag-inflation","tag-john-taylor","tag-nixon-2","tag-obama","tag-pawn-shop","tag-phil-sheridan","tag-silver"],"yoast_head":"\nOld Coins Taught Me to Never Trust the Government - James Bovard<\/title>\n<meta name=\"description\" content=\"Collecting old coins helped me recognize how politicians are damn rascals who rarely hesitate to default on their promises to the governed.\" \/>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/jimbovard.com\/blog\/2020\/07\/02\/old-coins-taught-me-to-never-trust-the-government\/\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"Old Coins Taught Me to Never Trust the Government - 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The Wall Street Journal called Bovard \\\"the roving inspector general of the modern state\\\" and Washington Post columnist George Will called him a \\\"one-man truth squad.\\\" His 1994 book, Lost Rights: The Destruction of American Liberty, received the Free Press Association\u2019s Mencken Award as Book of the Year. His Terrorism & Tyranny won the Lysander Spooner \\\"Best Book on Liberty in 2003\\\" award. He received the Thomas Szasz Award for Civil Liberties work, awarded by the Center for Independent Thought and the Freedom Fund Award from the Firearms Civil Rights Defense Fund of the National Rifle Association. 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The Wall Street Journal called Bovard \"the roving inspector general of the modern state\" and Washington Post columnist George Will called him a \"one-man truth squad.\" His 1994 book, Lost Rights: The Destruction of American Liberty, received the Free Press Association\u2019s Mencken Award as Book of the Year. His Terrorism & Tyranny won the Lysander Spooner \"Best Book on Liberty in 2003\" award. He received the Thomas Szasz Award for Civil Liberties work, awarded by the Center for Independent Thought and the Freedom Fund Award from the Firearms Civil Rights Defense Fund of the National Rifle Association. Bovard\u2019s writings have been publicly denounced by FBI director Louis Freeh, the Secretary of Agriculture, the Secretary of Housing and Urban Development, the Postmaster General, and the chiefs of the U.S. International Trade Commission, the Drug Enforcement Administration, the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, and the Federal Emergency Management Agency, as well as by many congressmen and other malcontents.","sameAs":["http:\/\/www.jimbovard.com","https:\/\/www.facebook.com\/jim.bovard","https:\/\/x.com\/jimbovard"],"url":"https:\/\/jimbovard.com\/blog\/author\/admin\/"}]}},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/jimbovard.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/14889","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/jimbovard.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/jimbovard.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jimbovard.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jimbovard.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=14889"}],"version-history":[{"count":5,"href":"https:\/\/jimbovard.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/14889\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":22401,"href":"https:\/\/jimbovard.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/14889\/revisions\/22401"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jimbovard.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/14891"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/jimbovard.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=14889"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jimbovard.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=14889"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jimbovard.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=14889"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}