Pennies from Heaven
O'ROURKE, P.J.
Pennies from Heaven Special one-for-two sale. BY PJ. O'ROURKE How much do you suppose it costs the U.S. Mint to produce a penny? Let me tell you—with a deeply self-satisfied howl of...
...The penny's cost overrun was the subject of one of those little six- or seven-column-inch filler items that are now the mainstay of the once-mighty wire services...
...But nothing doing...
...Or, "If that rap singer on the radio said what I think he just said, how come a SWAT team didn't teargas his recording studio...
...Various powerful political interests have been trying to get rid of the penny for years: the Treasury Department, retailers of all types and sizes, vending machine companies, and every industry that has to buy pricey zinc, from the manufactures of barnyard feed buckets to the purveyors of sunblock for lifeguard schnozzolas...
...What a moment of redemption and salvation it was...
...The problem is the cost of zinc, which is what a "copper" is actually made of...
...That would violate all of the economic thinking that has been done since the days of John Maynard Keynes...
...Take care of the pennies, and the pounds (of flesh extracted from us by the IRS) will take care of themselves...
...I was arranging sheets of newsprint on the kitchen floor, being careful to keep the editorial pages face down...
...There's no doubt that paying double is a very high price when it comes to obtaining a penny...
...It will not even, if you're managing the U.S...
...This particular squib was in the August 16 edition of the Boston Globe, but I didn't come across it until the day before yesterday...
...Anyway, there was the penny article, and I haven't been as pleased and enthusiastic about anything reported in a newspaper since Ken Starr folded up shop...
...And yet, I'm leaving out the best part of the story...
...And where's Eliot Spitzer now that we need him...
...But then comes the story about the penny costing two pennies, and we experience a sudden miraculous Hayekian, Misesean, Rose and Milton Friedmaniacal psychiatric cure...
...I suppose, as a fiscal conservative, a concerned citizen, and—at least until the cocktail hour—a decent human being, I should have been indignant...
...And it would give the Federal Reserve Bank governors nothing to do except sit around saying "oops" and "whoopee" every time the economy went down or up...
...Or, "Where'd my hedge fund go...
...Maybe there should be a little more government oversight...
...Or, rather, in the matter of government, we lose our faith in our loss of faith...
...Yes, in for a penny, in for $40,000,000 in government waste on the eight-billion pennies put into circulation each year...
...on a cocktail napkin in an Irish bar across from the Pentagon during open mike night...
...A quick survey of my home indicates that the average American household contains something on the order of 900,000 to 1,000,000 pennies stashed in coffee cans, cigar boxes, quart jars, kitchen junk drawers, childrens' piggy banks, under car seats, between couch cushions, and so forth...
...So it's enormous flat-screen high definition TVs all around, as soon as we get done building our backyard zinc smelters...
...We all do...
...We catch ourselves thinking things like, "Whoa, what about those sub-prime mortgages...
...The sub part is sounding like moldy hoagies...
...The nation's only supplier of the zinc "blanks" from which pennies are struck, Jarden Zinc Products, managed to block legislation banishing the penny...
...For the past 25 years a penny-weight of copper has been worth considerably more than a penny...
...Maybe you were put in mind of this by the postwar Iraq occupation planning that was done at 1 a.m...
...Mint, buy a penny...
...Therefore the U.S...
...The twice-priced penny proves your wisdom about Washington being a wacky-packed urba-nus ignarus brimful of prize saperoos, mutton-tops, woozy yaps, rattle hats, all day suckers, and asses wagging their ears...
...The above may be old news to PJ...
...O'Rourke is a contributing editor to The Weekly Standard...
...Mint began making pennies out of less expensive zinc with a thin plating of copper for the sake of tradition and to keep Lincoln from looking like he'd been stamped out of a galvanized hog trough...
...But $180,000 is a piddling sum when it comes to obtaining effective influence in Congress...
...Understandably I try to shield them from the extremes of liberalism...
...the more assiduous readers of the nation's minor newspapers...
...But to tell the truth, I was hopping about in glee...
...Or maybe you've been listening to the Democratic and Republican presidential candidate debates and wondering why none of them are taking their medication...
...I only buy the Globe for the comics, the Sudoku, and to train the puppy...
...A penny for your thoughts, and I'm not just picking your brain: I'm offering you a 100 percent return on investment...
...Well, congratulations on your insight...
...Something that, by the way, is not advisable in the kitchen's puppy-training area...
...Ah, the miracle of democracy— always letting us get our 2 cents in...
...But then a rising commodities market drove up zinc prices...
...Perhaps you yourself, even if you're not a libertarian, have been thinking that there's something chowder-headed about our government...
...When we're tired and stressed, we occasionally experience delusional hallucinations involving government—the kind Hillary Clinton should be medicated for at all times...
...Libertarians are only human...
...You see, there are times when even those of us with the staunchest libertarian principles lose our faith...
...And we wouldn't want our money to have any actual monetary value, would we...
...Maybe China needs a lot of zinc for, oh, I don't know, stabilizing the lead paint of Barbie dolls so that our girls don't start beating their girls on math tests, or something...
...All my sane disgust at and mentally balanced distrust of the political process returned like—need I say it?— the proverbial bad penny...
...The puppy is a Boston Terrier...
...Our other dogs are a black Lab and a Brittany spaniel with French antecedents...
...A penny will not buy a penny postcard or a penny whistle or a single piece of penny candy...
...This little brown item of pocket clutter costs twice as much to make as it's worth, and it isn't worth anything...
...Let me tell you—with a deeply self-satisfied howl of execration—almost 2 cents...
...It did so mainly by paying the political consulting firm of Baker & Daniels LLP $180,000 to lobby against legislation concerning —excuse me, I can't resist— "common cents...
...Not only are you smart, the other good news is that you have a lot more money than you thought you did...
Vol. 13 • September 2007 • No. 2
