A Nation Without Pennies:
Progress or Pernicious Folly?
The United States government, in its infinite economic wisdom and spiritual smallness, has announced that it shall cease the production of pennies — that humble, copper-colored disc upon which generations of American children first learned the weight and worth of money.
At first glance, this might seem the act of a practical and forward-thinking Republic. After all, why should a nation that prides itself on efficiency waste nearly four cents to produce a coin worth but one? But let us not be so easily seduced by the arithmetic of accountants and the penny-pinching triumphalism of Treasury officials. This is no mere cost-saving measure. This is the quiet burial of thrift.
The government assures us that this change is merely a continuation of modernity — that Canada and New Zealand have already led the way. That is well. But is the metric for progress now measured solely by imitation? And shall we next abolish dimes, and quarters, until a dollar buys only what a quarter once did, and the value of money is as inflated as our egos?
Worse still, the demise of the penny is a quiet assault upon the moral education of children. We are told the coins end up in couch cushions and art projects — well! What better proof that they belong in the hands of children? For it is through the clinking of small coins in a piggy bank that a child learns patience, responsibility, and the rudiments of economics. To deprive them of that is to render saving itself quaint, a relic of a world where one waited, scrimped, and earned.
Let us also not forget the symbolism of the penny — humble, ubiquitous, and bearing the likeness of Abraham Lincoln, a man who rose from poverty by the sweat of thought and moral courage. To erase his coin is not only an economic gesture, but a cultural one — the slow erasure of modest beginnings in favor of lofty efficiencies.
The Treasury boasts a savings of $56 million by halting penny production — a mere pittance in a government that spends trillions with the looseness of a gambler. What is $56 million, next to the moral bankruptcy of teaching a child that one cent no longer matters?
In short, the penny is not being retired — it is being executed, and with it, a host of civil virtues: thrift, fairness in commerce, and childhood’s first encounter with monetary agency. We are, quite literally, devaluing value.
Thus I say to Congress, to the Mint, and to the casually complicit public: beware the small changes made in the name of economy. A civilization collapses not with fire and fury, but with a shrug and a calculator.
