So I was looking at buying gold, and since I also look at antiques and estate sales, there's always gold coins.
The first US minted coin to depict an actual person was around 1893 or so, and it's got a picture of Christopher Columbus on it. I believe they made $5 and $10 gold pieces.
This was hotly debated. The idea of memorializing any man's face and thus forcing your acquiescence to the values he stood for simply to engage in commerce is an unwarranted government intrusion into the private lives of free men. It woulkd have been absolutely unconscionable at that time to put a sitting President's image on a coin, and of course no President would have been so tawdry and tacky to have wanted such a thing. Many were staunchly opposed to depicting an actual person, for reasons that culminate with an Imperial leader striking his own image on the currency. Who does Trump think he is, another Caesar? (surely he does)
Before then, and for some time after, we had coins you're surely familiar with like the Walking Liberty Half Dollar or the Mercury Dime. These are symbols, representing the values of our Republic. Liberty, Justice, all that hoopla they talk about in the Declaration.
The values our Republic chooses to display have degraded significantly since then. We no longer celebrate the Virtues that make this nation great. Now, our coinage celebrates the Men, and very occasionally Women, who performed Great Works in this nation. But there is no Spirit. There is no universal truth being celebrated.
And now, we are turning the coinage into nothing more than a veneration of the current leader.
This Republic will fall soon enough, and history of our coinage tells the tale that it's been a long time coming.
When I was a kid we still had a few Indian Head nickles floating around. That was of course the end stage of Colonialism, when the colonists venerate those they eradicated, to puff themselves up of course, by painting the conquered as worthy opponents in combat.
I didn't buy the coins. I bought a gold ETF called RING. Gold didn't do bad, but it turns out I should have bought silver.
That's another sign things aren't meant to last. The USD is down 15% since Trump took ofice. That would be good, if we were a major exporter, but we're not, except for oil and jet engines, and with Trump abandoning the United States leadership role in the global hegemony, there's really no reason to keep using the Petrodollar.
So expect the dollar to completely crash. Wish I had bought the coins.
