Mourn for the Lost Penny

Every Canadian hated pennies. Even homeless street beggars hated getting pennies. If someone dropped a penny, they wouldn’t even bother to pick it up. Every Canadian seems happy that the penny is gone.

Sadly, Canadians do not realize how this loss is truly a tragedy, because it unequivocally shows how the government and the Bank of Canada have abused the monopoly over money. If you go to the BoC website, you can see that since 1914 the Canadian dollar has lost 95% of its value.

This is the inevitable result of the age-old credo of monetary cranks and inflationists. Mises wrote:

A very popular doctrine maintains that progressive lowering of the monetary unit’s purchasing power played a decisive role in historical evolution. It is asserted that mankind would not have reached its present state of well-being if the supply of money had not increased to a greater extent than the demand for money. The resulting fall in purchasing power, it is said, was a necessary condition of economic progress. The intensification of the division of labor and the continuous growth of capital accumulation, which have centupled the productivity of labor, could ensue only in a world of progressive price rises. Inflation creates prosperity and wealth; deflation distress and economic decay.

All this time, rather than having pennies lose value until they must be eliminated, pennies should have been increasing in value. We should have been able to buy more stuff with pennies today than 50 years ago. That is how a free economy with a stable money supply works. Money is saved and invested into more production. Workers create more goods, and so the monetary unit can purchase more stuff. Instead, the Canadian government and its central bank have distorted the economy and redistributed wealth by means of monetary policy. Monopolies are always bad, and a monopolization of money is the most dangerous of all.

The death of the penny should be a blaring wake-up call to Canadians. The Bank of Canada should be shut down, the government should abolish legal tender laws, and Canadians themselves should decide what their money should be. Otherwise, expect to someday bid farewell to nickels, dimes, and even loonies as the government continues its destruction of our currency.

— Read more at the Mises.ca —