The Aporetic

So recently the GAO addressed the ques­tion of replac­ing the dol­lar bill with a dol­lar coin to save money. The idea is that a bill wears out in, say, ten months while a coin lasts ten years. The gov­ern­ment would save the cost of print­ing dol­lar bills.

Also recently some econ­o­mists have pro­posed that the Trea­sury avoid the debt ceil­ing cri­sis by sim­ply mint­ing two one tril­lion coins out of platinum.

Many years ago when I was research­ing Keep­ing Watch I inter­viewed a lob­by­ist, James Ben­field, who lob­bied on two issues only: day­light sav­ing, and the dol­lar coin.

How can day­light sav­ing have a lob­by­ist, you might ask? A whole series of indus­tries ben­e­fit from day­light sav­ing, mostly indus­tries hav­ing to do with out­door activ­i­ties. The mak­ers of char­coal bri­quets, mos­quito repel­lant, and soft­ball gear all sup­port an extended period of day­light sav­ing. Ben­field dis­cov­ered that fast-food fran­chises did more busi­ness under day­light saving—“up to eight hun­dred dol­lars per unit per day” and con­vinced them to help pay his salary.

The dol­lar coins’s con­stituents are more obvi­ous and less numer­ous: the metal extrac­tion and pro­cess­ing indus­tries, which as NPR explains here, have con­vinced Sen­a­tors Tom Harkin and John McCain to intro­duce a bill favor­ing those indus­tries. On the other side, Crane Paper has hired its own lob­by­ists to pro­tect the dol­lar bill and its exclu­sive monop­oly on paper stock for same.

In 1918, when day­light sav­ings was first tried, the main sup­port­ers were A. Lin­coln Filene, of Filene’s depart­ment store, and his crea­ture, the US Cham­ber of Com­merce. They pitched DST as a patri­otic mea­sure to save fuel, as below in this ad and the con­gres­sional mail­ing card spon­sored by “United Cigar Stores Company:”

;

At one time, a strong eco­nomic lobby opposed day­light sav­ing: the movie indus­try. In 1930, Fox West Coast The­aters of Los Ange­les led a sec­ond fight against day­light sav­ing for Cal­i­for­nia, which its spokesman claimed brought “unlim­ited pos­si­bil­i­ties for evil” to the movie indus­try.” Fox pledged $50, 000 to stop­ping such a measure.

In the case of day­light sav­ing, time was and is money. In a more gen­eral sense, “time is money” is a phrase grow­ing out of usury, and the lend­ing of money, which was at one time con­sid­ered imoral for many rea­sons includ­ing the fact that the lender prof­ited from the pas­sage of time, a quan­tity cre­ated by and belong­ing to god.

Day­light sav­ing and the dol­lar coin both have the same odd rela­tion­ship with the nat­ural world. Both involve real things which have become abstracted. In the case of both money and time the sym­bols have come to replace the things they once represented.

Prein­dus­trial peo­ple mea­sured time by nat­ural cues–the pass­ing of sea­sons, the phases of the moon, the bio­met­ric sched­ules of farm ani­mals. Time was insep­a­ra­ble from nature: “noon” was when the sun was directly over­head, and so noon was dif­fer­ent ten miles to the east or west. Time was a local thing that depended on local con­di­tions, and it existed in nature. A clock or watch was just a con­ve­nient sym­bol, a re-presentation, of this nat­ural quality.

But by the mid nine­teenth cen­tury, and the estab­lish­ment of regional and national time zones, time had become what the clock said: noon in Ban­gor Maine was the same thing as noon in Detroit and St. Peters­burg Florida. The sun had noth­ing to do with it. Day­light sav­ing, first tried in WWI, epit­o­mized this change. In 1850, Amer­i­cans had changed the hours of oper­a­tion to reflect changes in daylight.

notice the time is the “merid­ian” of Low­ell, MA: that is, noon is exactly when the sun passes over­head. Instead of “day­light sav­ing,” the mill changed its hours to match avail­able daylight

;

In 1919, with day­light sav­ing, they changed the clocks and pre­tended it was 6 am when it was actu­ally 7. The sym­bol, the clock, had replaced the nat­ural cues it once symbolized.

Sim­i­larly money is now a purely sym­bolic medium: it’s been largely divorced from the tan­gi­ble com­modi­ties it once sim­ply rep­re­sented. Money was once gold or sil­ver coins: paper money was orginally a sym­bol of the gold it merely represented.

United States. Gold Coin note, First National Gold Bank of San Fran­cisco, Novem­ber 30, 1870

Now there is no gold back­ing the paper. And just as “noon” is a stan­dard­ized gen­ral­iza­tion cov­er­ing a broad set of time zones, hav­ing lit­tle to do with what time the sun is over­head, paper money is a sym­bol of gen­er­al­ized social pro­duc­tion, indexed roughly to the “gross national product.”

But in both cases the “nat­ural” ori­gins, or the ori­gins of the con­cept in tan­gi­ble arti­facts of the nat­ural world, per­sists. When we change to or from day­light sav­ing we feel odd and slightly dis­ori­ented. We feel the dif­fer­ence between what “nature” says and what the clock says. Sim­i­larly, the ori­gins of money haunt the present. We act as if money is a scarce nat­ural com­mod­ity, like gold. To cre­ate two tril­lion dol­lars, we need to mint two plat­inum coins.

At this moment, we’re again approach­ing a fake eco­nomic cri­sis, in which con­gress, hav­ing agreed to spend X in its bud­get, has now declared that it will refuse to raise the bor­row­ing limit required to fund the lev­els of spend­ing it just autho­rized. It won’t vote to increase taxes, and it won’t vote to cut spend­ing in any way close to what would be required to bal­ance the bud­get and begin to pay down the debt and address the bud­get deficit. So we have this phony cri­sis, with a gov­ern­ment shut­down being threatened.

The Obama admin­is­tra­tion has an option, though: it can sim­ply mint two plat­inum coins and value them at a tril­lion dol­lars a piece. It would then deposit them at the local Fed­eral Reserve bank, and voila, two tril­lion dol­lars. It’s just that easy. Just as the posi­tion of the sun no longer deter­mines the time, except In a very gen­eral way, so money is not tied, except In a very gen­eral way, to scarce nat­ural commodities.

Con­gress sets the bud­get, but it doesn’t deter­mine how much money the gov­ern­ment has. That’s deter­mined by the Trea­sury, in coop­er­a­tion with the Fed­eral Reserve. The Trea­sury takes in tax rev­enue, and issues Trea­sury Bonds which peo­ple buy. It can issue as many Trea­sury bonds as the mar­ket will bear, or the Fed is will­ing to buy.

The tril­lion dol­lar coins won’t cause infla­tion, because–and this is the hard part to remember–they will only go to cover spend­ing Con­gress has already autho­rized. Object­ing that the Trea­sury is arti­fi­cially “cre­at­ing money” is exactly like object­ing that day­light sav­ing is arti­fi­cially cre­at­ing day­light. Time is indeed money.