"Sherman, set the WayBack Machine for 1967!" "Yes, Mr. Peabody."
http://www.kitco.com/ind/Daughty/dec202006.html Yes, the US Mint is now proposing to make it illegal to melt coins or export them. Note that this rule has not yet gone into effect. I haven't looked closely enough to see whether it goes into effect before the next Free State Wyoming jamboree. I do note that many things which are made illegal continue to be practical, profitable, and people do them, anyway. Not me, of course. "I'm a *good* boy!" >:D Meanwhile, of course, what this situation clearly represents is exactly where we were back in 1962-69 when there was a so-called "silver shortage." There wasn't any shortage, and the government, then under JFK and LBJ, lied. They lied because they did not want to admit that their policies of war in Southeast Asia, spending on the space program, endless welfare for everyone under the Great Society, and other programs were causing real monetary inflation at very significant levels. So, the fedgoons took the silver out of the coins after 1964. Nobody was fooled, of course, and the Europeans and other foreigners who had the option to redeem dollars for gold began to do so as fast as they could. So began the London Gold Pool 1965-1971 to attempt to maintain the "official" price. Failed, as all such efforts do. At one point in the height of that folly, roughly 1968, the military was airlifting gold to London to make good on the redemptions. There was so much gold piled on the weighing floor at Rothschild's in London that the floor actually broke through into the basement. London's gold market was closed for two weeks. Many people in the biz think it would have been longer, but the gnomes of Zurich started up their gold market and began redeeming dollars for gold, so London was re-opened. "It was a miracle!" Anyway, we're at that point, now. Gold which was officially $35 per ounce from 1934 to 1965 began to creep up on the world market, despite all efforts to keep it down. By the time of the evil Nixon's decision to viciously repudiate the Bretton Woods accord of 1944 (unilaterally, I might add, in violation of its terms) the price of gold on the world market was about $42 per ounce. You can see where that was a great deal for foreigners who were allowed to go to their central banks and redeem dollars for gold at $35 per ounce, sell that gold on the world market for $42 per ounce, put $7 in their pocket, and still have $35 to redeem for another ounce. "It's perpetual motion, Mr. Peabody!" "No, Sherman, it isn't." So we set the WayBack Machine for 1971 and we see the evil overlord of the USA fedgoons, Richard Mischief Nixon, "closing the gold window." Prices began to shoot up, peaking in January 1980 at $895 intra-day on the April 1980 gold futures contract. Using the inaccurate consumer price index (CPI) as a vague measure of inflation, we have $2600 per ounce in today's dollars for that $895 high in 1980 dollars. And that is where we are headed, folks. The 1967 law making it illegal to melt down silver coins for their metal or export them is now being visited on copper, nickel, and zinc coins. The next step is typically currency controls, followed by hyperinflation, followed by dictatorship. I would expect the schedule to go a bit faster this time, what with all the digital aspects of fiat money.
