Gold dollars

It’s been a pretty good week. I got home for a few days, got to visit my best friend at the bar he now tends, and I think I talked him into the trip to Iceland this summer. But what defined the week for me, unfortunately, was money.

Dear, sweet Jessica and I both needed stamps. I was going into work the next day, so we decided I might as well walk to the post office and bring a book back. Sideling up to the vending machine, I discovered something terrifying posted just above the bill receptor:

This machine dispenses US dollar coins in change.

Oh no! There I was with a twenty dollar bill, ready to buy a book of stamps that cost $7.80. I hesitated, thinking how to avoid my onrushing misfortune. I could buy a second book of stamps! Of course, I’d probably lose it before I ever finished the first one. I could wait in line and buy at the counter! Of course, that would mean missing my lunch break. As I removed my booklet from the drawer at the machine’s base, I heard the machine spit out two dimes and twelve dollar coins.

Having twelve bucks’ worth is awful. It’s like having a pouch full of unusually large quarters in your back pocket, and it makes sitting uncomfortable. However, spending twelve gold dollars, if you’ve never had to, is even worse. No one has ever seen one before, and you are compelled to provide an explanation for why you’re wandering in here and depositing foreign scrip on the counter, fast. This happens everywhere.

I was able to drop two of the coins in two successive trips to the corner store, buying a pop. “Just came from the post office…,” I explained. “I was buying stamps,” I told the woman at Burger King, after handing her five coins. In truth, every transaction I made last week was colored by the horrible, substandard currency jingling in my pocket.

I have no problem accepting the government’s ability to improve society through monetary policy. I draw the line, however, at classifying the introduction of nasty, heavy, metal discs that are uniformly despised where they are recognized at all as “improving society.” I honestly believe that, valuing them in the real world, gold dollars are worth less than paper ones. Anyone who doubts me (and there are plenty of angry Libertarians who do) ought to take a couple in hand and go out on the street. Go ahead, bud. Buy something. As far as I’m concerned, the government can go forth, tax and spend; just leave our actual currency alone!

At any rate, I spent my last one last night at the Pita Pit. The total came to six bucks and some change, so I gave the girl at the counter a fiver, a dollar coin, and a few quarters. Responding to the now-customary “You’re still a dollar short,” I told her there was a dollar coin in her hand. “I was just at the post office and got a lot of them…” I trailed off.

The girl looked puzzled. “Awesome,” she said, and concluded that I was some kind of numismatist-cum-weirdo. God damn it.