A Trillion Dollar Coin

Well, this kind of thing happened many, many times over thousands and thousands of years until one night, after another group of cavemen had recovered a burning branch, a really smart caveman, named Orp — who was kind of a nerd, but in a good way, and the others accepted his eccentricities — noticed that as the wood burned up the flames died down, and Orp reasoned that if he added more wood the flames would burn brighter. Being very daring, and because Orp didn't have enough of a vocabulary to explain his idea, he went and found some dry wood and piled it on top of the burning branch. The fire promptly flared up. His cavemen brothers and sisters were absolutely amazed and everyone knew right away what this meant: with some work they could keep a fire burning for a long time, maybe forever.

Such is serendipity.

In this spirit, thanks very much, then, to the Southern retrogrades who have pulled together in a vindictive effort to destroy America's whole economy. Normally, theirs would be the sort of behavior expected from a failed third world state; something, certainly, never found among OECD members. But these aren't normal times and the Southern retrogrades have forced us to discover (although this discovery hasn't quite yet taken root) that what we mistakenly think of as a question of redistribution involving budgets and taxes is, in fact, a question of distribution involving the fiction of a trillion dollar platinum coin.

And henceforth I will slightly amend my contention that money is just an idea, an idea about relations of political power. That appears now to be perhaps overly general. From what we have learned with our discovery of the trillion dollar coin, money should more properly be classed as a fictional idea about power.