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Message:: [QUOTE="John Anthony, post: 1909182, member: 42773"]The only numismatic history analogous to that of the US cent, to my knowledge, is the history of the Roman small bronzes of the 4th and 5th centuries. The Romans churned these practically worthless coins out by the hundreds of millions - the 4th century equivalent of the billions of cents the US has produced over the last few decades. In many markets, these coins were traded by weight, since inflation had devalued them to the point of their copper bullion value, and they likewise shrunk in size, sometimes down to a lilliputian 10-13 millimeters in diameter, weighing less than a gram. (If the Romans had had the technology to employ aluminum, they would have probably availed themselves of it.) Yet they continued their mass production, day after day, year after year. Occasionally an emperor would "reform" the coinage, only to watch it slip back into  monetary insignificance, sometimes in a matter of months. My conjecture - and it's pure conjecture - is that the production of this kind of coinage maintains the illusion of economic stability that has always been a primary concern for the state. Eliminating the US cent would be a tacit admission that inflation has won, and we can't have that. Maintaining the illusion in the case of coinage requires debasement. The government does this sort of thing all the time, in myriad forms, regardless of its political orientation. For example, why do you think they leave food and fuel costs out of their official inflation figures? If they included those numbers, the illusion of economic stability would be seriously compromised. The Romans minted their little bronzes up until the dissolution of the empire. I wonder if our history will follow suit.[/QUOTE]

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