This article and the WSJ journal both trot out the same old assertion that consumers rejected dollar coins. That's true to a point, but the "consumers" in this case are retail businesses. It's the retailers who decide what kind of notes or coins will be used to fill their cash registers and, consequently, what kind of currency will be handed back as change. Merchant demand and ordering patterns trickle up to the neighborhood bank branches and likewise determine the kind of coins they stock. As an advocate for the coins, I used to attempt to buy them at banks but gave up when it turned out they were rarely available. And anyway, that's beside the point. If the coins had been properly introduced into circulation, individual consumers wouldn't have had to ask for them at banks. Instead, they'd have been able to ask for them at, say, Starbucks when breaking a ten dollar bill for a latte.

The government would not have even needed to eliminate the dollar bill entirely, but only require merchants to take a certain percentage of dollar-unit orders in coins. Then consumers, as the word is usually meant, would have been able choose coins or bills.

Of course, this is where the government got timid, and has since become utterly paralyzed when it comes to anything as radical as eliminating pennies or dollar bills. There's entirely too much sentiment for the penny, which not only costs much more than a penny to make but also has become utterly irrelevant in the marketplace of things like hamburgers, magazines, and even sticks of gum. Token coins, according to the classic definition, are traded at a face value far in excess of their intrinsic value. But we now have, thanks to government paralysis and overweening sentiment, coins whose face values are far less than the cost of their minting. After millennia of hard-up emperors and over-extended republics degrading the metal content of their official currency below face value, we now have the penny and nickel with face values so low we can't figure out how to break even at minting them, much less generate seignorage.. This has to be a human historical first, but it isn't anything to be proud of.

The federal government has met the situation by stiffening the penalties for defacement and melting, and is said to be looking into yet cheaper ways to turn a penny or a nickel. But hardly anyone in government has the courage to acknowledge that, by any objective standard, we do not need a cheaper penny. In fact, we do not need pennies at all. And the relevance of the nickel is increasingly doubtful, unless it is radically reduced in size and weight.

When the circulating dollar coin program was halted a few years ago, VP Joe Biden joked to the effect that nobody was holding their breath for the Chester A. Arthur dollar coin. And I can't argue with that. But I had hoped that we could reach a point where circulating coins had relevant value and usefulness, even to the point where a handful of coins might be worth as much as a handful of wing nuts.