12 Comments

Thank you Jim, this is wonderful essay!

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You're welcome. Thank you for your kind words and for reading my stuff.

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That was fun and enlightening. Thank you.

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You're welcome. Thank you for your kind words and for reading my stuff.

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Excellent article Jim.

Thank you! 🙏

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Thank you for your kind words and for reading my stuff. You're welcome.

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Space

the

Final

Frontier

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Nothing is final. There is always one step beyond.

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Just looks like a quote from the adventures of the Startship boobie prize

or something . . .

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"In 1792, as a result of having the constitutional authority to coin money, the Treasury department under Alexander Hamilton helped congress establish standards. In particular, a dollar was defined as one-twentieth of an ounce of gold."

According to Edwin J. Vieira, Jr., who is widely regarded as the leading authority on the legal and historical aspects of U.S. money, what the 1792 Coinage Act did was to define the dollar as a certain weight in silver based on the Spanish milled dollar. To quote from Vieira's book, Pieces of Eight, page 193:

... Congress did not create a "gold dollar", or establish a "gold standard" or a "dual standard", as popular misconceptions hold. ... It explicitly defined the "Dollar[]" as a fixed weight of silver, and "regulate[d] the Value" of gold coins according to this standard "Unit[]" and the market exchange ratio between the two metals. Nowhere did the Act refer to a "gold dollar", only to various gold coins of other names that it valued in "Dollars"

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Oops. Sorry about the duplicate posts. I'm still learning to drive Substack.

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"In 1792, as a result of having the constitutional authority to coin money, the Treasury department under Alexander Hamilton helped congress establish standards. In particular, a dollar was defined as one-twentieth of an ounce of gold."

According to Edwin J. Vieira, Jr., who is widely regarded as the leading authority on the legal and historical aspects of U.S. money, what the 1792 Coinage Act did was to define the dollar as a certain weight in silver based on the Spanish milled dollar. To quote from Vieira's book, Pieces of Eight, page 193:

... Congress did not create a "gold dollar", or establish a "gold standard" or a "dual standard", as popular misconceptions hold. ... It explicitly defined the "Dollar[]" as a fixed weight of silver, and "regulate[d] the Value" of gold coins according to this standard "Unit[]" and the market exchange ratio between the two metals. Nowhere did the Act refer to a "gold dollar", only to various gold coins of other names that it valued in "Dollars"

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