E Pluribus Unum

This is the only article you will read today that quotes Benjamin Franklin and Whoopi Goldberg in the same paragraph. In his excellent biography of Benjamin Franklin, H.W. Brands writes that Franklin was an early proponent of paper money. Not hard to understand because he was also a printer vying for the contract to print the legal tender for the state of New Jersey. But Franklin was more than just an opportunist; he had actually given a great deal of thought to the matter. Here's what Brand says about Franklin's thinking:

[Franklin believed that] the opposition to paper often reflected an unwarranted reverence for [gold and silver]...These were nothing more than convenient measures of something more intrinsic: the amount of human labor that went into any commodity. [Franklin wrote] "Suppose one man employed to raise corn, while another is digging and refining silver; at the year's end, or at any other period of time, the complete produce of corn, and that of silver, are the natural price of each other; and if one be twenty bushels and the other twenty ounces, then an ounce of that silver is worth the labor of raising a bushel of that corn." This fundamental principle had an important corollary: "The riches of a country are to be valued by the quantity of labor its inhabitants are able to purchase, and not by the quantity of gold an silver they possess."

Honey, after they drop the Bomb, all the Kruggerands in the world ain't going to help you. Hell, it'll take 1,000 of them just to buy one can opener."