God on the Edge

Tony Phyrillas wonders if the ACLU has infiltrated the mint:

Have you seen the new U.S. $1 coins? My first impression was that the coin was designed by a committee made up of ACLU members.

What's missing? Try finding the words "In God We Trust" on the coin.

Our national motto is not on the front of the coin, which features an awful likeness of George Washington. The words are not on the back, which features the Statue of Liberty...The words "In God We Trust" are found on the edge of the coin...

What part of the coin is the easiest to wear away? The edge, of course. How long will "In God We Trust" appear on the new $1 coins before the words are rubbed away entirely?

...If this trend continues, our currency will not be the same when our grandchildren grow up and have children of their own.

... just like how our currency is not the same as when our parents and grandparents grew up.

The idea that the edge of the coin is "the easiest to wear away" is rubbish. High points on the front and back are, which is why if one is so lucky as to find a buffalo nickel in one's change, it is almost guaranteed to be lacking a date. That date represents a high point of the obverse and therefore is rubbed away long before the edges, generally the least worn portion of the coin, show any significant wear. Three seconds of thought - and two coins in your pocket - should be sufficient to discover why.

If you look modern quarter or dime (or a fiddy cent piece if you can find one) you will see the vestigial results of the days when the edges were often the first part of the coin worn away. But those ridges were not placed there because it was the nature of Dark Ages coinage* to wear edge-first, but because it was the nature of men to grind edges down purposely, recovering a portion of the silver that used to make up much of our circulating currency. The lack of ridged edges told everyone who might receive the coin that it was not of full weight, and therefore not of full value. It should go without saying** that the reason no one today purposely grinds the edges from our coinage is that the metal value of our ridged coinage is not worth the electricity it would take to run your dremel.

While it is possible (I did not say "probable" or even "likely") that the banishment of the US motto to the edge of a coin that no one will ever really use*** is an ACLU-inspired conspiracy to acclimate us to some future God-free currency that our children's children's children must pass off as valuable, it is certain that we are already the inheritors of the opposite. We have kept the forms of our grandparents' money and attached them to a token currency whose only value derives from the "full faith and credit" of the government. And in that we truly trust for some reason.

* Modern history began in 1964 with the assassination of JFK.

** But it doesn't.

*** Thus the odds of the edge wearing away, already remote, become infinitesimal.