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Numismatics and Holidays


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  • 2 months later...

Vernal Equinox... Daylight Savings... Passover and Easter (both late this year: full moon on the 19th of March; next one on the 18th of April). ...

 

I am going to jump ahead to May Day, comrades.

 

1 Ruble 1924. Yeoman 90. Lenin's New Economic Policy brings a temporary return to hard money. Obv: Proletarian shows farmer the glorious new day.

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Workers Paradise promised an end to Money

by Michael E. Marotta

 

From ancient times in western Europe the 1st of May has been a traditional holiday, often the first warm day of the year. In the 19th century international labor organizers turned it into Labor Day. In the old USSR, May Day parades were big events, as they had been with socialists all over the world. Since the publication of Das Kapital in 1867, radical communists, leftwing anarchists, and pale pink liberals all expected capitalism to be gone by May Day 2000.

 

The core of American numismatic collectibles are the 19th and early 20th century coins that remind us of an earlier time. Karl Marx and Friedrich Engel’s Communist Manifesto called for the establishment of public schools, an income tax, and centralized banking. U.S. gold, silver, and bronze coins with images of Liberties, eagles, and Indians on them remind us of an earlier time when education, the funding of national defense, and the operations of demand deposit savings accounts were all done differently.

 

While communism seems to have withered away, Marxist ideas still drive a lot of common assumptions about money, even in America, and even among numismatists. We speak of "wildcat banking" but not of "wildcat farming" or "wildcat musicians." We say that only govenments can mint "coins" and that everyone else makes "tokens." Even the clamor for American Gold Eagles only echoes Karl Marx's observation that gold is the highest form of commodity money. There, his thinking stopped. And so has ours.

 

Comes the day, comrades, when the complete liberation of money will be the hallmark of a new capitalism, a solar age of fantastic individual production where each person owns more manufacturing capacity than any 19th century industrialist.

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  • 7 months later...
  • 5 years later...

A little more holiday fun - from Hollidaysburg, PA!

A large red note with a huge Roman Numeral V - just in time for Valentine's Day - and Dated February 14th, 1859!

 

 

 

That note is a beauty.

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A little more holiday fun - from Hollidaysburg, PA!

A large red note with a huge Roman Numeral V - just in time for Valentine's Day - and Dated February 14th, 1859!

 

 

 

 

I don't believe it!

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A little more holiday fun - from Hollidaysburg, PA!

A large red note with a huge Roman Numeral V - just in time for Valentine's Day - and Dated February 14th, 1859!

 

 

A romantic soul from back in that day must have greatly enjoyed that note too.

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