Great article! It is truly well written and interesting economic history.
I really enjoyed the graphs.
One thing I would add, however, is that near the end considering the weight of quarters as a way of limiting inflation is still not in line with a metal standard: quarters as a metal are not valuable per se insofar as all our government issued small change currency is already low-weight relative its metal content and the market price of that metal content.
On the other hand, the parking meters accepting dollar bills and credit cards are a good example of inflation in general.
Only some formatting stuff. There are a couple of typos in the pdf (some spaces missing, “the Penn’s” instead of the “Penns”, etc). You don’t need to cite google books link in the references, since the books exist in print form.
Have you considered getting it published, say RAE or QJAE?
Thank you for the feedback. Originally I was going to submit it to Libertarian Papers, but since I am a Linux person, it would be too much work converting from the Unix typesetter to word. I have a few web sites in the works, so I figured I would just publish it myself.
I will fix problems you mention. Regarding the references: I am trying to insert the synax in the typesetter to take the reader to the exact page of my citation in a Google text. I should have all the bugs worked out for the next release.
I realize that quarters-- being made of pot metal with their own legal tender status-- do not reflect anything except where we are in the fiat dollar ride down the big swirley.
As for the references, it is always useful to provide an online resource for the impatient Internet crowd - it raises value and credibility, if something can be immediately referenced. So please keep at it.
Excellent research work, great article, and amazing findings! Those original quotes are priceless. You should polish it up and publish it as a book that parallels those events, motivations, and reasoning with the current ones. The more the world changes the more it stays the same.
I thought that word (or an open office substitute) was required. As you can see, I certainly could use the help in editing and finding typos.
As anyone who is a Linux-oriented Software person can tell you, office suites are the bane of our existance. I used gnu tools for this project: emacs, groff (the whole tool chain), wget, perl, tesseract (for old document OCR) and the gimp. An office suite for research papers is like tap dancing in Jimmy Hoffa’s concrete footware.
Besides the hacking, It is a blast to go after work to the Pennsylvania Historical Society here in Philly and paw through 300 year old documents. I held a letter James Logan scribbled on. I saw an entry in William Rawle’s Ledger for payment to Ben Franklin’s print shop. Philadelphia may have politicans that are so crooked they are screwed into the ground when they die and voting machines that are so rigged (with only a single working lever) that they could double as urinals in the off-season, but the town has history. A future ? That’s another question…
But with all the pdfs at our disposal, the whole project was inspired by a paper copy of Hazards Register of Pennsylvania that my wife bought online for a novel she was working on. Keep you paper backups…
