The Absurdity of the Platinum Coin and Other Absurd Absurdities

The clever plan to sidestep the debt ceiling with a $1 trillion platinum coin swept the blogosphere and even the real-life-news-osphere this week, but it was definitively shot down today by the U.S. Treasury. I didn’t get a chance to blog about the silliness before it was too late, but Sonic Charmer (or is he calling himself The Crimson Reach now?) dutifully delineated the absurdity of it all, including the meta-absurdity that many serious people seriously regarded the idea without any absurdity.

The Paul Krugmans and the Matt Yglesiases of the world take it for granted that it is completely absurd to not raise the debt ceiling because the results would be catastrophic, and they also take it for granted that the threat of the Republicans to let this happen is proof of their irresponsibility, or intransigency, or obstructionism, or some other Smart Person word. Meanwhile, they find it perfectly reasonable to argue for resolving the situation with an accounting trick that involves minting some metal into the shape of a coin and declaring it to have some value.

Somehow “not raising the debt ceiling” is so clearly outside the realm of acceptable thinking that it does not even need to be argued, while “minting a trillion-dollar platinum coin” is so clearly inside the realm of acceptable thinking that it can be entertained, defended, strongly encouraged, and perhaps even legally required!

It reminds me, though perhaps only obliquely, of the “Overton Window” mentioned briefly in the Glenn Beck / Penn Jillette video I watched the other day. There’s such a narrow bound of acceptable ideas among the elites of today, and anybody who dares to think outside of those bounds is a dangerous nut.

Matt Yglesias is considered an intelligent, reasonable person by many people, and he presumably gets paid to express his opinions. But shouldn’t the fact that he argued that the U.S. Treasury might be legally required to do something they have now definitely claimed they will not do make one stop and think about just how far outside the bounds of reasonable ideas Matt might be?

It very well may be catastrophic to not raise the debt ceiling, but I generally agree with Ezra Klein that minting the coin might not be any better. So I find it intriguing that various Smart People considered the first idea unequivocally absurd while considering the second idea unequivocally worthy of serious consideration.

Incidentally, this is why I love and appreciate crazy people and crazy ideas that fall outside of the ever-changing but always narrow bounds of mainstream acceptable thinking. Most of them probably are crazy – I don’t think going back to the gold standard would work and I don’t think the government was capable of 9/11, to name a couple from my general philosophical neighborhood – but I know that many of today’s acceptable ideas were crazy in the past and many of them will probably be crazy again in the future, so I try to retain a wee bit of healthy skepticism about some of the things that are considered crazy in the present.

There’s a recent piece in the Atlantic claiming that everything you think you know about the Cuban missile crisis is wrong. (This is more about mainstream ideas about History than about Science or Economics, but the general principle is the same.) It makes me wonder if someone at the time had dared to accuse JFK of essentially triggering the entire crisis to save his political skin, would such a person have been completely scorned as an ideological idiot spouting conspiracy theories? It makes me wonder what false and incomplete narratives our government spins today that we won’t learn about for decades – or ever. And in an odd, roundabout way, it gives me comfort in my non-conformist ideas about capitalism, about climate change, about evolution, about God.

It’s easy to stretch skepticism into postmodernism, and I am not arguing for all truths, or for none. Crazy ideas still need evidence to be right, and they can still do a lot of damage if they’re wrong. But the same is true for the mainstream’s acceptable ideas, and I seem to be reminded of the self-evident absurdity of some of those ideas on an increasingly regular basis.