DESIGNER

Noah Usher

PROFILE/DESCRIPTION

There is a bizarre fascination among opinion journalists with the idea that Barack Obama can finance government, whatever the outcome of the next debt-ceiling showdown, with a $1 trillion platinum coin. Having investigated the subject intensively for about an hour, it seems to me that the Treasury is “not allowed to just print money” at the order of the executive in about the same sense that the executive is “not allowed” to order the air force to drop nukes on Brooklyn, or “not allowed” to order the assassination of American citizens. Which is to say, it’s just not done, until it is. The American habit of making a fetish of their written constitution tends to blind them to the fact that power is constrained at last by conscience, convention, and credible threats of social, institutional, and physical reprisal, not paper law. The pundit class’s interest in the statutory niceties of the president’s authority to mint platinum coins tells of both a touching faith in the subordination of executive power to public procedure, as well as a longing to transcend the actual democratic process through the singular will of a great leader supplied with a gleaming totem of grail-like generative power. Article text courtesy of Economist.com [url=http://www.economist.com/blogs/democracyinamerica/2013/01/fiscal-reckoning]http://www.economist.com/blogs/democracyinamerica/2013/01/fiscal-reckoning[/url]