Maine man turns devalued Fiat money to his advantage by paying fine with tons of coins

Government currency debasement steals your wealth and erodes your purchasing power, but there is a situation in which you can use the devaluation of our money to your advantage.

If you have to pay a fine and want to make a point.

That’s exactly what a Maine man did.

When the city of Palermo fined Kirk Sherman $20,000 for disturbing wetlands on his waterfront property, he ponied up. But he paid the penalty using loose change. The pile of coins weighed in at over 12,000 pounds.

Sherman and his partner said they approached the city before purchasing the land.

“[Palermo’s Code Enforcement Officer] stated that we could do a six-foot meandering path for 100 feet, then the next into the next 200 feet we could fill in 1/10 of an acre.”

However, city officials say Sherman built the road too close to a lake.

Sherman said the Maine Department of Environmental Protection (DEP) told him that if he quickly remedied the situation, he wouldn’t face any penalties from the department.

Sherman insists he followed the state’s instructions.

“Within a day of the notification, we’d hired the people that we had were supposed to. We’d contacted DEP. We’ve done exactly everything the DEP asked us to do, and the DEP is fine with it without, they didn’t write a violation or even give a fine.”

However, the municipality has the authority to pursue further disciplinary action. And city officials did just that. The Palermo select board voted to levy the fine. According to WAIBI, the city wanted “to ensure property owners on Lake Sheepscot know that they must follow codes and ordinances, even if they remediate damages once a violation has been issued.”

Sherman said he didn’t feel like pursuing the issue in court, so he paid the fine and got a little payback in the process.

 “I’m paying it, and I just want them to realize that they weren’t fair with us. So this is our kind of one fun way of saying, ‘Here’s your payment, good luck.’”

A city official called Sherman “unprofessional” and said the city was considering charging a handling fee because somebody has to count all those coins.

I reckon if they levy a fee, he can pay that in change too.

Pettiness made possible by Fiat money

One news reporter joked that Sherman should go into the “Pettiness Hall of Fame.” But I’ve got to give the guy props. We’ve all been hosed by the government at some point. We’ve all felt that powerlessness and frustration. Kudos to Sherman for getting a little satisfaction of his own.

Ironically, his little stunt wouldn’t be possible in a world with sound money. The reason it took more than six tons of coinage to pay a $20,000 fine is that the government has made our money virtually worthless.

If he had paid his fine in U.S. quarters minted before 1965, it would have taken about 80,000 coins weighing about 16,000 ounces or 1,000 pounds. That’s a lot of coins. But one-half ton pales in comparison to the 6-ton pile of metal Sherman delivered.

But that was a different age. In those days, U.S. quarters were 90 percent silver.

That changed under the Coinage Act signed by President Lyndon B. Johnson in 1965, the U.S. Treasury removed all of the silver from dimes, quarters, and half-dollars. Instead, the government mints coins from “composites, with faces of the same alloy used in our 5-cent piece that is bonded to a core of pure copper.”

You will sometimes hear coins minted before 1965 referred to as “junk silver.”

In reality, we should call modern American coins junk. 

Johnson promised that removing silver would have no impact on the value of U.S. coinage, asserting that “[The] Treasury has a lot of silver on hand, and it can be, and it will be used to keep the price of silver in line with its value in our present silver coin." 

You'll be shocked to learn he was lying. 

Richard Nixon told a similar fib when he severed the last tie between the U.S. dollar and gold. When he announced the closing of the gold window, Nixon said, “Let me lay to rest the bugaboo of what is called devaluation,” and promised, “Your dollar will be worth just as much as it is today.”

As we all know, that’s not what happened. The dollar buys a fraction of what it did in 1971, and U.S. quarters minted after 1965 are virtually worthless.

Sherman could have made things really easy by paying in gold. He could have covered his fine with 6 1-ounce gold coins.

That’s real money.

Instead, it looks like he gave the city a lot of pennies. Pennies are so worthless, the government doesn’t even mint them anymore. It simply became too expensive to produce them. According to the U.S. Mint, it costs 3.69 cents to mint and distribute one penny.

The bottom line is that the government is destroying your money.

Based on the CPI, prices have increased by over 713 percent since 1970. A penny gumball I bought when I was a kid would cost about 8.1 cents today.

This is bad news for the average person who is trying to protect their hard-earned wealth. But at least you can use the government’s monetary malfeasance to make a point of your own.

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