The latest in successful discrimination lawsuits concerns paper money, which -- it is claimed -- is difficult for a sight-impaired person to deal with, since they can't tell the difference between ones, fives, tens, and so on. OK, fair enough. The proposed solutions include making paper money in different sizes, or including some sort of raised or embossed section. (No one has proposed making fives _smell_ different from ones, but I don't see why that wouldn't work -- we can scent everything else made of paper, why not that?) But all of this is just misguided speculation. I have a much better idea. How about making our currency -- rather than out of paper, which has very little intrinsic value -- out of, say, some kind of metal? Something that is kind of scarce, say, like silver? Or even gold? You could have a standardized design for each denomination, and different sizes of coin for each, which would be easy for blind people to distinguish. It would have the added advantage of making intentional inflation of the currency by the government very difficult, which would in turn have a favorable impact on the balance-of-trade issue and the currency exchange issue. Who knows, it might even help restore some of the respect this country used to have in the international financial markets. I think it's a good idea and I'm going to propose it to the Treasury Department.
Oh, wait... you say we used to _have_ a system like that? Well, what the hell happened?
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