Maybe, oh I don’t know, having come into legal ownership of that penny? Does the fact that it was made using shared resources mean that my money now belongs to everyone?
There are a lot of things, the discarding of which one may wish to criminalize, or at least mount a strong moral(istic) argument against.
Where do you suggest drawing the line? Mattresses? Books? Dinner leftovers, if still edible?
I thought the idea of private property means that subject to narrow limitations, you can do with your property as you please. What have I been missing?
In a system that respects private property, the response to people throwing something out en masse is perhaps to reevaluate the point of making it - at taxpayer expense - in the first place. To have to lecture about how it is immoral and possibly illegal strikes me as - dare I say it? - something decidedly other than American.
Where, indeed, do you draw the line? They used to make half pennies as well - should they keep making those?
Let’s focus on that for a second. The US stopped minting half-cent coins in 1857.
The purchasing power of the smallest remaining coin at the time - one cent - was over 30 times greater than it is today.
The market has spoken regarding their utility, in that almost no machines will accept them. As well as the fact that the sole manufacturer of the coin blanks is having to
spend money on lobbying Congress to not abolish the coin.
As a matter of public policy, at what point indeed do we decide that it’s time to move on, rather than moralize about what people ought or ought not to do with their own coins?
P.S. I don’t know about discarding, but
it is indeed illegal to melt and/or export pennies and nickels. The reason for this legislation is that such melting was already beginning to be worth it. Does that itself not say it all?
(Both links courtesy of Wikipedia).