A system that lets minor inefficiencies endlessly accumulate, because the activation energy to address them is too high, is rotten. As for picking up hundred dollar bills, Congress isn’t solving big problems either.
Your perspective makes sense if you accept as good that massive political effort must be taken to do obviously good things against the wishes of special interest groups. But most people would think that the US Mint churning out worthless coins every year at the expense of citizens is an undesirable state of affairs. Wasting other people’s money is inherently despicable.
Not that worthless coins are anywhere near the top of the list of bad and wasteful policies. But if we can’t even solve the obvious low-hanging fruit, we’re not solving those bigger problems either.
I imagine it would cost less than all the money collectively spent on minting them and buying and maintaining machinery to handle them. Even better if they got rid of the quarter too. But yeah, I can see why no politician has decided to make this their signature issue.
What the US needs is to abolish all coins except the quarter. Due to inflation, a penny in 1913 is worth about 30 cents now. And somehow they made do with no smaller coins than the penny (the half cent having been discontinued in 1857).
Why are we shuffling these worthless bits of metal around? I’m sure it’s to enrich some medium size companies in a few important Congressional districts.
They would if they could. Spain is a weak little country that depends on the US for defense. The US is the most powerful country in history. There is no symmetry.
This is false. Labor laws passed in the 1900s in most Western countries give you a right to strike without the risk of getting fired. It doesn't have to be bargained for. There's lots of caveats, but that's the general rule.
Views on collective responsibility for riots have changed a lot. These days, it's only the individual rioters who commit specific crimes that are thought of as bearing responsibility. But before the 1960s or so, a violent crowd was seen as collectively responsible, and it wouldn't have been considered unjustified to treat them accordingly, the way you'd be justified in violent self-defense against an individual rioter today.