<i>National Review</i> Blogger Terrified Of New Five-Dollar Bill

National Review blogger Mark Krikorian is all upset at the changes that have been made to U.S. currency, fingering the redesign of the five-dollar bill as the root cause of the weakening dollar, as opposed to...I don't know...the past seven years of economic and foreign policy.

Paper money has no intrinsic value, it can't be redeemed for gold or silver, you can't even make jewelry out of it. There's nothing behind it but the people's confidence in it, and when the government keeps changing its appearance, as it has with the successive redesigns over the past several years, that confidence is undermined.

Ehhh, I don't know. Seems to me that the best thing any single denomination of European currency had going for it was the image of hero flying-ace/beloved Little Prince author Antoine de Saint-Exupery on the fifty franc note. Nevertheless, opting, against all good aesthetic sense, for conversion to the bland Eurozone designs hasn't hurt the Euro against the dollar confidence-wise - and the Euro includes special design changes to accomodate the visually impaired as well.

Still Krikorian, like an unfrozen caveman lawyer, is against the new purple "5", saying: "If I wanted to use purple money, I'd move to a banana republic."

Speaking of banana republics, back when the same color was found painted on the index finger of every Iraqi who participated in their nation's pretend elections, his colleagues would have had you believe that purple ink would cure anything!