How much do you suppose it costs the U.S. Mint to produce a penny? Let me tell you--with a deeply self-satisfied howl of execration--almost 2 cents. This little brown item of pocket clutter costs twice as much to make as it's worth, and it isn't worth anything. A penny will not buy a penny postcard or a penny whistle or a single piece of penny candy. It will not even, if you're managing the U.S. Mint, buy a penny.

The problem is the cost of zinc, which is what a "copper" is actually made of. For the past 25 years a penny-weight of copper has been worth considerably more than a penny. And we wouldn't want our money to have any actual monetary value, would we? That would violate all of the economic thinking that has been done since the days of John Maynard Keynes. And it would give the Federal Reserve Bank governors nothing to do except sit around saying "oops" and "whoopee" every time the economy went down or up. Therefore the U.S. Mint began making pennies out of less expensive zinc with a thin plating of copper for the sake of tradition and to keep Lincoln from looking like he'd been stamped out of a galvanized hog trough. But then a rising commodities market drove up zinc prices. (Maybe China needs a lot of zinc for, oh, I don't know, stabilizing the lead paint of Barbie dolls so that our girls don't start beating their girls on math tests, or something.)

The above may be old news to the more assiduous readers of the nation's minor newspapers. The penny's cost overrun was the subject of one of those little six- or seven-column-inch filler items that are now the mainstay of the once-mighty wire services. This particular squib was in the August 16 edition of the Boston Globe, but I didn't come across it until the day before yesterday. I only buy the Globe for the comics, the Sudoku, and to train the puppy. I was arranging sheets of newsprint on the kitchen floor, being careful to keep the editorial pages face down. (The puppy is a Boston Terrier. Our other dogs are a black Lab and a Brittany spaniel with French antecedents. Understandably I try to shield them from the extremes of liberalism.) Anyway, there was the penny article, and I haven't been as pleased and enthusiastic about anything reported in a newspaper since Ken Starr folded up shop.

I suppose, as a fiscal conservative, a concerned citizen, and--at least until the cocktail hour--a decent human being, I should have been indignant. But to tell the truth, I was hopping about in glee. (Something that, by the way, is not advisable in the kitchen's puppy-training area.) You see, there are times when even those of us with the staunchest libertarian principles lose our faith. Or, rather, in the matter of government, we lose our faith in our loss of faith. We catch ourselves thinking things like, "Whoa, what about those sub-prime mortgages? The sub part is sounding like moldy hoagies. Maybe there should be a little more government oversight." Or, "If that rap singer on the radio said what I think he just said, how come a SWAT team didn't teargas his recording studio?" Or, "Where'd my hedge fund go? And where's Eliot Spitzer now that we need him?"