The price of the zinc required to mint pennies has been steadily increasing; according to a recent article in the New Yorker, the cost of producing a penny is now 1.7 cents — it costs nearly two pennies to make one. Producing a coin at a higher cost than the value of the coin itself is known as "negative seigniorage." This phenomenon has led many to question the continued existence of the penny and suggest it be abolished. Understanding negative seigniorage in economic terms will lead to an opposite conclusion: hundred dollar bills should be done away with.
Why is the price of zinc going up?
it is the falling value of dollars themselves that is causing the price to go up. The greater the supply of a good, the less value each individual unit of that good will have. This is known as the law of marginal utility. Applying this law to money leads to the conclusion that when the mint prints more dollars, the value of existing dollars will decrease, and thus it will take more dollars to purchase metals and other goods.
The government is able to "print" money both electronically by manipulating the interest rate and through the physical creation of more dollars and cents.Any increase in the money supply, however minute, dilutes the purchasing power of existing dollars and thus throws off economic calculation. Curtailing the power of the government to print money means creating a more sound, prosperous economy.
What makes coins and other hard commodities desirable as currency is that they cannot simply be printed. Gold, copper, and silver must be dug out of the ground, so the government is limited in the amount that it can spend and, therefore, inflate.
Government fiat does not raise the standard of living; production on the market does. In industries where there is innovation and more production, prices fall.
In a world without government intervention in the money supply and economy, prices would fall to the point that the penny would take on a new relevance. Instead of decrying the penny, economists should recognize its potential to combat government inflation and advocate a return to an even harder currency. Coins may be expensive for the government to make, but this ensures that our money retains some value, regardless of what the government does

The state has no wealth that is its own. It is not a profitable enterprise. Everything it possesses it must take from society in a zero-sum game. That usually means taxes, but taxes annoy people. They can destabilize the state and threaten its legitimacy. They inspire anger, revolt, and even revolution.
Rather than risk that result, the state from the Middle Ages to the dawn of the central-banking age was somewhat cautious in its global ambitions simply because it was cautious in its need to steal openly and directly from the people in order to pay its bills.
To be sure, it doesn't require a central bank for a state to choose inflation over taxes as a means of funding itself. All it really requires is a monopoly on the production of money. Once acquired, the monopoly on money production leads to a systematic process of depreciating the currency...which can then be printed without limit...
The banking system thereby becomes a primary funding agency to the state, and, in exchange for its services, the banking system is guaranteed against insolvency and business failure as it profits from inflation. If the goal of the state is the complete monopolization of money under an infinitely flexible paper-money system, there is no better path for the state than the creation of a central bank. This is the greatest achievement for the victory of power over liberty...
It was believed that an age of scientific public policy needed a scientific money machinery that could be controlled by powerful elites. The dawn of the age of central banking was also the dawn of the age of central planning, for there can be no government control over the nation's commercial life without first controlling the money.

Before the creation of the Federal Reserve, the idea of American entry into the conflict that became World War I would have been inconceivable.
That is to say, it was the war that ended liberty as we knew it. What made it possible was the Federal Reserve. And not only the US central bank; it was also its European counterparts. This was a war funded under the guise of scientific monetary policy.
There is always a price to be paid for funding war through the central bank. The postwar situation in America was a classic case...
the Federal Reserve had not yet acquired the tools to manufacture an attempt to save the economy. Instead, neither the Fed nor Congress nor the president did much of anything about it...
Sadly, the easy recovery of 1920–1922 tempted the central bank to get back into the business of inflation, with the eventual result of a stock market boom that led to bust, then depression, and finally the destruction of the gold standard itself...
FDR found that even fascist-style economic planning and inflation could not restore prosperity...Here is where the history of the United States and the Fed intersects with the tragic role of the German central bank...
But did people blame the printing press? No.The popular explanation dealt directly with the Treaty of Versailles. It was the harsh peace imposed by the allies that had brought Germany to the brink of total destruction — or so it was believed. Mises himself had written a full book that he hoped would explain that Germany owed its suffering to war and socialism, not Versailles as such. He urged the German people to look at the real cause and establish free markets, lest imperial dictatorship be the next stage in political development. But he was ignored...
The world's major economies were being lorded over by money monopolies, and the front men had become some of the worst despots in the history of the world. Now they were preparing to fight each other with all the resources they had at their disposal. The resources they did not have at their disposal they would pay for with their beloved machinery of central banking....

The institution that was promoted by economists working with bankers, in the name of bringing rationality and science to bear on monetary matters, had given birth to the most evil political trends in the history of the world: Communism, socialism, Fascism, Nazism, and the despotism of economic planning in the capitalist West...

Fast-forward to the Iraq War, which has all the features of a conflict born of the power to print money...
The effect of the money machine goes well beyond funding undesirable government programs...These days, the American consumer has been hit very hard with rising prices in oil, clothing, food, and much else. For the first time in decades, people are feeling this and feeling it hard. And just as in every other inflation in world history, people are looking for the culprit and finding all the wrong ones...I say to the sincere Right, if you really want to limit the state, you will have to give up your dreams of remaking the world at the point of a gun. Wars and limited government are impossible. Moreover, you must stop ignoring the role of monetary policy. It is a technical subject, to be sure, but one that we must all look into and understand if we expect to restore something that resembles the American liberty of the founders...

The printing presses must be unplugged..it is the most important priority of the state ( ) to keep its money machine hidden behind a curtain... 

  apogeo?
http://www.iht.com/articles/2008/06/19/opinion/edevans.php
Sue OPEC
The president of the United States has the power to attack, and perhaps destroy, the Organization of the Petroleum Exporting Countries, the illegal cartel that has driven the price of oil over $130 per barrel. This can be accomplished without invasion or bombing...
The states should contend that Article III of the Constitution outweighs the act of state doctrine. Respect for the sovereignty of a foreign government for acts "done within its own territory" does not, even if very liberally construed, protect decisions reached by a cartel based in Austria that directs 13 nations to sell their product at inflated prices to customers outside their boundaries. If the states won the case, the court could recover substantial damages based on assets and commercial activities of OPEC member nations in the United States