So how, sanely, does the Mint reconcile the extreme disparity between the intrinsic value being so much higher than the face value? I know there was a must-win court case over an employer paying employees with such coins (”their pay is $50 week, so what if I pay them in $50 face-value gold coins?”), but the issue is still ripe for challenge up to SCOTUS.
At some point a government has to reconcile intrinsic-value coins with face-value denominations. Some variance is fine (other coins have a rough equivalence between face value and intrinsic value), but the orders-of-magnitude disparity expressed in gold coins is untenable.
It also illustrates how far the government has gone in manipulating the real value of money.
“So how, sanely, does the Mint reconcile the extreme disparity between the intrinsic value being so much higher than the face value?”
Because since the end of the gold standard, the value of currency has nothing to do with intrinsic value. The components making up a $100 bill are worth cents. There’s nothing to say that the components can’t be more costly rather than less costly - except the more costly version will never be produced for general circulation.