Back in the Nixon days when it was being debated about citizens owning gold again, there were articles about the government seizing gold from citizens when it went off the gold standard during the Roosevelt regime.
One that sticks in my mind was two brothers, who exercized their right to redeem $20,000 in paper money for gold, then at $21 the ounce. Evidently sensing what was coming, they did this a few months before the edict. After the law went into effect, the Feds tracked those guys down and confiscated the gold, giving them $20,000 in paper.
The brothers sued, taking it all the way to the Supreme Court. The Court ruled against them, saying that no harm was done since they got their $20,000 back, conveniently forgetting that gold was now valued at $35 the ounce. That’s whe it became obvious to me that the SC bent to whichever way the political wind was blowing at the time.
An interesting sidebar is that foreign governments could still redeem in gold until the LBJ days when they started a run on Fort Knox. LBJ and Co. talked them into redeeming the equivalent in Silver Certificates and then ran a campaign lambasting the public for hoarding the rapidly disappearing silver coins.
A further government windfall is “seniorage”. That’s the difference in what it cost the government to mint the coin and what the face value is. For instance, today it costs the government 10c to produce a 25c piece, with the difference going into the Treasury as “profit”.
Seignorage has always pretty much been around, even when coins were gold and silver. In fact historians claim that this was the impetus for official state coinage to start with, back to ancient times! As found in nature in streambeds and such gold is often found alloyed with silver, called Electrum. I think it averages around 18kt, say. Well the very first coins minted were officially valued at the going “natural” 18kt lump-of-electrum exchange but were far less pure.
Silver prices and gold prices fluctuated at various times and really put commerce through problems because one or the other would become overvalued relative to the other. It became profitable at times to export the coinage for the scrap value, and so they would disappear. Arbitrage, sorta. In those days the way the mints operated, you would bring your bullion to the mint and they would give you back finished coins, minus nominal fabrication costs. Rinse, lather repeat.
Nixon ended the practice of exchanging dollars for gold for central banks. That's when we went to a pure fiat currency. 1973.