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My hearts in London - Everett writes: Unless there’s some conspiracy going on regarding reasons for the changes to our currency, I don’t see anything wrong with adding a little color and counterfeiting deterrent measures to our bills.

Actually, you've hit the nail on the head. If the motivation for these redesigns is innocent, then the topic is trivial and hardly worth discussing. The reason I wrote this column is that I do not believe the motives are innocent.

Consider the fate of the Dutch guilder. First, they devalued the guilder in people's minds by making it look like play money. Then they removed the face of Admiral de Ruyter, a Dutch national hero. Note that currency designer Ootje Oxenaar called Admiral de Ruyter a "war criminal".

The final step in this process was the complete elimination of the Dutch guilder and its replacement by the Euro.

If the dollar redesign follows the same course, then the next step will be removing George Washington and other Founding Fathers from our bills and replacing them with various heroes and heroines of the left. Next, the dollar will be eliminated altogether and replaced with the Amero or some other such transnational currency.

If my suspicion is true, the purpose of these redesigns is to devalue the dollar in people's minds, so we will feel no sense of loss or outrage when it is finally eliminated.

If my suspicion is true, the purpose of these redesigns is to devalue the dollar in people's minds, so we will feel no sense of loss or outrage when it is finally eliminated.

Then it's failing in my case.

I find the newest series of notes visually interesting and esthetically pleasing. (OTOH, I quite literally put them under a microscope!).

Although I disagree that "the purpose of these redesigns is to devalue the dollar in people's minds", I agree that "we will feel no sense of loss or outrage when it is finally eliminated".

It's more subtle that making us not like the look of our money. It's to get us used to money frequently changing. After all, all three of the so-called Amero countries already use the same symbol -$- for their money. People will passively accept the new North American Dollar (or NAD) because it isn't all that much different than the last half a dozen changes to our bank notes.

The ones with the 'nads are ready to shove them down our throats at any excuse...