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Money burning or burning money is the purposeful act of destroying money. In the prototypical example, are destroyed by setting them on fire. Burning money decreases the wealth of the owner without directly enriching any particular party. It also reduces the money supply and (very slightly) slows down the inflation rate.
Money is usually burned to communicate a message, either for artistic effect, as a form of protest, or as a signal. The burning of money is illegal in some jurisdictions.
Assuming that the burned money is paper money with negligible intrinsic value, no real goods are destroyed, so the overall wealth of the world is unaffected. Instead, all surviving money slightly increases in value; everyone gains wealth in proportion to the amount of money they already hold. Economist Steven Landsburg proposes in The Armchair Economist that burning one's fortune (in paper money) is a form of philanthropy more Egalitarianism than deeding it to the United States Treasury. In 1920, Thomas Nixon Carver wrote that dumping money into the sea is better for society than spending it wastefully, as the latter wastes the Labour economics that it hires.
Another, more common near-opposite is the creation of counterfeit money. Undetected counterfeit decreases the value of existing money—one of the reasons why attempting to pass it is illegal in most jurisdictions and is aggressively investigated. Another way to analyze the cost of forgery is to consider the effects of a central bank's monetary policy. Taking the United States as an example, if the Federal Reserve decides that the monetary base should be a given amount, then every $100 bill forged is a bill the Fed cannot print and use to buy Treasury bonds. The interest earnings (after expenses) on those bonds is turned over to the US Treasury, so any lost interest must be made up by U.S. , who therefore bear the cost of counterfeiting.
On the other hand, there are some situations where burning money might not be so unreasonable. It is said that the ancient Greek philosopher Aristippus was once on a ship at sea when he was threatened by pirates; he took out his money, counted it, and dropped it into the sea, commenting, "Better for the money to perish because of Aristippus than vice versa." Cicero would later cite this episode as an example of a circumstance that must be considered in its full context: "...it is a useless act to throw money into the sea; but not with the design which Aristippus had when he did so."
Since around 2015, the UK has experienced a surge of interest in money burning. This has been noted in both the book The Mysterium and in a Kindred Spirit article that is reprinted in International Times. An annual Mass Burn Event - where people are invited to burn money - is held at the Cockpit Theatre in London every autumn.
In 1984, Serge Gainsbourg burned a 500 French franc note on television to protest against heavy taxation.
On 23 August 1994, the K Foundation (an art duo consisting of Bill Drummond and Jimmy Cauty) burned one million pounds sterling in cash on the Scottish island of Jura. This money represented the bulk of the K Foundation's funds, earned by Drummond and Cauty as The KLF, one of the United Kingdom's most successful pop groups of the early 1990s. The duo have never fully explained their motivations for the burning.
In the 1995 film Dead Presidents, the title sequence directed by Kyle Cooper features close shots of burning U.S. bills; it took two days of shooting and experimenting with the paper to get the effect right.
In the early 18th century, New York City courts would publicly burn the counterfeit bills they gathered, to show that they were both dangerous and worthless.
In traditional China and Vietnamese ancestor veneration, imitation money in the form of joss paper are ceremonially burned, with the aspiration that the dead may use the money to finance a more comfortable afterlife.
In 2010, the spokesperson for the Swedish Feminist Initiative, Gudrun Schyman, burned Swedish krona 100,000 during a speech about the inequality in wages for men and women.
In 2018, a collective of artists called Distributed Gallery have created a machine named Chaos Machine which burns banknotes and turns them into cryptocurrencies while playing music.
According to this law, even writing words on a banknote can be punished.
The production of paper money by the State Bank is under the exclusive authority of the Central Bank, and is issued by the Brazilian Union. By that reasoning, the paper on which the money is printed is the property of the State, and its intrinsic value belongs to the person. Articles 98 and 99 of the New Brazilian Civil Code give "money" its own definition. This is because a banknote cannot become a common good, if the owner himself decides to keep it in his possession indefinitely. This makes money different from other state assets such as rivers, seas, streets, roads and piazzas, which are all immobile.
However neither the Currency Act nor Criminal Code mention paper currency. It therefore remains legal to completely destroy paper currency.
The European Union defines "falsifying or fraudulently altering money in any way" as a crime. Also, according to the EU ruling 1210/2010, "all money that is unfit for circulation must be delivered to the relevant national authority". EU countries must remove the currency from circulation and reimburse the holder", no matter what the country of issue.
The European Central Bank has established that "Member states may refuse to reimburse Euro money that has been deliberately rendered unfit for circulation, or where it has been caused by a process that would predictably have led to the money becoming unfit. The exception to this is money collected for charitable purposes, such as coins thrown into a fountain". The ECB legal department also states "the ECB will refuse to replace money that has been stamped for advertising purposes".Banconote.it, La parola a Crapanzano
The European Union provides an obligation at the community level to retire "neutralized" notes from circulation, or those rendered unfit for security systems.
The question of legality has been compared to the much more politically charged issue of flag desecration. It can be argued that the desecration of the flag is comparable to the desecration of a photograph of Legal Tender (provided it was modified as to not violate counterfeiting laws). In 1989, in a Senate Judiciary Committee hearing on the Flag Protection Act, William Barr testified that any regulation protecting something purely for its symbolic value would be struck down as unconstitutional. The Senate report recommending passage of the Act argued that Barr's theory would render 18 U.S.C. § 333 unconstitutional as well. Reprinted in In a dissent in Smith v. Goguen, Justice Rehnquist counted 18 U.S.C. § 333 in a group of statutes in which the Government protects its interest in some private property which is "not a traditional property interest". On the other hand, the Government's interest in protecting circulating currency might not be purely symbolic; it costs the Bureau of Engraving and Printing approximately 5 cents to replace a note.
Legal Tender, a 1996 telerobotics art installment by Ken Goldberg, Eric Paulos, Judith Donath, and Mark Pauline, was an experiment to see if the law could instill a sense of physical risk in online interactions. After participants were advised that 18 U.S.C. § 333 threatened them with up to six months in jail, they were given the option of remotely defacing small portions of a pair of "purportedly authentic" $100 bills over the web. A crime may be occurring — but "only if the bills are real, the web site is authentic, and the experiment actually performed." In fact, one bill was real and the other counterfeit. Almost all of the participants reported that they believed the experiment and the bills to be faked.
The destruction of money is also bound by the same laws that govern the destruction of other personal property. In particular, one cannot empower the executor of one's estate to burn one's money after one dies.Restatement of Trusts, Second § 124 p.267, cited in Eyerman v. Mercantile Trust Co., 524 S.W.2d 210 (Mo. App. 1975) [3] along with In re Scott's Will, 88 Minn. 386, 93 N. W. 109 [4]
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