No, the fight isn’t always about how to spend money, but about what the nature of money itself is. That historical idea came to mind when I was at the American Numismatic Association convention. I talked to all sorts of people about all sorts of topics.

One fellow I have known for years wanted to talk about the gold standard. He almost seemed to want to fight about it. He declared paper money was unconstitutional. He cited what he said was the constitutional language that says only gold and silver are legal tender.

I couldn’t resist pointing out to him that the Supreme Court said that paper money was legal in 1870. That court case was a whopper. It was also historically interesting for people who like to know the rest of the story.

The founder of the modern American system of paper money was Salmon P. Chase. He was the Treasury secretary for Abraham Lincoln and the North. He was desperate for money. Like the South, he was forced to issue unbacked paper money called Demand Notes to finance the war.

Chase was nothing if not creative. Not only did he issue Demand Notes, but he figured out a new way of war financing that ran circles around anything ever done by the United States before. He created the National Banking System. Chartered national banks could issue their own paper money, but it had to be backed by federal government bonds. What were these bonds? Why they were debt to finance the war.

The new system worked. The North got the money. The North won the war. But in the meantime, Chase was appointed Chief Justice of the U.S. Supreme Court. During the Grant administration, a imminent court ruling could declare what Chase had done constitutional or unconstitutional.

Perhaps oddly, Chase was on the side of calling it unconstitutional. Grant leaned the other way. A vacancy on the court was filled with a “sound” paper money man and the decision went 5-4 in favor of paper.

We’ve had it ever since and we’ve been fighting about it ever since as the booth visitor demonstrates.

While certain individuals will be attempting to shake coins out of the Denver Mint on Monday, collectors will have the opportunity to get the new Alaska quarter the regular way. They can order rolls and bags from the U.S. Mint. Granted, it probably isn’t as much fun as levitating a building and shaking it, but getting Alaskan state quarters is still pretty interesting for us collectors.

I like the design. I like the design a lot. The bear grabbing the salmon, or perhaps trout, says it all. Why can’t Wisconsin’s quarter have something that strong on it?

After all, we have bears here. They can be annoying, but they are real. We also have trout.

But we also have cows, cheese and corn here as well, so that is what we got on our coin when it was our turn in 2004.

I have written a number of times that the Wisconsin design was chosen by a vote of the people of the state, so I can’t complain about the design on those grounds.

But then I go and see a really good state quarter design and I am just envious. Nevada was a really good one, too.

Fortunately, I can collect any of the other 49 designs that I want.

But if I want the 49th state, that order period starts Aug. 25. Visit the Mint Web site at www.usmint.gov for details.

If I still had the 49-star flag that I had when I was a kid, I would wave it. It’s Alaska’s turn.

I had a nice e-mail yesterday from somebody who considered Pat Heller’s weekly gold comments out of line. He said it was both a political column and it offered investment advice, neither of which, it was stated, belonged on a numismatic Web site.

Because the e-mail was an expression of concern, I thought I would throw the topic out for readers to consider.

Is it appropriate to publish information about the ongoing credit and banking crisis and its potential impact on the U.S. economy generally and the price of gold specifically?

I am by nature an optimist, so I take gloom and doom pronouncements with a grain of salt. However, I don’t think anybody can reasonably dispute that the current credit crisis is the worst financial mess the country has been in at least since the savings and loan crisis of the late 1980s and early 1990s.

The area of uncertainty is how this will impact the price of gold. Bad news doesn’t always make the price of gold go up any more than good news always makes it go down.

As an editor of Numismatic News, I have always advocated buying gold in the form of collecting gold coins. That way, you can have fun, build up a nice collection, and incidentally have a quantity of the precious metal that serves as a hedge against unforeseen calamities.

I know there are people who would rather cut right to the chase and buy pure bullion plays. They buy bullion coins from coin dealers. Is this activity a numismatic one or an investment one?

It seems to me it is a bit of both. It is not possible to draw a fine line between the two. When Russ Rulau was editor of World Coin News in the 1970s, the joke was it was really World Gold News. But the topic was important to readers and the publication thrived.

So this question of suitability recurs over the years. What’s your opinion?

The bullion markets are moving too fast for the U.S. Mint to keep up with pricing. Platinum has been in almost free-fall and the platinum American Eagles, both proof and uncirculated, have been unavailable for many days.

Law requires that prices be published in the Federal Register and this only slows thing down. Internally we can only guess at how many prices Mint staff members have considered and rejected as the decline continues.

With automobile sales down, it is no surprise that platinum, which is used in catalytic converters, would sooner or later go down with them.

A co-worker, Tom Michael, pointed out a very curious thing about bullion prices the other day. An ounce of platinum was 100 times the value of  an ounce of silver. This morning, when I decided to write this, I checked the Kitco Web site and found platinum at $1,478 and silver at $14.78. How long this will continue is anybody’s guess.

There are no historical relationships such as the one enjoyed by gold and silver, so this platinum-silver pricing relationship will simply last until it changes.

Gold at $825 an ounce is down also, but it is not an industrial metal. Its price swings tend to be more constrained than either platinum or silver. That is because so many people own it and view it as a haven. It is also popular in jewelry so that demand helps even out the fluctuations.

I was on Harry Rinker’s “Whatcha Got” radio program yesterday to talk about the 2009 editions of Coin Digest and North American Coins and Prices.

We talked about gold and silver prices, his mother’s regular purchases of silver proof sets in the early 1960s, which he was pleased to see, had gone up in price, perhaps because the dime, quarter and half dollar on those pre-1965 sets are made of 90 percent silver alloy.

When he wondered what was hot, I couldn’t help but mention Lincoln cents. Next year is the 100th anniversary of the coin and 200th anniversary of the birth of our 16th President. We will see four new collector designs and no matter what the price of gold and silver happen to do, there will be huge attention focused on their issuance.

Time flies by on a radio program and my spot was less than 15 minutes. His final question was about foreign money and whether it was buying U.S. coins. I said that it was, that Russian and Chinese buyers had broadened out into American silver dollars as well as the historical coins of their homelands.

That is worth thinking about. While there have been some active foreign buyers from time to time in the past, there has really never been a large foreign presence in the market for American coins before. It may never get to that stage of significance, but our globalized world may also  sweep the American coin market into its scope.

It is still a race to get this week’s Numismatic News out the door later today. I am finishing up the photo pages as soon as I finish this post.

One interesting experience I had while I was at the American Numismatic Association convention in Baltimore was that I happened to look into the trash barrel in the aisle by the Krause table. The contents were almost uniformly blue. It was a blue I recognized as Mint boxes, so I looked closer.

There I am, the editor of Numismatic News standing in the aisle in a crowd of people poking in a trash can. Nobody said anything. Perhaps nobody noticed.

However, I had to find out what the boxes were. There were all for the 1987 Constitution $5 gold piece. That is the most common of the $5 commemoratives that have been struck since 1986 and it trades based solely on bullion value.

Anybody who bought it at issue price suffered for years by watching its price decline. Now that gold is fluctuating around the $900-an-ounce mark, the coins are worth far more as metal than as a collector’s item.

If the coins are heading off to a refinery, there is no need for boxes. So as was the case in 1980, mintages of precious metal coinage become ever more suspect.

Will this change the common status of the coin? I doubt it. It will take a long while to get rid of a significant number of the more than 800,000 uncirculated and proofs that collectors eagerly snapped up.

It is also a lesson about the value of original packaging. It can’t overcome the larger factors of underlying bullion value or collector demand.