Money burning
Money is usually burned to communicate a message, either for artistic effect, as a form of protest, or as a signal.
In the usual case, the central bank withdraws money from circulation by selling government bonds or foreign currency.
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.
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.
[2] In 1984, Serge Gainsbourg burned a 500 French franc note on television to protest against heavy taxation.
[14] 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.
[15] 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.
[16] 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 2010, the spokesperson for the Swedish Feminist Initiative, Gudrun Schyman, burned SEK 100,000 during a speech about the inequality in wages for men and women.
Section 16 of the Crimes (Currency) Act 1981 prohibits deliberate damage and destruction of Australian money without a relevant legal permit.
João Sidney Figueiredo Filho,[26] has affirmed that "when money is inside the Central Bank, then it is the property of the National Treasury.
But the chief of police Jéferson Botelho Pereira has concluded that "whoever rips money is committing a crime against the property of the Union".
[28] 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.
This makes money different from other state assets such as rivers, seas, streets, roads and piazzas, which are all immobile.
[29] According to the European Commission's Recommendation dated 22 March 2010,[30] "Member states must not prohibit or punish the complete destruction of small quantities of Euro coins or notes when this happens in private.
Also, "Member states must not encourage the mutilation of Euro notes or coins for artistic purposes, but they are required to tolerate it.
[35] The European Union provides an obligation at the community level to retire "neutralized" notes from circulation, or those rendered unfit for security systems.
[42] In an amicus brief for Atwater v. City of Lago Vista, Solicitor General Seth Waxman writes that arresting an individual who removes the corner dollar values "may expose a counterfeiting operation".
Certainly people have publicly burned small amounts of money for political protests that were picked up by the media — Living Things at South by Southwest,[44] Larry Kudlow on The Call, both in 2009[45] — without apparent consequence.
[47] 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.
[42] Legal Tender,[48] a 1996 telerobotic 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.
§ 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.
