An Analysis Of Abraham Lincoln's Five Dollars

It was Abraham Lincoln who said ”A house divided against itself cannot stand”. What he meant by this was that a functioning government could not coexist if it was not united. Essentially, if the house was ideologically split, you did not have a divided house, you had no house at all. The value of a government was based on its ability to pass legislation, and if it could not do that, it’s value was not divided, it was effectively zero.

This same logic can be applied to a Five-Dollar Bill. The US government says that the note is worth Five-Dollars. It can be covered in dirt, marker, or a moustache and a silly hat drawn on Abraham Lincoln, it is still worth Five Dollars. However, if you split that bill in half, you don’t have two “two-fifty” bills, you have a broken Five Dollar Bill that is worth nothing. There is no …show more content…
Can you guess which one it was?

That’s right, it was Richard Nixon.

Now let’s say that instead of wasting that five-dollar bill on an uninteresting thought experiment, you decide to spend it instead. Wandering around the store, you notice an interesting painting for sale. You realize it is George Peter Alexander’s famous 1860 Oil painting of Abraham Lincoln.

How surprising that Target got their hands on the original painting.

But of course, they did not, as the store is selling five additional copies of the very same painting. With your paltry five dollars, you could easily buy three of them. The actual image of Lincoln is not what is interesting, but the thought of the actual artist painting it all those years ago is what makes the original special. You could go back in time to when Peter Alexander was painting, copy a thousand of them, but they would still be worth far less than the original.

These phoney knock-offs are practically worth as much as your “Two-Fifty” dollar bill.

But then you remember a classic Lincoln