Whose Image and Superscription? Toward a Semantic Economics of the Mint (EA-SEI-MINT-01)

EA-SEI-MINT-01 — Founding DocumentSeries: Semantic Economy Institute — Founding DocumentsCluster: Moving Statues Made of Rubies Mint (MSMRM / r.17)Journal: Provenance: Journal of Forensic Semiotics / target venue: Critical Inquiry This paper founds a subdiscipline: the semantic economics of the mint. It examines the physical design surface of currency — the face, the signature, the seal, the inscription — not as decoration or tradition but as a compression layer that encodes sovereignty, extracts political rent, and trains economic cognition through repetitive embodied contact (substrate pedagogy). Drawing on and correcting five established fields (monetary economics, numismatics, semiotics of money, political…