Here’s a simple way to destroy a million dollars. As a bonus, it also has to do with baseball.
No, I’m not talking about waltzing into a museum with a baseball bat and taking care of some ancient pottery (although that’s fun too).
Take a sack and fill it with 99 new baseballs, all of the same manufacture.
Take a million dollar baseball and drop it into the sack. (If you’re having difficulty with the concept of a million dollar baseball, a good example is the baseball that Barry Bonds hit for his record breaking 73rd home run of the season.)
Shake the sack vigorously; swing it around. (Visit a museum, if you like 
You now have 100 baseballs, each identical, each of which *could be* the million dollar ball. Each ball *could be* but almost certainly isn’t.
There’s no way to reclaim the million dollar baseball.
You might have some luck trying to sell the sack (“This sack contains a million dollar baseball, I’ll sell it to you for $1,000,202 ($1,000,000 + $1.99 * 99 + $4.99)” ) but that’s a mighty tough sell. If you really want to destroy the value of the million dollar ball, disperse the baseballs.
The million dollar value attached to a million dollar baseball is fragile; the only difference between a million dollar baseball and a regular one is that the million dollar baseball participated in an historic event.
The answer to this problem (if you happen to own just such an historic baseball) is to get it signed by the slugger who slugged it just as soon as possible. Any way of differentiating it will suffice, even if it just amounts to keeping it well away from ordinary baseballs.
This kind of fragile value isn’t just limited to baseballs; it also occurs with diamonds.
Wrigley field and Skydome do have considerable property value, but I’m talking about rocks.
The value of a diamond is that it is (so they tell us), forever.
But what about a manufactured rock that happens to be identical, right down to the atomic level? Is that forever, too?
Diamonds are valuable because:
- They’re shiny
- They’re expensive
- We believe that they’re valuable
Out of these reasons, I must say that #1 is the least important. Lots of things are shiny. Ignore #2 at your peril; there are a great many things which derive their value from their price-tag. As difficult as it is for me to swallow, sometimes people buy things just because they’re expensive. #3 is, of course, the most important justification of all.
Diamonds are quite shiny, but they’re not particularly rare. I doubt that they will become extremely cheap, however, because any diamond merchant (synthetic or mined) has absolutely nothing to gain from devaluing their merchandise.
Of course, in our global marketplace, it doesn’t take very many rogue merchants who don’t realize this to take down the market.
In the end, it doesn’t really matter.
If I propose to a girl with a ring and rock the size a grapefruit, it doesn’t matter how perfect the atomic structure of the crystal is. It doesn’t matter how shiny it is. It doesn’t matter whether it was mined or manufactured. Why not?
Because the instant I tell her that I bought it for $10 on E-Bay, she’s going to slap me.
If diamonds ever stop satisfying criteria #2 and #3, we’ll find something else worthless to value.
