In The Armchair Economist, Steven Landsburg makes the case that burning your own money is a form of philanthropy. Destroy a banknote, he argues, and "all surviving money slightly increases in value," so everyone else gains wealth in proportion to what they already hold. Thomas Nixon Carver wrote in 1920: "Dumping money into the sea is better for society than spending it wastefully, as the latter wastes the labor that it hires."
In 1994 the K Foundation — Bill Drummond and Jimmy Cauty of the band the KLF — burned a million pounds on the Scottish island of Jura and have "never fully explained their motivations." Serge Gainsbourg torched a 500-franc note on live television to protest French taxes. In the UK, defacing a banknote is illegal but destroying one outright is not, which is why the KLF were never charged.
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