Stacy Summary: A good Sunday read. Any new ideas out there for your own local currency? What would you have backing yours? And/or what would you do to get people to circulate it?
In Minneapolis, a group of jobless residents pledged to provide handmade goods, such as clothing or canned vegetables, to a central commissary. Then they printed their own currency, emblazoned with the line “Organized Unemployed,” to facilitate trade. The experiment ended badly when too many members contributed nothing but sauerkraut to the commissary. “You can’t buy and sell sauerkraut among yourselves for very long,” says Loren Gatch, a political scientist at the University of Central Oklahoma. Continue reading