THE FUTURE OF MONEY Bernard A. Lietaer - library.uniteddiversity ...

strongly hierarchical and centralised solutions to all problems. You
will also see that these experiments were stopped by governments,
not because they were not working, but because they were working
too well without the need for central government involvement.
The path not taken in the 1930’s
If your family lived in the 1930s in Western Europe, the US, Canada
or Northern Mexico (i.e. the area where the Great Depression hit
hardest), you may have heard about the path not taken. In the
aftermath of the German hyperinflation period of the 1920s, or of the
Crash of 1929 in the other countries, literally thousands of
communities started their own currency systems. Your village or
town probably used one.
The interesting solutions, which were implemented at that time,
include a now almost forgotten movement of 'emergency currencies'.
There was one overriding objective in all the 1930s complementary
currency systems: ensuring that people had the medium of exchange
necessary for their activities, to give each other work. Two means
were used to attain that single objective:
· People compensated for the scarcity of the national currency by
creating their own complementary currencies;
· In the more sophisticated implementations, they also built in an
incentive to avoid hoarding of currency. This aimed at conteracting
the tendency for people who had any money to hoard it out of fear of
the future, thereby worsening the crunch for everybody else. (A
similar problem has been observed in Japan in the late 1990s.)
Compensating for the scarcity of national currency