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

Unemployed people don't earn money. If enough of your clients are
unemployed, your business also fails, increasing the number of
unemployed further, which brings down even bigger businesses, and
so on. This is the snowball effect that was happening throughout the
Western world as the shocks of the crash of the 1920s were being
absorbed. 'When someone knows he is going to be hanged in a
fortnight, it concentrates his mind wonderfully.' Suddenly people
realised that, after all, money is only 'an agreement within a
community to use something - almost anything - as a means of
payment'. So they agreed to accept pieces of paper issued locally,
metal tokens, or whatever else they could settle on. Among the more
exotic outcomes of this creative brain storm of the 1930s I found
· rabbit tails used in Olney, Texas (issued by the local Chamber of
Commerce in 1936)- it apparently also had the beneficial side effect of
reducing an excess of jack rabbits in the area
· sea shells marked with the seal of Harter Drug Company in Pismo
Beach, CA (issued March 8, 1933)
· the wooden discs engraved with 'In God we Trust' manufactured
by the Cochrane Lumber Company as medium of exchange for
Petaluma, CA (1933).
Once the currency was created, the next problem was ensuring that
people did not hoard it. Every time someone hoards currency, by
definition its lack of circulation deprives other people in the
community of being able to perform transactions. The more
sophisticated forms of complementary currency of the 1930s included
a circulation incentive feature recommended by the Argentinean-
German businessman and economist Silvio Gesell (see sidebar). We
will talk more about Gesell's ideas later. At this point, let us limit
ourselves to the 'stamp scrip' mechanism he recommended. The core
idea was to encourage people to circulate the money through an anti-