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

This is how the road was not taken in the US in the 1930s. It was a
dose call, but the Zeitgeist of the time seemed definitely in favour of
spectacular centralised decisions for which political credit can more
easily be claimed.
What is most interesting is that there is a growing consensus among
economic historians that these centralised initiatives did not really
get the US out of the Great Depression after all. They were better than
nothing, and a lot of hard-working people produced a lot of valuable
work under the programmes. But the majority of economic historians
agree today that - for the US as for Germany - the spectre of the Great
Depression was only vanquished by shifting the economy to prepare
for World War II.
Some political lessons
The main lesson is that what appear to be boring technical decisions
relating to banking and currency regulations are probably some of
the biggest political time bombs around. We cannot prove that Hitler
would not have been elected, or that the Anschluss would not have
happened if the Wara and other stamp scrip grass-roots initiatives
had been left to flourish. We cannot prove either that World War II
would not have happened if the path not taken in the 1930s had been
given a chance. There are obviously many other variables affecting
such sweeping phenomena. History is not a laboratory experiment in
which we can try again from scratch, and neatly change only one
variable each time.
The historical record shows, however, that stamping out the
popular grass-roots initiatives where people tried to solve their
problems on a local level helped push a sophisticated and educated
society into violently suppressing its minorities, towards less and less
democracy and, ultimately, towards war. That such suppressions