Town mints own money to fight austerity

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ROME (Reuters) - A small town in central Italy is trying to go independent and mint its own money in protest at government austerity cuts.

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Local currencies were used during the Great Depression and have been used many times since then too. It doesn't matter what currency you have but that you have some units to move around. If you live in a town in the US but you have no dollars to get things done you can either borrow them from a bank (and then end up owing the town to the bank) or you can issue your own currency. This works if what is needed is mostly labour and what the town produces is food stuffs and other essentials. Once you need to do commerce outside of the town it's quite unlikely that outsiders will take your local money so for that you need dollars - but it means that you can get considerable work done for very few dollars - people can work to improve the capital of the community and get their necessities met.
To help make the currency something people would find desirable to accumulate towns can make the local currency an accepted form of payment for property taxes. When California issued bonds to pay its government workers it could have created demand for those bonds by accepting them for the payment of taxes. The banks could have been given the right to exchange bonds for smaller denominations of bonds and California could have escaped a considerable portion of its debt trap. The banks, however, are owed a great deal by California and don't want it getting out of debt and the Federal government realized the threat tot he dollar if Cali were allowed to issue what would in the end be a de facto currency so applied pressure to make sure the dollar remained unchallenged by any state currency.

Many business associations have also used their own currency to encourage shoppers to visit.
 
Just use bottlecaps. Accepted the post apocalyptic world over.
 
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