>For those of you interested in local money...
>
>I believe my home town of Ithaca, NY was the first to develop the
>idea, encapsulated in Ithaca Hours (each one of which is, by common
>agreement, worth ten dollars). And Paul Glover's the madman behind
>the "local tender" scheme. He's also the one who started the health
>fund, mentioned below.
This scheme strikes me as largely silly, though in a different way from Paul Virilio. The economic problem is not the lack of the means of exchange - it's the structure of power that the means of exchange represents. What difference will spreading a few pieces of paper around Ithaca - the total stock of which is a fraction of 1% of the county's personal income - make? They're bartering haircuts for bread, and not much more. Does it matter half a damn?
Doug