| | One of the important obvious principles behind currency as a proxy for value is that it is not easily corruptable, counterfeited. If a tribe is on average, average, then a tribe will include it's quota of naked sweaty apes, doing what naked sweaty apes do.
Clearly, our tribes are on average, average.
In a utopic ethical tribe, they could readily use specually marked 'sea shells,' set aside for this purpose of value proxy; easily counterfeited, but nobody would, in this purely hypothetical utopic tribe.
In reality, coinage from gold and silver made counterfeiting difficult, as long as 'real' coinage was somewhat readily discernable from crap.
With printed currency, extraordinary engraving and printing technologies attempted to make currency hard to fake, resulting in currency as works of actual art.
Counterfeitable, but with great difficulty.
The above resulted in a curious new market; money valued uniquely as money, literally the coins and bills, not as a medium of exchange. Creating its own market. With coinage from precious metals, this is readily understandable, as in Michael's example above. With competing money in the same economies, there can be other factors, like the explicit discount exchange rate of Berkshares. Or, the chauvanistic factor; this is 'our' money, the local tribe, local economies. Or even, this money just 'looks' better, as a work of art. If it is accepted in value for value transactions, that is one thing, but some currency can apparently introduce brand new 'value' into value for value transaction.
All of that, primarily, from the goal of creating currency not easily corrupted, to insure functioning value for value transactions.
And largely for naught, a total distraction from the real corruption of value for value transactions in our economies, no matter what the currency; the arbitrary power to tax value for value transactions, willy nilly, either directly, or indirectly, in the ability to arbitrarily create current accounts in our economies.
"Counterfeiting" of value in value for value transactions in our economies is no less damaging if done by the government than by private counterfieters. The latter are pikers compared to what the federal government is able to do to the marketplace.
Our system has corrupted itself into a free-for-some, a concentration of power so irresistable that it has acted as its own corruption magnet. No system is perfect, and systems can and do tolerate a certain amount of imperfection, corruption, carcass carving, parasitism, and even defective beast building, but when we lurch towards 'too much' the bones begin to show.
I was first drawn to the concept of 'local currencies' wondering how they might factor into a response to overbearing centralized power, not because I thought they could, but because there were others who apparently had that belief. My conclusion is, local currency is not a factor that can directly impact change or devolution of federal power, only indirectly/symbolically. Other than the local circulation factor, which is real enough, its primary other value seems to be pure gesture politics.
In advance of any such hypothetical devolution, local currencies appear only as symbolic elements, while in the wake of any such devolution, as a required element, but I don't see how the phenomena 'local currencies' itself contrinutes in anything other than a symbolic way to devolution of too concentrated federal power.
Still, you got to admit; some of these local currencies are good looking bits of cash, values in themselves.
regards,
Fred
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