Knob Magazine

A few months ago my landlady invited me to a dinner party. One of the guests was this guy who planned on developing an independent regional monetary system for the pacific northwest. Say what you will about the folks from Oregon, but they are second to none in blind ambition for ideas that can only be described as ‘kooky’. At the time I found the gentleman’s wandering musings about the federal reserve, history unconvincing. It seemed we was another of the myriad weridos whose shtick is asking you to pull a dollar out of your pocket – they typically don’t have one – and pointing out too things: the phrase “this note is legal tender for all debts private and public”, and the creepy all seeing eye on top of the pyramid. In one of those rare instances of the maxim eyes are generally less creepy in pairs, these freelance economists eyes light up with the crazed look of a halucinatinc zulu warrior and exclaim “Don’t you see!”. The situation generally sends me searching for someone to rescue me from the awkwardness of being cornered by some crazy at a party, and in moment of inescapalbe irony, I look down at the lone eye on my dollar bill, and it back at me, and we agree that this dude is a fucking lunatic.

Apparently this guy has a website, and his argument has some support in the form of a 45 minute cartoon and a self-published book. Typically, I rank cartoons and self published authors somewhere between “guy sitting next to me on the airplane” and “written on a bathroom stall at a food co-op” on my scale of credible academic sources. In this instance I was impressed however in that this guy has finally grounded his argument in something other than the crazy dollar bill speech.

Don’t get me wrong, the cartoon and I assume book (haven’t read that one yet) are complete schlock. While it is true that the international monetary system is both problematic and chronically misunderstood by the population. I definitely got the vibe that had you-tube existed 70 years ago, this same video would have been enormously popular in the beer halls of Berlin. Moreover, why is it that the most far-fetched and difficult to explain phenomenon are best explained in less than an hour by internet video?

In some ways it is a real shame. Local currency co-ops, micro-finance and barter circles can be really useful tools in promoting local production and getting money into the hands of those who could not get it otherwise. But the same programs lose major credibility when positioning themselves in a messianic struggle against a millennias-old conspiracy.