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

survived the war and is successful to this day (the WIR system in
Switzerland, described below).
But the 'mother of all stamp scrip applications', and the place where
the implementation came the closest to become official public policy
was in the US.
The US, in fact, has a much longer history of issuing
complementary currencies than is generally known. With clockwork
regularity people under similar circumstances of duress seem
spontaneously to reinvent the same solution. Complementary
currencies sprung up during the Panic of 1837, the Civil War years,
and the Panics of 1873, 1893 and particularly of 1907.
Professor Irving Fisher of Yale, author of a classic book on interest
rates, and widely considered the most prominent American
economist of his time, heard about the Worgl experiment and
published several articles about it in the US. At the time he was
advising several communities on starting their own stamp scrip
systems and was so inundated with additional requests that he
quickly decided to publish a little monograph to meet the demand.
He counselled against poor applications, such as the one
implemented in 1932 by Charles J. Zylstra in Hawarden, Iowa, which
erroneously applied Gesell's theory. In his case, the stamps were to
be applied to the scrip at each - transaction, instead of every month or
every week, as it should be. This transaction-based taxation was
effectively a sales tax, which in actuality encouraged hoarding,
instead of discouraging it. It did not have the desired effects and
users ended up hating it. As Zylstra was also a member of the Iowa
House of Representatives, he had become a very active and
prominent salesman for - unfortunately - the wrong approach. This
erroneous application has been described by some detractors of the