I believe it was a key bit in “The Immigrants” or its sequel, that the wanderers return home, having risked their lives (and some died) in the Old West, only to find the money they had sacrificed so much for is worthless banknote script from a defunct bank.
IIRC the “Sixteen Tons” song “I owe my soul to the company store” celebrates the fact that many coal companies in the Appalachians also pulled the same trick with company script. Because of the pricing, the workers could never get out of debt from the company and so were virtual slaves. Free enterprise at its best.
No, it wasn’t parallel (you misread your own cite). It was introduced to replace the Deutsche Mark at hyperinflation and based on a different basis - the name Rente means pension (funds). But it was issued by the same state and “politicos” gang as the old Deutsche Mark.
The Reichsmark officially replaced the Rentenmark, because the Rentenmark had been intended as temporary currency for this reason.
That the Deutsche Mark went through hyperinflation was NOT because a “gang of politicos” devalued it. The decision to put the Deutsche Mark away from the Gold Standard was made because of the war. In the first years after, the Mark and the economy did stabilise again for a short time, until demands for reparation exceeded available amount of total money.
Generally, hyperinflation in the 20s given the state of economy, reparations, unstable governments (not enough democrats as citizens) has got nothing to do with the situation today or the question of whether gold as basis for money is a good idea.
How’s the law on that today: are employers generally forbidden from paying workers in their own script, or is it simply required to announce it before so that workers can choose freely? After all, employers can offer non-monetary compensations, like a company car, stock options or even healthcare in the US, legally. So what protections are in place against this practice today, given the imbalance of the labour market?
You think that a national government lacks real assets to back its currency? Who do you think has more real assets, the United States of America or the First Bank of Podunk? I’d rather have American Dollars than Podunk Dunkets.
I don’t know what the law is on the subject. But I can tell you it happened to me once. I worked for New York State. Back in the eighties there was a budget battle and the government shut down when the legislature refused to extend the emergency budget. All fo us government employees were told we should keep working. Come payday we were given what were essentially IOU’s saying that we would get paid. As it turned out most banks grudgingly accepted them at face value and allowed us to cash them. The state got its act together and passed a budget and redeemed all the IOU’s.
But there were a lot of unanswered questions. What would have happened if the banks had refused to accept the IOU’s? What would have happened if the state had issued them for several weeks instead of only two weeks? What would have happened if it had been a private business doing this instead of the state government? What would have happened if the banks had accepted the IOU’s and the government then defaulted on them?
I expect that payment exclusively in scrip would fall afoul of minimum wage laws. You can offer scrip as an extra benefit if you’d like, but you’d need to pay the minimum in US dollars.
I was able to use US currency in Canada. At the time, the general rate was 1-1 and they gave you back Canadian change. Rather easy, though perhaps not the cheapest route.
I have encountered small change from both countries (US and Canada) on the other side of the border. Generally, nobody seems to mind if it’s a small amount (say, a quarter or less).
I think you should a) read the article more carefully and b) read up on the history of your very own country.
RE a, quote:
So if rentenmark was not legal tender, what was legal tender? Did they have no legal tender whatsoever? Or was reichsmark legal tender, like I said?
RE the causes of hyperinflation, right, all because of the war :rolleyes:. The graph of the dollar exchange rate in the wikipedia article clearly shows that in the first two years after the war the currency devaluated by 90%. Well, maybe, reasonable thing, what with the consequences of the war, revolts and reparations. Then in the next 3 years the currency value fell by a factor of 10^11 (!!). The [del]devil[/del] war made them run the printing press at truly German level of productivity. And here is another quote:
Maybe those Ruhr workers should have asked for in-kind payments from the politicos instead, if the war kept driving them to sink the national currency deeper and deeper.
It was because of the war, though not for the reasons often claimed. The bit that usually gets missed out is that Germany had funded World War 1 - the most expensive war in history to that point - by borrowing. It was shut out of the international capital markets, so almost all the money came from patriotic German citizens buying Hindenburg Bonds and the like.
The Weimer Republic inherited the Imperial government’s war debts. And the political Right - representing the middle classes who had bought the bonds - insisted that the debts be honoured. Meanwhile the political Left insisted on extensive social provision, not least for the millions of demobilised soldiers, disabled veterans, war widows and orphans. The government didn’t really have the money for either, but with armed leftists and armed rightists both threatening revolution, they weren’t really in a position to say No.
The result was massive budget deficits - 2-3 times anything Greece has managed recently. To cover the gap, the government borrowed as long as they could find lenders and when lending dried up they resorted to the printing presses. And the more money they printed, the more the value of the notes declined and the faster they had to run the presses to keep up. Sure, it was a self-destructive option, but so was everything else.
You already can set up your own currency system. You can’t make anyone accept it, but you can certainly set it up.