Sipsey Street Irregulars: Resilient Communities: Food Security + Local Currency

Saturday, March 7, 2009

Resilient Communities: Food Security + Local Currency

From John Robb's Global Guerrillas comes this comment and this link.

We need to start thinking these through -- and acting upon those thoughts -- before events smack us in the face.

MBV
III

Thursday, 05 March 2009

RC JOURNAL: Food Security + Local Currency

Jason Bradford, has an excellent story on his group's efforts to start a local currency for his town of Willits, California. Worried about local food security (as in one day after a systemic breakdown, the grocery store's shelves are bare), they devised an excellent scheme to build up local reserves. They founded a reserve currency backed by specific quantities of dried rice and beans called the Mendo Credit.

The story provides an excellent description of the bootstraping process required to get this type of effort off of the ground and rolling.

Posted by John Robb on Thursday, 05 March 2009 at 10:24 AM

5 comments:

jon said...: junk gold and silver coin is probably the best temporary currency available.

it can be backed by whatever you like it to be. you can turn it into any world currency anywhere (why you'd want to once you had it, i don't know) because it still has its melt value.

paper only keeps its wipe value.; March 7, 2009 at 9:28 AM
Melissa "Darla" In Texas said...: I am glad I am not the only one who reads Rob's Global Guerrillas. Been getting his updates for a couple of years, now. Good Information!

Melissa In Texas; March 7, 2009 at 9:52 AM
Anonymous said...: Encouraging food stocking by making it a reserve "currency" is a good idea. Gold and silver have little utility - other than melting them to make bullets.

Care must be taken that the beans and rice are real, and not fiat. Fiat notes redeemable in beans and rice is no better than paper backed by the "full faith and credit of the US." In other words, this should be a barter system for food, not the creation of "currency."; March 7, 2009 at 9:52 AM
CorbinKale said...: Interesting idea. I hope it works. I will tend to keep my food futures stored at my own property. I don't have to go get it, and I don't have to trust someone else to watch over it.

I bought large amounts of sugar and salt in 25lb bags from Sam's Club. As long as I can keep it dry, it will last. My brother pointed out that if I was going to use any of it for barter, I would need a packaging scheme, because walking home with a pound of loose salt in your pocket is not practical. Sam's Club provided the solution. Bulk Ziploc bags, in various sizes. Those would be good for ammunition, foods, medicine, etc.; March 7, 2009 at 10:25 AM
pdxr13 said...: Gold and silver coin are the best currency **possible**. They don't require backing by an armed .gov man to give them value, although being minted by a reliable Mint is a good thing (the US Mint is still a top-quality operation, even with copper/nickel alloys). Silver coins represent the sweat of miners/refiners/minters somewhere and can't be faked, as long as traders insist on the actual coin at the time of transaction (not a paper "promise to pay").

I love that: Melt value vs. Wipe value.; March 7, 2009 at 12:13 PM

"Progress made under the shadow of the policeman's club is false progress."

I believe that liberty is the only genuinely valuable thing that men have invented, at least in the field of government, in a thousand years. I believe that it is better to be free than to be not free, even when the former is dangerous and the latter safe. I believe that the finest qualities of man can flourish only in free air – that progress made under the shadow of the policeman's club is false progress, and of no permanent value. I believe that any man who takes the liberty of another into his keeping is bound to become a tyrant, and that any man who yields up his liberty, in however slight the measure, is bound to become a slave. -- H.L. Mencken

"The Fate of Unborn Millions. . ."

"The time is now near at hand which must probably determine, whether Americans are to be, Freemen, or Slaves; whether they are to have any property they can call their own; whether their Houses, and Farms, are to be pillaged and destroyed, and they consigned to a State of Wretchedness from which no human efforts will probably deliver them. The fate of unborn Millions will now depend, under God, on the Courage and Conduct of this army-Our cruel and unrelenting Enemy leaves us no choice but a brave resistance, or the most abject submission; that is all we can expect-We have therefore to resolve to conquer or die." -- George Washington to his troops before the Battle of Long Island.

"We will not go gently . . ."

This is no small thing, to restore a republic after it has fallen into corruption. I have studied history for years and I cannot recall it ever happening. It may be that our task is impossible. Yet, if we do not try then how will we know it can't be done? And if we do not try, it most certainly won't be done. The Founders' Republic, and the larger war for western civilization, will be lost.

But I tell you this: We will not go gently into that bloody collectivist good night. Indeed, we will make with our defiance such a sound as ALL history from that day forward will be forced to note, even if they despise us in the writing of it.

And when we are gone, the scattered, free survivors hiding in the ruins of our once-great republic will sing of our deeds in forbidden songs, tending the flickering flame of individual liberty until it bursts forth again, as it must, generations later. We will live forever, like the Spartans at Thermopylae, in sacred memory.

-- Mike Vanderboegh, The Lessons of Mumbai:Death Cults, the "Socialism of Imbeciles" and Refusing to Submit, 1 December 2008

"A common language of resistance . . ."

"Colonial rebellions throughout the modern world have been acts of shared political imagination. Unless unhappy people develop the capacity to trust other unhappy people, protest remains a local affair easily silenced by traditional authority. Usually, however, a moment arrives when large numbers of men and women realize for the first time that they enjoy the support of strangers, ordinary people much like themselves who happen to live in distant places and whom under normal circumstances they would never meet. It is an intoxicating discovery. A common language of resistance suddenly opens to those who are most vulnerable to painful retribution the possibility of creating a new community. As the conviction of solidarity grows, parochial issues and aspirations merge imperceptibly with a compelling national agenda which only a short time before may have been the dream of only a few. For many Americans colonists this moment occurred late in the spring of 1774." -- T.H. Breen, The Marketplace of Revolution: How Consumer Politics Shaped American Independence, Oxford University Press, 2004, p.1.

Sipsey Street Irregulars

Saturday, March 7, 2009

Resilient Communities: Food Security + Local Currency

5 comments:

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