Since mutual credit money is truly valueless, it cannot BE a unit of measure. It must USE a unit of measure. This means that there must be something with which to set the price of things. You could use chickens or bales of tobbacco or kilowats, or hours as your unit of measure in which the mutual credit money is denomitated, but you can’t really do this because the “value” of any of those things varys across and within communities. Instead, the proper unit of measure is a conventional money, which is determined by an arbitrage market. So in fact, I think what I’m claiming is that the true role of conventional money is to determine aggregate value of things, skills and time, to be a unit of measure. Once we have that (which we allready do), then we can do the bulk of our exchanging using mutual credit money.
[tags]money,mutual credit,LETS,price,value[/tags]