In the best tradition of market-based fixes, “Buy Nothing” looks like a win for…
by John Rubino of Dollar Collapse
Most of us own too much unnecessary stuff and have borrowed waaayyy too much money to buy said stuff. Meanwhile, all that debt is boosting inflation, making things that actually matter harder to afford.
But free people have a way of self-organizing solutions to their problems, and one of the more inspiring examples is the ‘Buy Nothing Project,’  through which members give or lend unneeded things to their neighbors. Think Craigslist without the asking prices.
Around two million Americans have joined related groups on FaceBook and elsewhere in the past year, bringing total participation to nearly five million.
In the best tradition of market-based fixes, “Buy Nothing” looks like a win for all concerned. Givers get the satisfaction of meeting and helping their neighbors while freeing up space occupied by things they no longer use. They also get to bank favors should help be needed in the future. Receivers, of course, get needed items for free. And the stuff itself gets a home where it’s used and valued. Any Toy Story fan knows this means a lot. The result: positive Karma all around.
From a recent Fortune article: 
The collective cleaning out of closets that took place while people quarantined and socially isolated has fueled the Buy Nothing movement, as has the economic uncertainty the pandemic wrought. But experts say there’s also something deeper within our collective psyche that shifted in the past year and a half as people sat at home and realigned their priorities. “There’s a growing dis-ease with consumer culture and the way it operates,” says Juliet Schor, an economist and Boston College sociology professor who studies consumption. “The wastefulness, the cycle of acquisition and discard, is increasingly unappealing to people.” She calls this a “mainstreaming change” in how people think about consumerism.
Rebecca Rockefeller, cofounder of the Buy Nothing Project, says the gift economy has been around forever for a reason. “This is how we originally survived as a species,” she says. “It makes sense that it’s something that we are rediscovering the value of now, because we’re at one of those inflection points in society where we have a lot of thinking to do about how we’re going to move forward if we’re all going to make it.”
Alternatives to mainstream consumption have cycled through our culture for decades—voluntary simplifiers, downshifters, minimalists, simplicity circles. But the Buy Nothing Project is a kinder, less extreme version by design. Participating doesn’t force anyone to shift their relationship with capitalism or material possessions all that much, which helps explain why it has spread beyond the hard-core early adopters. “You could say this is consumption with conscience, with sustainability in mind, but it is absolutely consumption. We’re just sharing the resources,” says Liesl Clark, Rockefeller’s Buy Nothing Project cofounder. “It’s not a movement of austerity.”
So we can add Buy Nothing to the growing list of positive responses to the globalist/consumerist/inflationist takeover. Other things on the list include the gardening/homesteading renaissance, facilitated by sites like Grow Network that help non-gardeners become food self-sufficient, and Peak Prosperity, which teaches skills for personal resilience. And of course the financial trend away from fiat currency and towards real money like gold, silver and bitcoin.
These subcultures are still tiny compared Wall Street banks and big-box stores. But they’re growing and coalescing into what looks like a coherent alternative economy that’s vastly healthier than the current one.
www.silverdoctors.com/headlines/world-news/the-emerging-alt-economy-buy-nothing/

Fiat Currency vs Gold Standard. A nice write up.
What does it mean to have a “gold standard”, or to simply use real money itself (i.e. gold and silver currency)? It means that every currency unit is a “unit of value” (the definition of real “money”). It is backed by tangible wealth. When Paul Volcker assassinated the gold standard, suddenly each and every currency was transformed into a “unit of _____”(?)
As with all “fiat currencies”, there was no longer anything to give this so-called “money” any value. But while that is the most-obvious deficiency of all fiat currencies, it is arguably not the most-important deficiency. The other reason why (for a thousand years) every fiat currency ever created has been destroyed through hyperinflation (or removed before it could destroy itself) is there is no mechanism to limit supply.
This brings us to a fundamental principle of economics (and thus any/all monetary systems): any “currency” produced for free, and in (near) infinite quantities must be worthless. It must be worthless for two practical reasons, which go entirely beyond the fact that the “fiat currency” has no inherent fundamental value.
If one could produce currency (virtually) for free, and in (virtually) infinite amounts, one person/entity would create a near-infinite amount of this “funny money” – and buy every asset on the planet. It is because of this absurdity that we have the second practical reason which such a currency would be worthless: no one would respect such a currency. Thus they would not accept it as payment for goods/services.
“Debt-free money” (i.e. a gold standard) is legitimate, and practical, and sustainable. Debt-free currency is merely another form of paper, financial fraud. There is no rational, legitimate, economically sound manner in which any fiat-currency monetary system can ever be operated. By its very nature, every “fiat currency” must be grossly unsustainable and woefully fraudulent or fatally deficient in numerous, key respects. A thousand years of failed attempts at this ‘monetary alchemy’ attest to this elementary fact.
"Quantitative Easing”.
Every dollar/euro/pound/yen of “quantitative easing” is not merely worthless, but fraudulent – because our central banks have been cranking-out trillions upon trillions of this funny-money knowing that it was fundamentally worthless in every respect. In monetary terms, “QE” is literally identical to counterfeiting. Thus when our governments began their “QE” fraud, they made all of our currencies effectively worthless.
There is no way to distinguish a (totally worthless) “QE dollar” from the merely partially worthless “currency-from-debt” which these fraud factories have previously churned out. This is why our governments have always policed “counterfeiting” more seriously than virtually any other crime (except for their own counterfeiting).
The problem is that large quantities of counterfeit currency entering any monetary system do not simply “dilute” the value of that currency. They DESTROY the value of the currency being counterfeited, because the “integrity” of the monetary system is impugned, and thus the people lose confidence in that (corrupted) currency. One thousand years of history tells us that the moment any fiat currency loses the confidence of the people, it collapses to its true value: zero.
All credit for original article goes to:
https://www.sprottmoney.com/blog/debt-free-money-not-a-solution-jeff-nielson-sprott-money-news.html
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Digging Deeper...
The US Dollar IS NOT Fiat Currency (Although The Dollar Was Fiat When It Was Backed By Gold)

https://rumble.com/vpj0ex-bix-weir-the-good-guys-already-wonwe-are-witnessing-the-clean-upthe-old-gua.html