Thursday, December 04, 2003

Louis Lathouwers explains his Guilder-LETS to Radio Bergeijk

Radio Bergeijk is a Dutch situation comedy about a fictitious radio broadcast station of the local village Bergeijk. Yesterdays 15 minutes broadcast was hilarious in the sense that a regular studio guest, Louis Lathouwers, tried to explain his view on the payment situation after 2002 (Listen to the show- in Dutch - here).



In his explanation he noted that with the introduction of the Euro, the people in Bergeijk became twice as poor. In order to resolve this he suggested the introduction of a new fictitious trading unit, with the name Guilder (our former money unit here in the Netherlands). Then, on-air, he tried to exchange his invented fictitious Guilder for a cup of coffee and a repair of the bike. The conversation really got out of hand when it came to fictitious banks, a fictitious Rabo-bank, with fictitious bank accounts, debit-cards and fictitious pin-code's, including fictitious robbery of fictitious money in the accounts. And also fictitiously rich people.



Essentially, the show was a satire on LETS, Local Exchange Trading Systems. These are a payment-unit to be used in communities that do not want to use money, but want to exchange services. See this site for more information on LETS and this site for the Dutch variation: Noppes.