Krugman's blindness to the patently obvious solution to babysitting coop scrip story is astounding. If anything it belies the Marxist philosophy that an hour of work is an hour of work. It's completely ridiculous that any arbitrary pair of hours should be equivalent to each other. They should not have pegged the currency, and that is the problem. When you think inflation is a hammer and all planned economies are nails, people are gonna get hurt.