In SAMAD, the interim currency is the K, or the kilocalorie. This little number is the invention of a porfessor of economics from the University of Arizona at Tucson. Very early on, the Huachuca command decides that what amounts to a Communist economy, with everything planned by and owned by a small group at the top, is antithetical to the American way of life. This sentiment is widely shared in the Twilight: 2000 world right across the remnants of Western civilization. However, SAMAD is actually in a position to do something about it in 1999.
The K functions much like the Krakow ration chit. The owner can redeem the currency for 1,000 calories of food. While this innovation hardly restores a proper market economy, it does enable small business. One of the main goals of SAMAD after 1999 is getting workers off the land and doing something else. This is hard to do with intensive garden-style agriculture, but increases in efficiency gained as a result of experience during the 1998 and 1999 farming years enable the percentage of the labor force growing, gathering, or hunting food gradually to decrease. Some of the labor goes into cottage industry to produce the variety of conusmer goods SAMAD needs for internal consumption and "foreign" exchange: soap, textiles, beer and liquor, boots and other shoes, cooking implements, and so forth. With internal consumption facilitated by the K, SAMAD's cottage industries are able to grow at a respectable rate, by post-Exchange standards.[1]
Again referring to the pre-Exchange library of technological goodies, SAMAD is able to supply its cottage industries with simple hand-powered and gravity-powered machines of the sort used in many parts of the Third World. Although much progress has yet to be made by 2001, it's clear that SAMAD is producing a wide variety of products needed throughout Arizona and beyond. The basis for a long-range trading economy is reappearing by April 2001.
Webstral
[1] Anyone who has tried bathing out of a big coffee tin with a gallon of water knows how valuable a coarse washcloth can be. Once SAMAD is able to lay hands on some cotton, the manufacture of good-quality washcloths becomes a cash cow, so to speak. Also, the need for cotton for all textile purposes helps drive the desire to reclaim the cotton-growing fields of southern Arizona.
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