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- bdlilrbt - 08-17-2005
This is a short exerpt from the newsletter on our new website. Check it out if your interested. www,hudsonwinemerchants.com
**These rural Italians also practiced a peculiar variety of communism, light-years away from the dreaded Stalinist Communism of the USSR. Their logic was that since the Italian government taxed everything they sold, if they traded goods they would not have to pay taxes. So, they bartered everything. It worked like this: the doctor would treat the wine-grower’s family in exchange for wine; the wine-grower would trade wine for lamb; the shepherd would trade lamb for repairing his truck; etc. Provisionally everyone kept accounts, often amounting to many millions of lira, but they were never fulfilled. Although everyone was deeply in debt, they ate and drank well. Old people who could no longer work were simply included in this loop, ad infinitum. When you died, your debts went with you to the beyond. In this way almost no money exchanged hands, so according to the government, it was a depressed region, and yet everyone lived very well indeed. Giugi simply made the opera festival part of the loop, to everyone's satisfaction.