There has been a bull market over the last decade in local barter systems, ways to step outside of the mainstream economy by moving goods and services around a community without exchanging U.S. Federal Government legal tender. Most of those systems seem to more or less seem to rely on valuing your time or stuff in dollars, and then translating the value to some local form of currency. In Warner, NH, a local group has picked the Time Bank system, which takes the radical (and untaxable) further step of dealing only in the exchange of hours of service. So maybe I charge $100/hour on the mainstream market, and my neighbor gets $10/hour at QuickieBurger. In the Time Bank community, his hour is worth just as much as mine. It's more of a thrill than I could have imagined to pull the clock out of the counting house and set it free.