Sometimes, nutty ideas actually work.

Few people today remember Joshua Abraham Norton, even in San Francisco where he once roamed freely in every sense of the word. A failed businessman, and no doubt suffering from mental illness, he declared himself "Emperor of these United States" and "Protector of Mexico" in 1859. Rather than committing him to an institution, the people of the Bay Area played along, giving undue attention to his many proclamations and even providing him with a new regal uniform when his old one wore out.

Among his more ingenious ideas was to print his own money to pay debts. Playing along with the joke, merchants and restaurateurs actually honored these notes. Norton may not have been so ill after all.

I thought about Emperor Norton this week when I read news stories about the return of local currencies, or scrip, in many U.S. cities. I say "return" because the idea gained currency (pun intended) during the Great Depression. Utah was at the center of that movement, which author Amity Shlaes detailed in her recent book about the Depression, "The Forgotten Man."

Back then, cities, towns and neighborhoods were looking for a way to survive amid failing banks. Bartering was, of course, an easy way to keep the economy crawling. But, as Shlaes wrote, "Salt Lake City had now gone further than barter. The townspeople had banded together and created a group, the Natural Development Association, that made its own money. They had given their unit the reverberating name of the vallar."

Banks agreed to support the idea, and by 1932, about 10,000 Utahns were surviving in one way or another on the vallar system.

Last week, USA Today reported that several U.S. communities, including some in Michigan, New York, North Carolina and Massachusetts, have once again begun printing their own scrip. Back in the '30s, real money was rare or virtually nonexistent. Today, that isn't as big a problem as the fact that no one seems to be spending any of it.

Here's how scrip works in many communities: Several businesses and people join to form a group that prints currency. They get agreements from banks that will sell $1 in scrip to anyone for 90 cents or so. The scrip comes with a stamp on it or some other notation with an expiration date. If you don't spend it by then, it must be renewed, at a price.

The idea is to get people to spend quickly and to spend locally. You can't use local currency anywhere else. The Economist magazine recently noted that the Bavarian coal mining village of Schwanenkirchen used such a system with great success in 1931, leading to better conditions in what had been a hopelessly impoverished region.