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Amid all the economic doom and gloom, you might have missed the little wire service blurb about the gas station clerk in Nitro, West Virginia (I am not making this up) who was caught selling gasoline to family and friends for 0.1 cents a gallon. We saw a lot of this sort of thing in WWO. It may seem relatively minor (although this clerk apparently pumped $50K worth before being caught) but it has a deeper significance: WWO players pinpointed this sort of fraud as the reason that any gas rationing scheme would likely fail in the U.S. - the lure of the black market would just be irresistible.

Thanks, Tennessee Jed, for blogging this: a Gas Rationing Coupon, printed en masse for the 1979 oil crisis but never deployed. Does the U.S. Gov have coupons ready these days? If so, betcha they don’t have George Washington on them; these days, it’s Andrew Jackson, minimum. (Soon to be Ben Franklin)