We had in Nanaimo, BC, Canada recently a presentation on an alternative
currency, Time Dollar (FCX), see http://www.fourthcornerexchange.com/ by its
creator Francis Ayley (he would actually want to achieve something more than a
local currency, his dream goal is a socially just replacement for the current
money system). What made the biggest impression on me during his presentation
was the claim that the nature of the money system has a big effect on our
behaviour: the conventional money system (with interest collected on loans)
forces people into competition, a local (i.e., interest-free,
inflation/deflation-free) money system is conducive to cooperation between the
market participants!
You can find a lot on interesting reading following the links on his site.
E.g., to a special issue of the Yes! magazine on money matters, http://www.yesmagazine.org/default.asp?id=93 , where my attention was caught
especially by this article: http://www.yesmagazine.org/article.asp?id=883,
where one can find the sentence "The exponential growth of debt, in turn, puts
pressure on the economy to also grow exponentially which, of course, in the
long run is impossible." The message of the article being that our current
money system makes no sense, that it only burdens most people with debt that
they will never be able to pay off, and that it is the cause of our
unsustainable use of natural resources.
So if all this is true, the logical conclusion seems to be that if we want
to achieve a just society (democracy), we have no chance to do so within the
current money system designed to benefit only a small segment of the society,
isn't it so? Shouldn't we (the DD promoters, WDDM, ...) then pay also some
(more, a lot of) attention to the reform of the money system???
Mirek
P.S.: F. Ayley's FCX system is run as a private corporation (not even as a
cooperative of all the members). He explained that this is necessary in USA if
he wants to be on a firm basis to face successfully the onslaught of big banks
if his systems starts to be successful and widely used (see the history of
local currencies: how the banks killed first such very successful alternative
system in Wörgl, Austria, 1932-33, and then many more in the USA during the
Depression: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Local_currency).
However, here in Canada people were not very enthusiastic about the idea of
local currency being run as a private corporation, and experts claim that the
reasons that led him to create a private corporation do not exist here, and so
if we have a local currency system in Nanaimo, it will be the homegrown
LETS/openmoney system: