Читать книгу Funny Money: In Search of Alternative Cash - David Boyle - Страница 8

I claim to be an alternative economist. As such, I am interested in searching for ways of making money more available to everyone and to help them avoid Orwell’s ‘spiritual squalor’. Alternative economists have their own institutions. One of them, TOES (The Other Economic Summit), met for the first time when the G7 leaders of the seven richest nations held their summit in London in 1984. The thought of all those conventional economists getting together in limousines to ruin the planet so annoyed the alternatives that they held their own show. TOES 1984 was an enormous success, attracting a strange mixture of futurists, greens, renegade economists, new age businessmen, hippies, social critics and complete crazies. The media took no notice at all, but some of the ideas which emerged – green taxation, new ways of measuring success – are now on every politician’s agenda, whether they like it or not.

Economists, with some notable exceptions, regard us alternatives with suspicion. Radicals get irritated because we don’t think the world’s problems are absolutely hopeless, and it spoils their pessimism. What Keynes called ‘plain men’ regard our ideas as bizarre perversions of the natural order of things. Alternative economists say the current world of money is quite bizarre enough already: the idea of fractional reserve banking, for example, means that banks create most of the money we use simply by lending it – anything up to ten times the deposits which they hold as backing. This is the real ‘funny money’. ‘The process by which banks create money is so simple,’ said John Kenneth Galbraith, ‘that the mind is repelled.’

There is a traditional critique of the money system, with a pedigree that goes back via Major C. H. Douglas – the inventor of ‘social credit’ – to Abraham Lincoln, Robert Owen and William Cobbett, and it now seems to have almost completely disappeared underground, though it pops up every so often on the right and left of politics, in US militia groups, or in strange men with carrier bags who shout ‘Fraudsters!’ from the back of the hall during political meetings.

This tradition is enraged by the way banks are allowed to create money, loading us all up with unrepayable debt. They argue that only governments should be allowed to do so, and they should do it interest-free and debt-free. Both Britain and America have experimented with ideas like this to stave off a banking crash: Lincoln by printing ‘greenbacks’ during the American Civil War and Lloyd George with ‘Bradburys’ during the First World War. Both were rapidly wound up under pressure from the banks, who were afraid they would create inflation.

But there needs to be money in circulation for the wheels of the economy to keep turning, and these arguments raged on both sides of the Atlantic until a century ago. In the USA this led to the great battle between gold and silver – between reliable money backed by gold, and available money backed by the much more plentiful silver. Now these ancestral battles are all but forgotten, ridiculed out of existence by the coruscating wit of George Bernard Shaw, and shunned because so many of the people who believed in an international bankers’ conspiracy also believed it was Jewish. The changes they called for are now extremely unlikely to take place.

The issues remain, but this book is not about them – there are other people far better qualified to write about them than I am. But I do want to write about creating money, because if its creation is so simple that banks and governments can do it, we may now be entering a world where we can all do the same thing for ourselves – which is the idea behind Local Exchange and Trading Systems.

LETS is a whole new kind of money altogether. What do you do, asked the people who came up with the idea, when you are in a community which is rapidly running out of cash? You have the people with skills and the time on their hands, and you have the jobs that urgently need doing – but no money to bring the two together.

The traditional definitions of money – a medium of exchange, a store of value and a unit of account – all apply equally well to LETS. Accepting money instead of a direct swap is a kind of agreement to accept something which is not useful in itself, but which you know can be exchanged later for something which is. It’s the same with LETS, but with LETS you simply imagine a new kind of money and start trading in it. You go into debt to your neighbour, and denominate that debt not in pounds or dollars, but a whole new currency of your choice which you agree about. The first LETS currencies were called ‘green dollars’, but you can probably do better than that. And hey presto! The money exists, the job gets done, and somebody has to pay off the debt by doing something else in exchange for the same currency. No pounds or dollars are involved, no bank accounts reached into, but it is money nonetheless. LETS currencies are a magnificent burst of independence from governments, bank managers and bureaucrats: they allow people to create the money themselves. The idea emerged in British Columbia in the late 1970s, the brainchild of an academic called David Weston, and was given its present form in the early 1980s by Scots-Canadian Michael Linton, whose inspiration has taken LETS all over the world.

The biggest systems, like the Blue Mountain LETS in Australia, involve over 2,000 people. I ran across the idea in New Zealand, at the Auckland Green Dollar Exchange – a regular meeting of enthusiastic traders, surrounded by assorted knitted hats, jams, cakes, beer, eggs, leaflets and some bilious green armchairs. I watched astonished as one woman sold her genealogical skills for green dollars to a woman trading mittens. This was 1991, and already 0.1 per cent of New Zealand’s population were dealing in green dollars. If you signed on the dole, the social security officials would give you a leaflet about it. It all seemed a long way from the UK.

Michael Linton brought LETS to Britain at the TOES meeting in 1985, and in 1992 – encouraged by the recession – it suddenly took off. By Christmas there were forty trading systems up and running, and the currencies had strange names which caught the imagination of journalists. The new currency for Stroud was called ‘strouds’, in Manchester ‘bobbins’, in Bath ‘olivers’; ‘groats’ in Stirling, ‘tales’ in Canterbury. And in Brixton they were called ‘bricks’; in Donegal, they fell back on ‘sods’, which must have been confusing. It was almost like a secret code – Salisbury has its own special money for kids, called ‘kebbles’. Their parents trade in ‘ebbles’. The turnover in local money was by then the equivalent of £100,000 a year.

The expansion has continued since. There are now over 450 local currency systems in the country. Some involve just a few neighbours. Some, like the local money in Kingston upon Thames, allow you to buy organic vegetables. Some, like the system in Manchester, allow you to pay part of your rent. The European Commission gave a grant to Bradford City Council to set up its own currency, and researchers think the equivalent of £2 million is traded in LETS currencies in the UK every year. The idea links people across class, age and income, and it allows them to think more widely about the kinds of things they can do – be it making cakes, T-shirts, sewing, baby-sitting, accountancy, law, building or drawing astrological charts. People report feeling liberated using these whimsical new currencies, and it builds communities. And not a penny comes from the banks.

‘It attracts more open-minded people,’ one member of a Northern Ireland LETS money system told Jonathan Croall for his report LETS Act Locally. ‘And that helps to bridge the gap between the two communities. That’s important to me, after my narrow upbringing. I have dreamt that LETS will eventually grow big enough in Northern Ireland to make a real difference.’ LETS is now an increasingly familiar idea in Britain, though it is too early to tell whether it is going to stay in a marginal niche or break out into the mainstream. The real innovations are happening in the USA.