The need for Local Money

If there isn't any about, and there are -

people who want work,
businesses that need customers,
jobs that need doing,
a tax base needing support,
then there really is no question about it.

There are problems, and they are, at the root, caused simply by the lack of money.

It only makes sense to create a money that stays around, that isn't lacking when it is needed. And to do this by whatever means is practical and legitimate.

After all, money is really nothing but information.

Imagine you go to build something, and you have the materials, the bricks and the wood, and the tools, and the time and the inclination, and planning permission and whatever

- but ... NO INCHES!

This is obviously absurd - but it is just exactly the way we talk about money.

So, just as you would use a different way to measure if someone told you there were no inches, so you can use a money of your own when the one from "them" isn't coming to hand.

But, as in all matters of design, remember the old rule -

If at first you don't succeed, try, try, and try again.
Then give up - no sense in being a damn fool about these things.

W.C Fields

DON'T repeat the errors of the previous botch. The form of any design for a new money should avoid any of the faults of the old.

There have been many local money systems throughout history, which have merely been small scale versions of the larger national currencies. But these don't work better at the local level than they do at the national. Issued in scarce supply by some local or regional authority, such currencies, simply by their very nature, create a local context of competition, which in turn generates conditions for local unemployment, local rich and local poor.

Furthermore, they are inherently even less stable than their national counterparts, and prone to embarassing and irrecoverable collapse.