Overview | How | Basis | Name | Backing | Implementation | Paper | Presentation | Risks | Benefits

Benefits

The most significant benefits of this local currency plan are to the community as a whole (supporting economic justice and sustainable prosperity) and to local government, businesses and nonprofits, which get grants and loans.

Hundreds of local currency systems have been used successfully in communities all over the world. Here's why:

"A local currency draws attention to, and provides real support for, our local economy and the unique goods and services it provides. This boost to local commerce safeguards jobs, keeps our favorite businesses thriving, promotes the production of local goods and services, and shields local culture from the infiltration of big-box stores and 'Generic Americana'.

"The local economic model .... affords greater use of recycled materials, locally available material, and renewable resources. Decreasing the distance between producers and consumers reduces the need for long-range transportation and the resulting pollution. Keeping our downtown businesses and local markets vibrant preserves the option of walking, cycling, and busing to nearby stores. [Local currency] makes small-scale production viable, simultaneously protecting our local culture and global environment.

"Perhaps most importantly, [local currency] fosters community."

"In addressing the mega-crisis which confronts the world today, .... decisive changes will need to be made in the methods we humans use to distribute power and allocate material resources. ....[Our] present dominant structures of money and finance, by their very nature, promote the concentration of power into fewer and fewer hands, increase the disparity in the distribution of wealth, channel the vast majority of the earth's resources into wasteful production, and force both social and ecological degradation. The pinnacle of power today is the power to issue money. If that power can be democratized and focused in a direction which gives social and ecological concerns top priority, then there may yet be hope for saving the world."

Even without a local currency, the common good bank will tend to keep money circulating within our local communities and will foster community, with democratic control and dedication to social and economic concerns, accomplishing all of the above purposes well. So why bother? Why muddy the bank with yet another component?

Here's why: Dependence on the dollar - or on any other official money - threatens our local economic security by exposing us to the vagaries of inflation and interest rate fluctuation. It ties us to the evils of the present economic system, funneling money from the poor to the already rich and destroying the planet. A collapse of the U.S. economy, whether gradual or sudden, is guaranteed sooner or later, since our economy is based on exponential growth and nature grows logarithmically at best. We are already quite far along the exponential curve, so the collapse may well come in the next 10-20 years. Local money will give us a ready alternative when that happens. (For more on the present economic system's fundamental problems, see What's the Problem With Unearned Income?.)

Furthermore, the volume of money that circulates within our community is busy doing only that - accounting for transactions within our community. It is unavailable for spending elsewhere. To whatever extent we replace that locally circulating official money with local money of our own, we free up that much official U.S. currency for other uses. We as a community are then that much richer.

These enormous financial benefits to the community will cause common good banks to spring up everywhere. Reclaiming for the people at large the power to create and control money for the benefit of everyone will repair the economic injustice and insanity that has plagued us for the past several hundred years.