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Voluntary Action for Stronger Local Economies
June 2006Last week Burlington played host to a national conference of an organization called BALLE, the Business Alliance for Living Local Economies. It’s a vigorous and growing alliance of 29 U.S. and Canadian networks of locally owned businesses, with over five thousand members.
BALLE members contrast their community, environmental and “social justice” orientation with the soulless franchises and big box chain stores, whose primary goal is maximizing profits and boosting their publicly traded stock prices. Needless to say, Ben Cohen, formerly the Ben of Ben & Jerry’s, is a big Vermont supporter. Unilever, the Anglo-Dutch consortium that Cohen sold Ben & Jerry’s to, was not represented.
On the day preceding the BALLE conference, the E.F. Schumacher Society, keepers of the “small is beautiful” slogan, presented a fascinating program centering on the use of non-governmental local currencies to stimulate local economies, encourage voluntary exchange of services, and – possibly – take the place of Federal Reserve Notes when the Big Crash comes.
A leading example is Fureau Kippu, a Japanese social service network of 372 community systems that issue smart cards to each member. The name of these cards translates as “caring relationship tickets”. As the members perform voluntary services to others in need – such as home care, shopping assistance, home repairs, and rides to clinics – they accumulate credits on their cards. The credits can then be used to “buy” similar services when they are in need.
An American-born version is called Time Dollars (www.timebanks.org). The program operates on the premise that everyone is in some way an asset to society and deserving of respect for his or her contribution, however modest. Enabling people to make and receive contributions of their time and abilities dramatically increases the social capital of a community. As in the Japanese program, members accumulate Time Dollars by voluntary service, and draw on their store when they need help themselves.
Groups in dozens of communities, including Burlington, have launched actual local currencies. Unlike Time Dollars, which focus on expanding caring humans services for the needy, most of the local currency programs aim to use scrip money as a way of facilitating barter transactions for goods and services, and “buy local” shopping.
Calgary Dollars, from Alberta, can be used for the exchange of all sorts of goods and services, listed in their catalog. The Schumacher Society’s program, soon to emerge in western Massachusetts, will have a lending component. The Society has persuaded four of the area’s banks to handle Berkshare accounts. Their scrip design features celebrated former residents of the Berkshires. Here in Vermont, Burlington Bread hopes to persuade the city to accept their scrip in partial payment of city taxes.
The Swiss WIR, in German an acronym for “business circle”, has served thousands of small businesses for over seventy years and is credited with exerting a stabilizing effect on the Swiss franc.
In Philadelphia, Recycle Bank gives credits to families for each pound of recyclable material put into curbside pick up bins. Homeowners can use the credits to shop at participating local businesses. The city gains by reduced landfill costs and the proceeds of recycling.
Most of the attendees at both conferences were clearly liberal in their political orientation. There was lots of talk about the benefits of sustainability, diversity, environment, and “social justice”, and denunciation of the evils of big banks and corporations.
But unlike liberals and socialists who favor a government program to address every perceived problem, these liberals are wary of taxpayer-financed bureaucratic programs. In some cases, they were as downright hostile to them as the most outspoken libertarian.
Their common interest is not clamoring for bigger government, but working together to stimulate dynamic economic activity by free citizens, building stronger local economies and communities through mutual aid, free exchange, and voluntary action.
Perhaps they have absorbed the prescient observation of Alexis de Tocqueville, after his visit to America in the 1830s. What will threaten democratic societies, Tocqueville wrote, is a benign but paternalistic government that “extends its embrace to cover the whole of society…It seldom enjoins, but often inhibits, action; it does not destroy anything, but prevents much being born; it is not at all tyrannical, but it hinders, restrains, enervates, stifles and stultifies so much that in the end each nation is no more than a flock of timid and hardworking animals with the government as its shepherd.”
The vitality of the BALLE and Schumacher Society conferences is welcome evidence that too much government has not yet crushed the spirit of citizen action to work together to solve common problems and build stronger communities. Just the same, Americans need to recognize that every proposal to tax earnings away from citizens to expand government carries that threat.
