Ways to strengthen local, community, state, national or regional economies
by Win Wenger, Ph.D.
Reportedly, several major cities in the northeastern United States, among them Ithaca, New York, have used such computer-coordinated bartering systems to restore prosperity where poverty was dominant–and apparently with less concept to guide the process than you find in this one brief. Here is how the system they’ve been using reportedly works:
One puts into the system whatever one wants to, for whatever others in the system are willing to pay for it, and draws from the system whatever products and services one desires within the systematized price of the values one has put in. In the deepest inner cities, I’ve been advised that at times and in some neighborhoods the U.S. dollar currency has in many instances become only a secondary basis of economic activity, people having managed to build enough value from what they’ve put into the system to trade wherever they please to advantage.
All this simply means that, based on the competence of the software and the prevalence of networked computers, and the competence and integrity of the people supervising the largely automatic system, a kind of electronic currency under whatever name has grown up to provide a more even playing field to the participants than they had been finding from accumulated disadvantage in the national and world economy.
Most of the existing companies engaging in barter appear to have “global” in their names but not in their operations. (Nor am I in a position to evaluate adequately the relative merits of the existing companies currently pursuing some sort of barter system.) You may need to pull people together locally to comprise your own system in order to appropriately address local needs and resources, whether or not you link up with one of the existing companies to give your exchange capabilities greater clout. This is a system which, like conventional currencies and national economies, can be abused and can damage people. This first of the “five-fold paths” seems simple in principle and actually is, but also may require the utmost attention in terms of how well you select the people who will supervise it initially, and who and what will comprise it.
Even if most of the information on this one path, as compared to the other paths, has yet to be developed, one thing is clear: this bartering approach allows even the most poverty-stricken or recession-stricken region to focus, not on what it doesn’t have but on what it does have, and so can immediately start building from there. Again: what’s crucial in a down economy is not what people don’t have but what people aren’t doing. Get people doing, get them producing things, and the economy heads upward.
| A computer-coordinated barter system allows people a potentially far wider range of options wherein to pursue their most productive value and to exchange some of that for other things they desire. |
There are certainly problems to overcome, the main one that of safeguarding the system and the values it will contain. But it allows people to no longer have to depend upon the systems and institutions which have left them at cumulative disadvantage. As wealth is created, they can re-enter the main system but from strength instead of from dependent weakness.
You can get away from what you don’t control, by refocusing from what you don’t have, to what you do have and thus do control. What you do control, you can do things with immediately. When you don’t control, it can take you a long, long time to achieve desired things.
Your local economy doesn’t have to have “money.” You do have to have people producing–producing what they can do well, and exchanging for what they need. In a marketplace, money and barter are two alternative methods. Throughout the world, there are some regions where money is effective and appropriate … and there are all those places in the world where it is not. But there is no need for poverty to prevail there. In all those places where money is inadequate, a good barter exchange system is another way to steer people and resources to productive and more productive uses.