There has been a bull market over the last decade in local barter systems, ways to step outside of the mainstream economy by moving goods and services around a community without exchanging U.S. Federal Government legal tender. Most of those systems seem to more or less seem to rely on valuing your time or stuff in dollars, and then translating the value to some local form of currency. In Warner, NH, a local group called Warner Connects has picked the Time Bank system, which takes the radical (and untaxable) further step of dealing only in the exchange of hours of service. So maybe I charge $100/hour on the mainstream market, and my neighbor gets $10/hour at QuickieBurger (what I meant to say was McDonalds, but QuickieBurger is a lot more fun in the mouth). In the Time Bank community, his hour is worth just as much as mine. It’s more of a thrill than I could have imagined to pull the clock out of the counting house and set it free. Faith Minton and Edie Daigle talk a bit about this new idea in this clip. [Call this a QuickiePost. I'll add links and a few more complex, reflective and thoughtful sentences in the next 24 hours.]
The Warner Time Bank: Forgeddabout Dollars/hour
Previous post: Doug Newton: Beaver Persuasion & Bigger Parsnips
Next post: The Seed Order, or, Hope Springs Eternal
