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  3. There was a time when only governments could create money, and as Mike R

There was a time when only governments could create money, and as Mike R

游客2024-08-05  29
问题         There was a time when only governments could create money, and as Mike Rowbotham explains in his excellent book, The Grip of Death, they have long since delegated 97 percent of that responsibility to the banks—which create it in the form of mortgages or interest-bearing loans.
        They are helped by the credit card companies, which give the power to customers to create their own debts—and create their own money at the same time—every time their card is swiped through a till.

        But now there are also supermarkets and airlines issuing their own money.Tesco, Safeway, and other businesses all issue their own points to encourage regular customers.A whole range of businesses deal in frequent-flier miles, which you can spend on an ever-increasing variety of goods and services, and which then disappear when you’ve spent them.In the United States, there are now a range of off-the-shelf "incentive cards" along the same lines for companies to offer their customers.There is even one card that acts as a combined loyalty and credit card.You can use it to buy things with "loyalty points" you haven’t earned yet, but which then have to be repaid with increased customer loyalty.
None of these innovations help us to improve either the shortage of money, the collapse of local communities, or the damage done by worldwide human greed.But they do open up new possibilities for experiments with new kinds of money which are kinder to the planet—and maybe even turning the base metal of human poverty into something closer to gold.As we know, with Local Exchange and Trading Systems (LETS) in the United Kingdom, people have been experimenting with this technology to invent their own new kinds of money.LETS money is available to anyone with time and skills, is less dependent on the increasingly bizarre fluctuations of the market, and does less damage to the planet by not charging ruinous interest.
        Similar ideas are suddenly popping up all over the world.But in America, as befits the great money innovators, the field is even broader, with a range of local currencies all launched to achieve a different aspect of local sustainability.Time dollars, for example, is a non-market kind of money that recognizes the contribution people make to the places they live.Time dollars record, store, and find new ways of rewarding the human transactions where neighbours help neighbours, such as giving lifts to older people.One hour is worth an hour, whether you are a rich lawyer or an elderly widow.All of the work is voluntary, yet none of it is volunteer work.
        Research shows that the Time dollar idea also helps us to see work differently, recognizing that caring work is productive work.Governments may not define it as such, and economists may balk at the whole idea, but it is.
        Then there are Hours, the innovative printed currency, which has revolutionized the local economy of Ithaca in upstate New York.Now Ithaca is home to what is probably the biggest local currency in the world.Like so many other small cities, Ithaca local business was threatened by large nationwide chains that took money away from local business and sent profits out of the area.The result was that local incomes were falling, economic self-determination was crumbling, and the city was increasingly dependent on expensive, packaged imports to the area, usually brought in from great distances by multinational traders.
        These experiments may be difficult to sustain, but they could potentially give people the means to provide themselves with the money they need—when it normally seeps away to the big cities and massive world capital flows.Taken together, they could mean an economic breakthrough for tackling poverty and social collapse and, given the implications of economic collapse in Russia or the Far East, an urgent one for the whole of humanity. [br] How are "incentive cards" used?
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答案 They’re used to buy things with "loyalty points"people haven’t earned yet, but which then have to be repaid with increased customer loyalty.
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