Healthy Money Healthy Planet - library.uniteddiversity.coop

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free money before, as we shall see in subsequent chapters.
This book is certainly not going to argue that all of a country’s money supply should
be created by central government, or even by a central bank. What we need instead are
several centres of decision­making and a tightly woven network of checks and balances, so
that the system operates as an intelligent, self­adjusting and self­organising whole.
Moreover, we need money that is created for different purposes, by different agencies and
with different designs. A centralised, scarce money system is an unhealthy system that
predisposes people to behave in the competitive and grasping way we see today.
Differently designed money systems, by definition, will induce people to behave in
different ways.
It is time to acknowledge that there is a big problem with our sick money system and
to start to supplement it with healthy systems that work for all. In Part 1, I looked a our
sick system and the problems it has caused. In Part 2, I now move on to look at how these
problems can be addressed through the implementation of healthy money systems. In
doing so, I revisit the ideas behind what we want money to do, then look at alternative
currencies that have been used across the world. I also discuss the concept of an organic
model for globalisation, new currency theories, the policy implications of healthy money,
and community banking. To conclude, I look to the future, with suggestions for how a new,
healthy system can be established to heal the sick body of our world.
This chapter aims to explore our understanding of what money is and what we want
it to do, in order to clarify how healthier systems should work.
It looks at different money systems that have been used in the past, starting with
the gift economy, mutual barter and then money as an alternative to barter. It then
discusses how money is bestowed with value, and explains that money is essentially an
IOU that circulates around a group of traders until it arrives back at the original issuer,
where it is cancelled. Money is thus something that appears when there is a debt and
disappears when that debt is cancelled, a concept discussed further in Chapter 15, where I