Healthy Money Healthy Planet - library.uniteddiversity.coop

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Why Complementary Currencies?
If the American people ever allow private banks to control the issue of their currency, first
by inflation, then by deflation, the banks … will deprive the people of all property until
their children wake­up homeless on the continent their fathers conquered. … The issuing
power should be taken from the banks and restored to the people, to whom it properly
belongs.
– Thomas Jefferson 1
This 18th­century quote by the famous American statesman was an early warning
against becoming reliant on bank­created money. Since attempts to reform the
creation of money are going to be tricky at the national level, it is easiest to work
from the bottom up, complementing scarce bank money with sufficient local
money. The issuing power of money will then be restored to the people at local
levels of organisation, and in time reforms will hopefully be possible at the
national level.
In this chapter I look at the advantages of creating local currencies and the
reasons why in recent years they have grown in popularity.
To avoid any suggestion of a hierarchy of currencies, it is now becoming common
to call subnational currencies ‘parallel currencies’ or ‘complementary currencies’.
They are also called ‘community currencies’, because a community does not have
to be local – a currency can even be created on the Internet. Here, with reference to
currencies, I use the terms complementary, parallel, local, community and
supplementary interchangeably.