Healthy Money Healthy Planet - library.uniteddiversity.coop

11
Another reason behind the increased use of community currencies is the
ageing of populations. The health budgets of governments can’t stretch far enough
to care for the growing numbers of elderly, disabled and chronically sick people
among us, especially when medical science is delivering a vast array of new drugs
and medical procedures that extend our lives still further. Much of the health
expenditure actually goes in caring work, which involves labour. Since labour is
always local, it is not necessary to use scarce national currency to pay for it. Japan’s
Hureai Kippu scheme (see page 000) shows how time dollars can be a useful
supplement to the national currency in easing this situation, and is a set­up that
could easily be adopted and adapted in New Zealand and elsewhere.
The implementation of a local currency can also help to ease the problems of
urbanisation and growing income disparity. In an example of this, when faced
with mounting rubbish and streets too narrow for the rubbish trucks to negotiate,
Jamie Lerner, the former mayor of the growing city of Curitiba in Brazil, gave out a
bus token to people when they brought in a bag full of sorted rubbish. Those bus
tokens effectively became local Curitiba money, and the neighbourhoods were
soon cleaned up. Later, food vouchers were also paid out. When faced with having
to solve one problem, Curitiba thus invented a new means to solve three problems
– transporting people to their jobs, cleaning up rubbish and feeding its people.
The only currencies we are familiar with today are national currencies, but the
pendulum is turning. Complementary currencies are now being created in a
greater variety of forms. As we shall see in the following chapters, some of these
succeed, some are modified over time and some fail.
When I advocate the use of complementary currencies, it does not imply that
I think localisation is superior to centralisation, or that they should ever replace
the national currency. It is not a question of either/or, for in the organic model