Labor: the New Gold Standard

Twenty years ago I started printing money. Soon after, residents of Ithaca, New York, began exchanging colorful cash featuring  children, waterfalls, trolleys and bugs. Since then, millions of dollars worth of Ithaca HOURS have been traded by thousands of  individuals and over 500 businesses.

HOURS have proven a flexible unit of exchange, strengthening local businesses, creating jobs, and enlarging sales tax revenue.  Each HOUR is valued at $10/hour, or one hour of basic labor. Professionals may request multiple HOURS per hour of work, or trade them equitably. HOURS were not intended to replace dollars, but to replace lack of dollars.

Today, however, while much of the US tilts beyond chronic recession into early depression, and since dollars have become tokens of  unrepayable debt, it is time to begin an orderly national transition from dollars to HOURS.

HOURS are as steady as the clock, because minutes neither expand nor contract. When properly issued, they represent basic labor  that produces real goods and services. As Adam Smith said, "Labor was the first price, the original purchase - money that was paid  for all things."

HOURS would be issued primarily through the proposed Green Labor Administration (GLAD), a nonprofit non-governmental WPA.  They'd stimulate the less instantly profitable green markets that big investors have too long avoided: energy-efficiency and retrofit,  solar and wind, urban agriculture, coop health care, and transit. Just like national currencies, HOUR commerce requires constant  networking, with sharp calibration of issuance, to balance circulation.

Gold itself, still the most admired store of value, is not capable of transacting the needs of seven billion humans. Total world supply  is a sixty-foot cube. Sooner or later, as soaring populations compete for declining farmland, gold would become worthless because it  is not food.

Meanwhile, supplemental HOUR cash honors skills neglected by the formal economy, stimulating new enterprise and creating new  jobs. HOURS revive deflated sectors when issued through regional credit systems, community banks and credit unions,  communitybased stock exchanges and family farms; and lent interest- free to small businesses. They thereby strengthen the dollar.  Just as healthy lungs depend on millions of healthy air sacs, macroeconomies depend ultimately upon the vigor of village and  neighborhood economies.


More information:
paulglover.org/1107.html

by Paul Glover