The Local Money Movement
By Casey Mills and Richard Mills
Early this year an article appeared in the Los Angeles Times profiling a man named Josh Freeman, who lives in the tiny town of North Fork, nestled up in the Sierras a couple of hours south of Yosemite. After ticking off a few reasons the guy might be considered eccentric—biodiesel car, dreadlocks, an interest in ten-day meditation retreats and ska music—the author focused on Freeman’s efforts over the past year to create a local currency. Freeman and his partner said they wanted to resuscitate their town’s ailing economy, and figured local currency was the best way to do it. At first blush, the effort seemed exhausting, doomed to failure, and as the article suggested, a bit eccentric.
Yet Freeman apparently enjoys quite a bit of company in his belief that local currencies could help rescue communities from a host of ills. Since the recent financial collapse, organizers throughout the country desperate to salvage their local economies have shown a growing interest in the idea, unveiling quite a few new alternative currencies over the past several years. These efforts have appeal across the political spectrum, and promise a lot of things to a lot of people—freedom from the reach of an overbearing federal government, a brake on the consolidation of wealth, an alternative to a confusing and unstable financial system, and a counterbalance to increasing corporate power and globalization. With its high unemployment rate and crumbling state government, interest has erupted in Northern California.
This is an excerpt of “The Local Money Movement”