Escaping money tyranny

Money makes the world go round. It lubricates the great engine of global capitalism and buys a cup of coffee in Bewley's. It is the universal token of exchange for goods and services. Or is it? What's the alternative? Barter? My pig for your Psion Organiser? We have an emotional attachment to money, especially national currencies. Witness the anguish in Britain over the possibility of losing the Queen's head off sterling. Or the torment visited on the bourgeoisie of Germany as the deutschmark sails off into the sunset and the euro sinks like a stone. We have become obsessed by money: what it does, earning it, spending it, winning it, saving it and especially the great river of it that flows in and out of business every day.

In his intriguing book Funny Money: In Search Of Alternative Cash, David Boyle sets out to prove that there are alternatives to cash and that by breaking our dependence on money, which he calls a psychological construct, we will free ourselves from the narrow world of budgets, bank mangers and income tax.

The first stop on his quest is Washington, where he sets out to prove the old saying that time is indeed money. He discovered a project which has spread to Florida and other communities - the Time Dollar. In essence if you cut somebody's grass, say an elderly neighbour, you earn a time dollar for each hour spent which you can then exchange for another service, like having your car washed or a babysitter. At the end of each month you get a statement from your local timedollar office detailing how much you have spent and earned. It is a source of money completely free from taxation and immune to inflation which also helps to bring communities closer together. Boyle points out that it is mainly older people who use the service as they have the time to spend, so to speak, but it also brings in a lot of people with young children as they get a reliable and experienced babysitting service in return for a lift to the supermarket for the weekly shop or some DIY stuff around the house. It combines the old-fashioned notion of service to the community with a realisable gain for those who think the warm glow and credits in the afterlife are just not enough of an incentive.

One of Boyle's heroes in the book is Edgar Cahn, a liberal Jewish lawyer, deeply involved in the time-dollar project. Cahn sees it as not just an alternative services transaction but as a moral force. If you can bring people who have no money into it, it will go a long way to eliminating the poverty in their lives because the one thing that people on welfare have is time. However, his project has run into difficulties because those who value old-fashioned money the most are often those who don't have it. The jury's still out on whether Mr Cahn can sell his idea to the American underclass. In Philadelphia, Boyle comes across another problem - money as a burden, believe it or not. There are those who feel bad about having too much of the stuff like Ben Cohen of Ben and Jerry's Ice Cream, who gives away as much as he spends each year, or teacher Edorah Frazer who gave away $450,000 (€455,973) one Christmas night. All who did so said they found the experience liberating and it made them feel good.

Boyle then heads for New York and opines that here, money is a religion with an army of priests and monks in the shape of the thousands of workers in Wall Street worshipping Mammon and dealing in intangibles such as derivatives.

From here he stops off in Ithaca, which has printed its own money, another version of the time dollar, and then on to a conference where he finds enthusiasts gathered from all over the US with various ideas on how to break our dependence on cash money.

Boyle's book suffers from repetition as he comes across the same type of ideas in different places. Obviously there is quite a grassroots organisation developing in the US and his is a decent guide to it, but anyone expecting a blueprint for escaping the tyranny of money will be disappointed. None of the experiments he saw in action had made the leap from small services to bigger transactions such as buying a car or even the weekly shop, and until this leap can be made the philosophy is doomed to be one where odd jobs are exchanged.

Aside from this it is a well-written and lively narrative of a burgeoning counter-culture, but doesn't seem to have the depth and breadth needed to be the coming revolution that he, and many others, hope it is.

Conn O Midheach comidheach@irish-times.ie