Just a few thoughts. My mind hasn’t fully settled on what hung me up about this book.

In regard to encouraging a local economy, have you looked into the idea of local currency? Here’s part of an article I wrote for In Business back in 1998:

“[...]As production for World War II and President Franklin Roosevelt’s work programs helped get the national economy back on its feet, local money faded away. But the last few years have seen a resurgence in local currencies, which are being used to keep money in the community and out of mall-based chain retail stores that decimate downtowns and force longtime merchants out of business. Local currencies affirm the value of labor among everyone in the community and reaffirm connections frayed in a mobile, increasingly impersonal society.

“The current revival is coming out of a sense of alienation with the global economy,” says Susan Witt, executive director of the E.F. Schumacher Society and editor of its Local Currency News publication. “Scrip is deliberately limiting choices to local sources. It’s also limiting choices to people you know, people you have a face-to-face relationship with — those you see at PTA and Board of Selectmen meetings or at work. A yearning for connectedness is behind this revival.”

The resurgence of local money flies in the face of global trends such as the consolidation of national currencies into one unit in the European Union. “Europe is catching up to the U.S., where the monetary destinies of hundreds of millions are controlled by fewer and fewer authorities,” notes Paul Glover, founder of Ithaca HOURS, the local currency of Ithaca, New York. “When decisions are made by people far away with different priorities, many local economies become vulnerable. Farmers in this country, for example, have long understood that money moves from rural areas to major money centers — with deadly effect. Local and regional money can revive deflated, discarded economies, both rural and urban.”

The standardized products generated by multinational production hurt local economics and reduce people’s sense of connection with a community, says Witt. “So many of our goods now are cookie cutter goods,” she explains. “We don’t know the story behind them. We don’t know what our money is doing — it could be invested in wheelbarrows in Brazil or paper chips in North Carolina or a shoe factory in Taiwan using toxic materials and harming workers. When you buy a local product, chances are you know the person who made it. If it’s a wooden table or chair, you might even recognize the forest it came from. There’s a sense of wholeness, of connection.”

Like U.S. dollars, local currencies are a legal form of taxable income. The Federal Reserve and the Internal Revenue Service have no prohibitions on local currencies, as long as their value is fixed to the U.S. dollar, the minimum denomination is worth at least $1, and the bills do not look like federal money.
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I posted this link a month or so ago, but it was at the end of discussion that was wrapping up:
http://www.ratical.org/many_wo.....money.html

I’m interested in your thoughts.

The other day, while taking my wife to find a decent pair of glasses that don’t cost the moon, I pondered the idea of local economies where you got the things you need from people in the community around you. As a result, people in every community would have skill sets that haven’t existed in over a century. You want furniture, you get it from the guy who makes it. You want shoes, you visit the cobbler, and if you want vegetables for dinner, you go into your back yard and pick them, or visit the neighbor who has what you don’t. The reason we don’t do these things is due to economic concepts of growth, efficiency and progress that have created the world we live in today, where it is more efficient to send strawberries from California to Florida than it is to just get them locally.

Everyone agrees that it is more efficient to have 500 people churn out thousands of pairs of shoes and ship them all over creation than it is for a family to produce shoes for a small community. But is it better?

At the root of this question is the incredible complexity of our daily decision-making processes. We have available to us, and pushed at us, an immense variety of goods. They exist because of economies of scale that Adam Smith never dreamed of. Because they can exist, they must be sold. And here is the catch…They needn’t exist. The only reason there are thousands varieties of shoes is because it is possible to produce and market thousands of varieties of shoes. Need does not enter the picture. Want doesn’t even enter the picture. Advertising exists to create want. The urge for more wealth is what fuels consumerism. The tragic result is the concurrent increase in the pressure to meet personal desires because it is by stroking those desires that marketers expand their markets.

Christians should not, cannot, must not become involved in the trap of consumerism, simply because it is the worship of something other than God. Consumerism is the worship of our personal desire to have. There is no room in our hearts for both God and Adidas, Lexus, HP, McDonalds, and TiVo. Christians must choose between one or the other: Me and my desires, or God and His desires. In this day and age, it is an economic decision, between the economy of this world and all it provides, and the economy of the Kingdom, and all God provides.