[lbo-talk] one view of the Greens

[Michael Dawson -PSU]

Personally, I think the "local currency" idea is mainly a hippie form of tax
evasion.  If you trade in local scrip, you don't have to report your local
scrip income, at least until the practice becomes widespread enough for
governments to find ways to enforce taxation on it.

I see no advantages other than that, which is a purely selfish, anti-social
one.

Our problem is not that the dollar mismeasures average inputs of socially
necessary labor-power.  In fact it works quite well at doing that, as the
system requires.  Also, if you want to invest and reinvest locally, you
probably can do so more easily do so within the dollar trading network, than
in some scheme where you have to convert your local scrip back into dollars
to buy supplies coming from elsewhere.  Nothing about dollars prevents
dedicated local community investing.  The capitalist market and its lure of
higher profits prevents that.

As to local economies:  Great, harmless in itself, except that, as a
political program, it's a hugely misleading use of energy. The idea has the
same flaw as all the other "turn on, tune in, drop out" proposals out
there -- It does not realistically address the main source of our world's
problems, which is corporate capitalism and the attendant total lack of
democracy in commanding-heights economic decisions.

I'm a GP member, but I agree with the Worker's Vanguard (nothwithstanding
their Stalinist verbiage and conclusions) on this aspect -- the Greens way
over-emphasize small business and way underemphasize public enterprise.

Unlike the DP, however, there are real ways to combat this problem within
the GP, and the middle-class hippie-ism is not the only major viewpoint.
There are also lots of us watermelons...