Funny Money: In Search of Alternative Cash. David Boyle

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СКАЧАТЬ would obviously expect them to pay tax in old-fashioned dollars. The same problem was faced by the local money pioneers in the UK: ‘I don’t think the Chancellor of the Exchequer really wants his lawn mowed,’ said one Inland Revenue official.

      But Edgar Cahn was a law professor and this made all the difference. Time dollars can’t be taxable, he said, because they are not real money: they are just records of services. ‘In the old days, did you tax people when they looked after their neighbours’ kids? Did people get taxed on the sugar they lent?’

      The IRS agreed. Service credits are not taxable, they ruled, and so it remains. But they do have to be reminded every so often. ‘When President Clinton summoned us to a “season of service”,’ said Cahn in a letter to the New York Times, ‘I do not think he meant services to the IRS.’

      ‘Time dollars represent a psychological and monetary reward for rebuilding the non-market economy,’ says Cahn. It is a kind of social money, and it can be given extra value if it is backed by government departments or underpinned by businesses. And it seems to work. After over a decade of time dollars, the idea is now firmly entrenched, firmly researched and funnelling a new kind of money – mainly, but not exclusively, among older people. There are now nearly 200 time dollar banks operating across the USA, from the Community Carers Service Bank in Berkeley, California to the Ohana Kokua Program in Hawaii; from the Give and Take Service Bank in Ohio to the BEST Time Bank in Laredo, Texas. There are even a few experiments in Japan.

      ‘When people came from Germany and Japan and Sweden and said we need to do this too, I realized this was not a Ronald Reagan problem,’ said Cahn. ‘Something was going on in every industrial society that I didn’t understand.’

      What was going on? ‘Gridlock: moral, political, fiscal,’ said Ralph Nader in the introduction to Edgar Cahn’s book. Then along comes the time dollar, ‘an organized, inflation-proof currency that can provide as constant, as powerful, as reliable a reward for decency as the market does for selfishness.’ If you believe that money began as a way of building relationships, rather than as an essential aid to shopaholism, then time dollars look as though they are going back to the roots of the whole idea.

      II

      Having walked half a mile in the tropical heat, I arrived sweating inside Edgar Cahn’s home in Thirty-ninth Street, with its white columns and its fantastically high street numbers. The air conditioning was battling away inside, but there was also another kind of frenetic bustling heat. A large woman was leaving the house, carrying on a forceful last-minute conversation about youth activities in the summer holidays. A black man with a beard like Abraham Lincoln’s was gesticulating into the telephone. Someone was carrying a large pile of papers in a cardboard box marked Pampers Stretch, and someone else was heaving the intestines of a computer in the other direction. Three more were typing away in the office to the side. Somebody was arriving with bagels in a brown paper bag.

      In the middle of all was a calm, donnish figure with wrinkled eyes, thinning grey hair and a slight beard. He was dressed immaculately, as you would expect of a professor of law, with a white polo-necked shirt as you would expect from someone who wants to change the world. This was Dr Edgar Cahn.

      His wife had died four years before, his children had long since grown up, and the whole time dollars venture seemed to have slowly taken over the house. On the ground floor, a portrait hung over the fireplace, and you could imagine it doing so over the domestic dinner parties of Washington lawyers. But now there were computers, canisters of bottled water, photocopiers, piles of press releases and legal agreements, lines of videos of Cahn’s various chat show appearances, rows of copies of his book and a big award certificate from the National Council on Aging. And somewhere amongst all that were the 5,000 requests for more information about time dollars which had completely overwhelmed the office after an article in Parade magazine.

      His own space in his own home had been reduced to the basement, but when I went down there later – with its dramatic line drawings on the whitewashed brick walls – it was also piled high with paper, broken desks and computers in an early state of repair. Sharing a home with time dollars was clearly like sharing a bed with a buffalo. Edgar Cahn’s own space seemed to have been shifted even further to a large mattress in the corner.

      I was worried that nobody would remember that I was coming. Everybody was so frenetic and nobody seemed prepared even to look me in the eye, as if I would somehow involve them in more work. I sat quietly at a large oak table and felt inconspicuous. Cahn seemed to be vaguely making his way over to talk to me, but every couple of feet someone would dash towards the large white front door and engage him in conversation, or hand him a piece of paper. And he would take off his glasses and peer at it closely, like Dr Johnson examining his dictionary.

      ‘David,’ he said, at long last sitting down at the end of the table. I was expected after all. ‘What I thought was that you could listen in to what we were doing. But if you don’t understand something, maybe you could ask me about it later rather than now.’

      Or in plain English, ‘I haven’t got much time’. Another thirty seconds, and he was giving calm, measured advice to someone whose elderly father-in-law was being given a tough time by the welfare authorities in some distant southern state. ‘This is what I feel we should do,’ he was saying. ‘We’ll talk to Amy. She has access to the welfare records on computer, and she’s a nice lady.’

      He had an air of quiet authority, and I found I was slightly in awe of him. So I was taken aback to hear him introduce me to other people in the room as ‘an oddball’. Was it the English grey socks I was wearing with my shorts? Or because my face was bright red from my walk in the heat?

      ‘You can’t describe everyone as an oddball who shows up here, Edgar,’ said Tina, who was down from Cleveland preparing to set up a project on a housing estate there. Clearly ‘oddball’ was a term of some approval.

      I was introduced to the others in the office. Clarence, with the Abe Lincoln beard, was still waving his arms warmly into the telephone. There was Lisa, who had just put herself through law school while working as an air stewardess. ‘And this is the Reverend Williams,’ said Edgar. I shook hands with a genial man in a green T-shirt and shorts, carrying the remains of yet another computer.

      ‘How long have you been involved with this kind of thing?’ I asked Clarence.

      ‘Right back to 1969,’ he said, followed by a series of loud ironic guffaws about the state of American cities. ‘And I haven’t found the silver bullet yet.’

      ‘And it’s been getting worse,’ said Lisa. They both laughed, embarrassed – as if it was somehow their fault that society seemed to be unvravelling itself, as if the sense of urgency in the office was to make sure it went on not a moment longer than it should. Most of the people dashing through the building turned out to have been involved with time dollars for only a few months. But all of them – Clarence from housing rights, ‘Reverend Williams’ from computer activism – felt that this new kind of money provided them with a lever which could make their other work more effective. It was like being in the centre of a whirlwind, which swirled around the calm figure of Edgar Cahn.

      Clarence was working on a three-way link-up between time dollars, a new food bank and a vast sprawling inner city estate in the city’s notorious south-eastern corner. If it worked, people would be able to buy food with the time dollars they earned. The computers were on their way to a time dollar base in Chicago, where they would be upgraded by unemployed youngsters, earning – naturally – time dollars. The software was going to Washington children for review, in return for time dollars.

      ‘When did we have this idea?’ asked Edgar.

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