Larry White has a very insightful review of Bernard Lietaer and Jacqui Dunne’s new book “Rethinking Money: How New Currencies Turn Scarcity Into Prosperity“. As Larry writes in a Facebook update “I wanted to like the book more”. I have the exact same feeling about much of Lietaer’s work.

Bernard Lietaer of course is a pioneer in the “local currency” movement. Fundamentally local currencies (or parallel currencies) have a lot in common with free banking and it is of course why Larry and myself would like to like the work of people like Bernard Lietaer. However, the problem with the local currency crowd in my view is that it’s leading proponents base their arguments for “local currencies” on seriously flawed economic arguments. In fact I would rather say that they tend to have anti-economic arguments. As Larry notes in his review:

“In Rethinking Money, economist Bernard Lietaer and journalist Jacqui Dunne offer interesting accounts of community currency projects more or less like Berkshares around the world. But they admire them for rather different reasons. The dominant monetary system is problematic, in their view, because it “perpetuates scarcity and breeds competition,” stifles cooperation, makes life stressful, concentrates wealth at the top, causes financial instability, and threatens the environment. It does so chiefly because the need to pay interest is “structurally embedded” in the system.

…Today’s government-dominated monetary and financial systems do of course exhibit instability. But the book’s other indictments of them are more dubious. Any monetary system “perpetuates” (does not abolish) “scarcity,” as economists use the term, and so too does any barter system. Scarcity, meaning that we do not have enough time and resources to accomplish all of our imaginable goals, is an ineluctable feature of human life. Competition is not a problem: Indeed, to bring about greater prosperity we need more competition, not less, and especially so in money and banking. Freer competition promotes rather than stifles greater social cooperation. Free-market banking and money-issue would end the government’s monopoly on basic money and its control over the interbank transfer system. It would end both special privileges for commercial banks and special restrictions on their activities. Greater efficiency, stability, and prosperity would follow. But to think that “monetary scarcity can be a thing of the past” is to engage in wishful thinking.”

I completely agree with Larry’s comments – Lietaer and other “local currency” proponets’ analysis is flawed. That is too bad as I strongly believe that we can learn a lot from the experience with “local currencies”. In fact I believe that “local currencies” can help us remove monetary disequilibrium. However, the general anti-capitalist and “localist” (or rather protectionist) perspective of people like Bernard Lietaer is entirely wrong.

One of the key problems in the local currency literature is that it seems to be completely unaffected by the research on Free Banking. As Larry correctly notes:

They unfortunately never mention F.A. Hayek’s unconventional work The Denationalization of Money, nor any of the literature of the last 30 years concerning non-fiat, redeemability-based free banking.

In reviewing Georgina M. Gómez’s boo Argentina’s Parallel Currency about Argentina’s experience with parallel currencies I made a similar comment:

What strikes me when I read Dr. Gómez’s book is the near total lack of references to Free Banking theory and to monetary theory in general. For example there is no reference to Selgin, White, Horwitz and other Free Banking theorists. There is no references to Leland Yeager’s views on monetary disequilibrium either. That is too bad because I think theorists such as Selgin and Yeager would make it much easier for Gómez to explain and understand the emergence of CCS if she had utilized monetary disequilibrium theory and Free Banking theory.

As I noted – I strongly believe that we can learn a lot about monetary issues and particularly about the feasability of Free Banking by studying local/parallel currencies, but we need to do it from the perspective of Larry White rather than from the perspective of Bernard Lietaer – competition in money and finance is good and is a source of stability rather than instability.

See some of my earlier posts on local currencies here:

Free Banking theorists should study Argentina’s experience with parallel currencies

Time to try WIR in Greece or Ireland? (I know you are puzzled)

PS for a Free Banking critique of local currency thinking see George Selgin’s piece “The Folly that is “Local” Currency”