There’s a village in England that I think of as “my” village because I made my home there for many years. But the real villagers are much more deeply rooted than I could ever be. They are practically part of the fabric of the place, a real community, and they have their own way of doing things.
They have developed among other things, a system of barter, a kind of informal exchange economy. They happily swap pheasants for asparagus, home-brewed beer for tomatoes, fresh salmon for frozen casseroles, and more or less anything for anything. Most of the exchanges involve food or unorthodox alcoholic beverages of unusual potency. No written records are kept, and the whole intricate system seems to balance out to everyone’s satisfaction. There is also a subtle bias built into in the process. People with lower incomes get a better deal.
Barter is a very ancient form of economy. It gets around the need for money, banks, credit cards, taxes, and the whole monstrous machinery of modern finance. But barter has its problems. If you had too many goats, for example, and needed some olive oil, you had to look around for someone with too much olive oil and an urgent need for goats. The other problem was the question of value. Just how much olive oil is a goat worth? So barter was tedious, slow and complicated, and about five thousand years ago, money was invented and quickly became the root of all evil. That’s probably an exaggeration. At least 3% of all evil can probably be blamed on other things, such as committees, party politics, and plain stupidity.
The history of money has been the history of different schemes for distributing it. The original scheme, which lasted for many thousands of years, was very simple. The poor were robbed by the rich so that the poor soon had nothing and the rich had everything. In the nineteenth century Karl Marx came up with what seemed like a better scheme – that everyone should share the wealth equally. But that was more sharing than human nature could stand. We are still waiting for the next bright idea about how to use money without allowing it to use us.
Left to itself, money flows uphill. The challenge for a civilized community is to divert some of the flow into things that benefit everybody. That’s the essence of non-profit fundraising. People will try any crazy thing. A village in Italy, needing to raise money for the repair of the church, tried this. For a donation of €1 (about $1), any citizen could throw a pie in the face of the priest or the mayor; for €2, both. The demand was overwhelming – the line stretched around the piazza. But they needed to raise €20,000, and there were only two thousand villagers. Also, the priest and the mayor could absorb only so many pies. In short, the scheme failed.
But those Italian villagers were on the right track. It’s no use asking people for money if you can’t offer something better than money in return.
Copyright: David Bouchier
