and how it works, what the purpose and benefits of it and the best ways to use it.
I think:
LETS is a way of trading goods and services with other people, without money.
This suits me because I have problems with money:
| Problems with Money | > | Lets on the other hand |
| 1) I don’t have much money. | > | I have as many LETS units as I and other people choose to create. |
| 2) I’m on a pension the government only gives me a little money and won’t let me get any more before they start taking it off me again. | > | If I trade with someone we create exactly the units that we need. If I am not running a money business and I keep my credits and debits about even, the government doesn’t know and doesn’t care. |
| 3) If my money account is in deficit I have to pay 20% interest to someone. | > | No usury, with LETS. When my account is in deficit, as it is at the moment, no one demands interest. |
| 4) There is a finite amount of money, so if I get money I have to take someone else’s money, this seems to make it all a bit cutthroat. | > | We create a debit and a credit when we trade as often as we need to, it’s win/win. |
| 5) If I haven’t got any money, I can’t buy anything even if there many people offering me things to buy. | > | There are always things or services to trade. This sometimes happens. Say no one can get a job for some reason: so no one has any money. LETS and similar systems mean that people can continue to trade with each other. |
| 6) Fees and taxes and profits! The government, the corporations and the banks all want some of my money every time I buy or sell anything. | > | No fees, taxes or profits. Some exchanges charge fees and taxes but LETS doesn’t and it’s not an essential part of the system. |
| 7) If the global financial system falls over, I won’t have access to any money and if I don’t have any money I can’t buy what I need and I will be in serious trouble | > | If all the computers fall over we can run LETS in a notebook – it’s been done before. We can trade vegetables. flowers and work. This kind of thing helped keep Greece running during their catastrophic financial collapse. |
| 8) Scammers are always trying to steal my money. | > | You can’t really steal my LETS balance. |
| 9) I have to “earn” money often by doing things I don’t want to. I think it’s a slightly disguised form of slavery | > | My credit and debit balance changes as I trade. I am self-owned and self-employed. |
| 10) Money is mostly owned by a very small gang of people who call themselves “Capitalists” and they rent money to the rest of us. Capitalism creates enormous waste and I think it’s destroying the world. | > | LETS is owned by us. I don’t know exactly who owns the CES but they aren’t Capitalists and there is an emphasis on recycling reusing and saving the world. |
| 11) You need money to buy things in Supermarkets and Supermarkets sell us things that are often very harmful and wasteful at an enormous profit. | > | If we have an alternative to Supermarket we can help change the world to more robust and healthier systems of trade. |
| There is NO grace, charm or community in money. Buying things with money is as dehumanised as it possibly can be. We don’t even have people at the supermarket checkout now. Money is so tied up in scarcity and competition and grasping | > | The best part of a LETS trade is the connection. I see people sometimes just gift each other and There is time, we can have a credit and a debit for years sometimes and it doesn’t grow moths. and In our system, I can have up to 2000 interest-free units debited and no one is harmed and It’s scalable, if I trade 100 things – good! if I trade 2 things – equally good! No one has to die over it. and If I need a hand with something small. Like; I can’t get up the ladder to change a light bulb, I don’t need to pay an $88 call-out fee and $150 an hour to get it done. |