Because for most of history men have typically been the ones to work and receive money in exchange for it, I see the current money system as being more “male” in the way it is valued. Pay for jobs (”bringing home the bacon”) used to be something mostly men needed to receive, in the form of “more pay for better skills”, and such, to pay the bills for the family.
Women’s work, by contrast, tends toward favoring human/interpersonal values more than skilled labor. (When you have mountains of dishes to do, and you want to get through them before you have to take kids for ball practice, you may not focus on doing a sterling job. You might just figure it needs to get done, however it needs to happen!)
With women working now and doing more than ever in our culture, the boundaries are not as clear. Some of the work that receives pay is nursing and other professions that are more in line with women’s traditional value in society–helping and nurturing life.
There are aspects of our monetary system that have been around for so long that I wonder if most of us even think about them anymore?
Money is really just a symbol. It’s just one tangible way to figure out a simple transfer of real value for any of the multitudes of interactions by human beings that are considered by any two people to mean something between them.
Gold–the standard upon which money relies for its value–is in limited supply. Though I have no way of knowing for sure, I’d venture to say the amount we have in the world altogether might even be disproportionate to the number of people in the world.
…There might even be lots more people in the world than when we first started using gold as the basis of our currency.
Do we keep getting more gold to keep the value of our money steady, or is each dollar now worth less because we have to divide the dollars we have among lots more people and lots more jobs?
I don’t know anything about how much gold America has compared to the dollars that are available for spending. Either the U.S. Treasury doesn’t make that fact known very often, or I just don’t see it in the paper when they talk about it.
Maybe other countries don’t use gold for their standard of value? (I’m not too familiar with this topic.)
Or maybe we just have the amount of value our government says we have, and it doesn’t depend on how much gold we have at all.
I submit to you that maybe we are using the wrong thing for our standard of value for money. Money just doesn’t cover value in every situation or every place.
Money, between two people on a deserted island, is worth nothing. It’s only the time and skills possessed by each person and what they do for each other with those things that is worth anything, on that island. And they probably won’t need to have great math skills to figure out the balance of who owes whom what, there. (That’s a penful.) That’s why they wouldn’t need money there.
Volunteer work is sometimes seen as having no value, since it is not paid work.
Sometimes volunteer work is worth far more, in my opinion, especially if it is done for someone else with no thought of reward, and possibly when they won’t even take a reward when it’s offered.
When “Volunteer” Work is Worth More Than Money
There’s a certain person I heard a story about while I was in Montana recently. [My (very honest) brother and his family live there, and he was telling me about something this man did one day.]
This person is known to just about everyone who buys software or does things on the internet, I’d venture to say. He has lots and lots and lots of money. But since this is third-hand information, I can’t vouch for its total accuracy, and I think it would be better if he vouched for this himself if he wanted it known.
(He might not want even part of the country to know about this.)
He knows the value of a dollar, as he probably had a say in how much money he charged for the software he sold. And it made him enough money to make him rich, I’d say.
He would not spend his money recklessly, I’m pretty sure, giving money for something that was worth nothing. How would anyone come to have as much money as he has unless he knew how to manage his money?
Anyway, according to the story, he was driving through the upper part of Montana one day and his vehicle broke down.
If you don’t know anything about Montana, let me just say that you can drive hours and hours at high speed between towns there sometimes without seeing anything of market value. My brothers could vouch for that.
In the particular part of the state I’m talking about, it’s about 90 miles to the closest town of any size from there, at least to find places where you might be able to buy things like car parts at a moment’s notice, perhaps. At least be sure of finding them without having to order parts.
Generally speaking, even the largest cities there are small compared to lots of other places in America.
Well, the traveler of this story must have needed to get somewhere by a certain time. I’m not sure why.
His vehicle broke down somewhere on that long stretch of highway.
Some old farmer guy who lived in the vicinity of my brother (he could have been 50 miles away, maybe) helped him out and got him back on the road, and wouldn’t take any money for it, even when pressed to do so.
But after our traveler got back on the road, he didn’t let it rest there. He did some research and discovered that the guy who’d helped him was going through some hard times financially and had an outstanding mortgage.
He decided to pay off the mortgage of the old farmer who had helped him.
I ask you. How much money was the gift of help to get back on the road worth to this traveler?
I submit to you that the real value we should be thinking of for our currency is not gold at all. It’s the value of a person’s time, willingly given for the cause of helping someone else out.
And not all of the value is in the time someone gives. Some of it is the smile that comes along with it. Some of it is going the extra mile, finding out what else we can do for the one we are helping, and also the ability to know when enough is enough, already.
Sometimes it’s a matter of being available, of “being there” when no one else is. Sometimes it’s keeping your commitment to your spouse when he or she is sick and desperately in need of your help, when it would be so much easier and fun to abandon them.
I expect it might help your credit rating if you abandoned your loved one, as statistics say that overwhelming medical bills are among the top reasons people go bankrupt in America today. If you didn’t stick with him or her, you might be able to distance yourself from the consequences of his or her illness.
It seems like a loyalty like that might be worth an infinite amount of money to a sick person. (But you know how some people are–they’re not happy with anything you do for them. Just see how some people who rescue victims from thugs in New York City are sued by the ones who rescue them.)
Recently there was a young man who waited on me in the grocery store. After he gave me my change, he stopped smiling and turned away, even when he practically bumped into me afterwards and I tried to smile at him.
Maybe he was just having a bad day. But if I was not already pretty much committed to doing my shopping at that store, I might have made a decision to go somewhere else next time.
Getting good customer service is that important to me, even if it costs a little more. And often, it’s the intangibles of the situation that mean the most to me, as a woman.
The value of business goes up when some of these intangibles are present. One thing that might have something to do with that: Women do 80% of the shopping in this country, according to a study I saw recently. Women appreciate the little things like good service and a smile, even after the transaction is over. The more these intangibles become a part of a business person’s or service person’s style, the more businesses in this country might thrive.
They do make a difference.
Male and Female Aspects of Currency
It seems to me that parts of our current money system are trying to cover the bases for some of the more needed “female” aspects of society, while keeping only the “male” aspects of the money system in place. (It might be trying to cover more than it’s really capable of.)
I’m thinking that perhaps the money system could be managed more successfully if it was divided in two, so that there was another form of currency that “balanced” it out.
I’m suggesting a new currency be formed that had built-in rewards favoring women’s typical functions in society, but still able to give us all (whoever participated) things we needed.
The main problem I see with our economy/money system right now is trust. And I think what we need is a way to balance it with what could typically be considered some right-brained kinds of things like female values.
I know, lots of men do ethically correct things, too. But even the saying “boys will be boys” tells me that society would condone a man being “a bad boy” before it would condone a woman being “a bad woman”.
Nature Functions Best when there is a Balance in Place
Where there is a male part, there needs to be a female counterpart to balance it out. That is as true for money (a man-made system based on a standard of gold) as it is for anything else in the world.
It’s the way we use anything, including money, that causes it to need balance, since it has no real value of its own. It’s just a symbol of value we’ve created, now a part of a complex system, so there can be an even exchange of value to provide for needs.
Just like in marriage, a “female” system could simply provide a different balance during times of normal monetary stress. When one is down, the other is up and provides the means of going on together. (All money functions seem to cycle, having higher value sometimes and lower value at other times.) When the “male” money system ebbed in value, the “female” currency might start to flow more strongly, until the “male” side was able to come back up.
I believe, from having heard older people talk about the Great Depression, that elements of this idea for a “female currency” were present in the way many Great Depression survivors were able to manage life in their time of need. In its simplest form, if you were passing through and needed a meal and a place to stay for the night, some farmer might give it to you if you agreed to help with the haying or fixing the fence. It was considered to be an equal exchange, based on something other than money–compassion, food, and labor being the elements of exchange involved. This is a form of an alternate currency outside of the money system, if you will.
I know, it sounds like barter, but this system would be more than that, because it would incorporate into the amount of it needed values that would encourage trust and a rating system that would help to balance the current money system.
This system would just organize things ahead of time so everyone who needed to could benefit through a previously-set-up networking system, particularly during times of greater economic stress.
The system I suggest would make use of the concept of “being a good neighbor”, except it would be used in this way: “you help me, I help you, but if you break my trust, I’ll probably help you a little less.”
The “trust” part is something eBay.com and Amazon.com have incorporated into their companies with great success. That could be used in this system, too, but with a little updating. (eBay’s feedback system would not work exactly right for this system the way it is, I think.)
This is How the Honorable Poor Survive
Though most people who have all they need may not be aware of this level in society, I’ve had a chance to see how some of the honest poor here survive–by networking in a similar way to what I am about to suggest.
As we know, not every poor person uses honorable means to survive. Other poor people may survive by robbing banks or homes, by depending entirely on welfare or churches to help (though I suspect any one of us could need this kind of help at times and getting help from it would be appropriate then), or by manipulation or fraud.
When I left Boston to move across the country, I discovered it was going to cost me way more than I’d imagined. I decided to sell as much as I could and ship the rest of my things through FedEx, UPS, and USPS.
But there are some things you can’t send that way, and sometimes you can’t even give things away without a lot of hard work and a fair amount of time to get the word out…and that’s when I discovered what a great network my dear friend Rosana had.
Rosana…(of Brazilian heritage, but now a U.S. citizen)…financially, she lives on the edge of what appears to be financial disaster in a way I have never seen. And she ends up moving so often that practically everything she has fits into a suitcase. She has come to like it that way, as things happen overnight sometimes and she often finds she needs to move quickly.
Part of her secret is that she has a faith like I have seldom seen, too. God answers her prayers in ways most of us have not even needed to have prayers answered.
She has a spartan existence compared to most of the people I know, something I expect most of us would not choose. But her network of friends is extensive.
During the last two or three months I was in Boston, just because I was a friend of hers, somehow she pulled up resources for me from everywhere to help me move, through friends, through a church, through other connections.
Did I need to get rid of a mattress? She had a friend who needed one (you can’t legally sell used mattresses there). Did I need a place to stay for a few days after the end of the month, after I moved out? She found me a place. Did I need a job? Somehow, she found someone who needed my services so I could make a little money before I left.
I know–setting up a currency based on this kind of thing probably sounds like socialism, too. But I submit to you that it is not, because in this system, we would all have a choice, and it’s actually more like a combination of barter and compassion and trust…and a money system all its own, interacting with the normal part of the money system. And we would be doing the work ourselves. We would not be a slave to what might turn out to be someone else’s ideology or over-control.
Just as nobody says you have to earn money if you don’t want or need to, nobody would say you had to earn this kind of currency if you didn’t want to. I do think if such a system was in place, society might very well start to expect us to have some connections with it, but I think at least most of the middle-class and those below it might also find that there were enough benefits that we would want to be a part of it.
Just as a brain functions best if there is smooth interaction between the left and the right sides of the brain, I believe the whole system would work best if each person participated in both kinds of currency on some level. It would then give a better balance. It could also be a learning experience for everyone, rich or poor. The poor would have to learn to manage their money better, and the money-rich could benefit from the network and the value system if they also contributed in other ways.
Volunteer Club
My overall idea for balancing the money system is in the form of a “volunteer club” that would come close to being parallel to (say) motor clubs like AAA.
For people who worked (verified) volunteer hours and were a part of the “club”, there would be certain benefits, such as free or partly-free health care; possibly getting higher amounts in their social security checks; such as being entitled to have a percentage of one’s rent deducted, depending on the landlord (participating landlords could both give and also receive benefits for allowing deductions in rent) from total rent owed. Those kinds of things.
The “club” would not only give benefits to volunteers who gave time to approved charities, projects, and functions or good deeds done for others (verified by other people who speak up for them, perhaps, but hopefully more than one, to eliminate fraud), but would also coordinate volunteer efforts of its own according to the current needs in our country.
Redefining “Volunteer”
I would suggest expanding the meaning of “volunteer” somewhat to include duties seen as being part of one’s responsibilities in our society.
Perhaps part of the problem in our country now is that not everyone sees certain responsibilities to others as being essential. (You know, like paying child support.)
Perhaps having a balancing system might have saved some Enron workers a lot of money if leaders’ honesty had had to be rated through a system like this.
If you were a good dad or good mom and found ways to make the relationship between you work, you’d get a certain number of points under this system. It’s the cohesive unit between a man and a woman that provides a stable foundation for our adults of the future.
Studies have shown that sometimes broken homes or lack of attention to the kids can contribute to such things as the making of criminals and to mental health problems: a single mom or dad can’t do it all when it comes to raising kids, and with all a single parent’s kid’s free time and a need to belong somewhere, many of them end up in gangs, learn criminal ways, or make heroes out of the wrong kind of people. Our country could save big bucks by cutting down on the number of criminals it needs to house in prisons alone!
I know it’s not always possible to do this, and it’s not necessarily someone’s fault if they can’t do it, but if you cared for your elderly parents yourself instead of sending them to a nursing home, you might get a certain number of volunteer points per quarter.
My family knows it costs about $70,000 per year to care for one person at one of our local nursing homes, and Medicaid (the government/our taxes) takes care of much of that expense after the person’s money runs out. Though there are some good nursing homes, I’m not convinced that they necessarily do any better job than most families could, if their houses were set up properly to accommodate them!
How This Currency Would Function
Gold-standard-money Volunteer-standard money
Rewards skill, scarcity Rewards time spent, compassion, integrity
Taxes paid with money Taxes paid as a percentage of volunteer hours given
Represented by coins, dollar bills Figured as an official percentage, to adjust value of money
Negative reinforcement (sometimes) Positive reinforcement (sometimes)
Pay to have house built (example) Get volunteer help building a house (as barter)
In order to understand this concept, let’s review what is usually seen as being true of the typical woman. I see a typical woman as participating in things like this:
- Cooking
- Cleaning House
- Cleaning up the messes both the kids and the husband might make, and/or training them to do it themselves
- Coordinating all functions of the household
- Sewing
- Saving you money! (Women do most of the shopping in this country–lots of men just don’t like to do it. And often, women are the ones who pinch the pennies to make ends meet!)
- Moving the furniture (’cause it would look better or fit better somewhere else)
- Resolving the kids’ squabbles
- Counseling (career, marriage, schooling…) (Dads do this too)
- Going to bat for the kids–or referring problems to dad when they’ve been bad so he can administer discipline if necessary
- Living the longest
- Going to church/religion/nurturing spiritual values
- Volunteering for charities, helping neighbors, sharing produce with friends
- Networking
- Confronting abuse/maintaining and encouraging social standards
- Talking/gossiping with friends on the phone
- Flexing between full-time homemaking, part-time jobs, or full-time jobs, depending on the needs of the family
- Filling in gaps in the world around her
- Right-braining/intuiting (vs. logic, which is typically seen as being a man’s domain)
- Expressing emotions, working at relationships
- Praising others when they have accomplishments
- Bringing life into the world and takes care of most of the nurturing until that life is mature
- Civilizing society–stopping the abuse, reducing the aggression
- Listening to the heart of what’s going on
- Helping the poor
- Imagination
- Helping her husband find the keys…
Etc.–you get the picture.
Men and women both do volunteer work–but I think it’s most often seen as being in a woman’s domain, at least until men retire.
Volunteer work is seen as receiving “no pay”, and therefore some people see it as being of less value. You have to be paid money in order to show that what you do is worth something. Right?
I disagree: the main element I see of value in volunteering is that everyone gets paid the same: nothing, as in no money!
Volunteer work could potentially be a basis for an entirely different kind of co-currency that would encompass a typical woman’s/right-brain values: religion, intuition, emotions, counseling, art, ethics, honesty, integrity, and such.
It would give a value to the volunteer hours people worked in the same way as we now give value to gold in our monetary system. Everyone’s pay would be the same: an hour of your time equals an hour of mine, to start with.
One thing ALL of us have is 24 hours a day, as long as we live. That is one thing that will always be equal, and we each have a choice as to what we do with our time.
This is one resource (time) that we can all share with others in one way or another–even the disabled or less mentally capable can do some valuable things with their time sometimes, even if it’s just to lend a hand helping us carry something or stick something on a page with glue to make a bulletin board or something.
It would depend on their disability, of course, what they could do. And some of them are better at smiling and making the world a pleasant place to be than some of us who physically or mentally function a little better.
Some people who were originally considered mentally or physically disabled have been discovered to have musical gifts or abilities to remember facts that most of the rest of us can’t even fathom!
I know a lady with Downs Syndrome who (much to my surprise at first) knows how to read, operate computer programs on a basic level (she loves the computer!), write out Bible lessons in a notebook, follow directions, and has had training in handling money and some clerical functions.
If (say) some secretarial positions were typically divided up a little differently, I could see people like her getting some of the more routine jobs that tend to become boring to some of the rest of us (but that are fun to her), and the remaining, more challenging, jobs could be given to others. It would make everyone’s jobs more interesting and challenging!
Acknowledging that a part of every job we do depends on being able to trust the person we do it for, and vice versa, I think it’s fair to divide up the value of our currency into these two parts: skills value and trust value (male and female parts).
In the Great Depression, you can bet that that farmer would not have allowed a transient to come in his house or help him in the fields if he didn’t trust him to display a level of decency and goodwill to himself, his wife and his children. Trust is half of the value of any interaction, whether it’s stated or not.
Suggested Use
Under a different system, money could perhaps be devalued to 50% of what it was before, starting a couple weeks after the changeover to the new system. The value of Volunteer currency could then kick in for the remaining 50% of the value of money.
This value for the volunteer part would not just be about volunteering. It would be about fulfilling our roles, roles upon which others depend for their well-being in some way. The resulting value of money for most of us, I think, might still be worth a lot more than that 50%.
People could get volunteer value points for things like service with a smile (while bagging groceries, waiting on tables in a restaurant or collecting carts in a parking lot–sometimes intangibles determine where people choose to do business, and we want them to do well!), getting to an appointment on time (unless there was a valid excuse like a 7-hour traffic jam), taking carts in the parking lot back inside (this might save some companies so much in employee time otherwise needed for rounding them up that they could cut prices!), visiting old folks in a nursing home, shoveling a walk for a neighbor, etc.
“Mystery volunteers” could be dispatched at random to various places to collect names of people who are doing good things: putting their doggy’s doo-doos in a bag while walking in the park, mowing their lawns (for the sake of those who need things to look nice), showing kindness to their children, etc.
Some people could be given small cash awards on the spot for their good deeds, just to make things interesting.
This could be a great incentive for the homeless and others who just needed to make a little extra money–through the club, they could perhaps pick up litter, or doggy doo-doos in the park that doggy owners did not, mow lawns for senior citizens who called the “club” asking for someone to do it, or rake leaves, etc., after registering with the volunteer club and getting verification from someone who would know that they fulfilled their volunteer obligations.
The lives of a lot of us would be a little more pleasant as a result.
Good Health Habits
Nutrition and fitness might also fall in the category of female values (got to train the kids of the kountry right, you know!)
Suppose you kept (as proof) grocery receipts that showed you bought a good balance of foods in each necessary food group. However, you never exercised. In this case, you might get 3 points for being nutritionally adequate, but none for proper exercise.
If you then decided to exercise 3 times a week for 30 minutes or more (verified by the gym, walking groups, etc.), you could get 3 volunteer points each week (one for each time you did it).
These points, registered with the volunteer club and verified by someone designated to check on you periodically, could be given to your doctor’s office as proof of nutrition and “exercise co-pay”. That could be worth a hefty discount off medical expenses, as it’s been proven that people who take care of their health usually have significantly lower medical costs, if only for the amount of drugs they need to use.
Even people who do all they can for their health, though, have problems sometimes. For the times they do need help, they could receive a good discount, I hope. (See the “Health Care” section below.)
There are lots of other things you could get points for, and you probably would if you simply took good care of the people and normal responsibilities in your life, like paying your child support when due and taking your child to the doctor when she needed to go. I’ll mention a few other things further on.
Any of those things could raise the value of any volunteer hours, too:
- Suppose you buy (and eat) verifiably good food in proper proportions and exercise 3 times a week for at least 30 minutes each. (6 points)
- You take your grocery cart all the way back into the store and get 2 points, because a mystery volunteer saw you and took down your name for the Club.
- You gave service with a smile (2 points), as you were putting your cart away
- Your grocery store was a “mystery volunteer” the day you went in and when they gave you too much change, you were honest and gave it back. (10 points for honesty) (and the store would get points too to help offset any change they lost)
- You worked 20 volunteer hours as well during October. For that month, you’d earn 20 volunteer hours.
- Then extra value might be figured out for each volunteer in the form of a “quotient”. (Disclaimer: A precise method should be decided later by a team of accountants or others who could figure something more expertly than I could.)
Everyone would start with a “1″ quotient at the beginning of the month and values/points would be added to or subtracted from the “1″ for that month).
- 6 points for healthy living practices, plus
- 2 points for grocery cart care, plus
- 2 points for service with a smile, and
- 10 points for honesty…
equals 20 points, which would be added onto the “1″. Your quotient for that month would then be 1.20.
You also worked 20 volunteer hours. To get the total value, you’d multiply 20 x 1.20, for a total of 24.0.
Feedback would also be recorded specifically for the various things you did right, so (say) employers or banks could check it and feel more confident they could trust you. It’s nice to keep things simple like eBay does for feedback ratings, but some things would be more important than others when it came to trust value. Therefore, I think feedback received should be divided up into more specific categories than eBay and displayed in our accounts late enough that even things that happen later might also be taken into account when figuring the ratings.
ANYWAY, you now have 24 volunteer hours saved up. You could choose to:
- save these hours in your volunteer hours account for later (you might need people to come take care of you in your old age), or
- take out the value “in kind” (say, having someone else come mow your yard in exchange for part of your 24 hours, or
- trade your volunteer hours for an item listed in the exchange part of the volunteer club, or
- have the value of them put into a card (something like a pre-loaded Visa card) and, using it along with money or a check or a credit card, have it increase the value of any money you spend up to a certain amount, depending on how many hours you volunteered, or
- get discounts on healthcare (or free healthcare) from clinics based on number of volunteer hours worked, or values from other businesses (who would also get tax discounts for accepting the cards, or further value from using volunteers to do certain jobs for them)
- etc.
This is how it might work.
- Each person would have to sign up to belong to the “volunteer club”, which would oversee the coordination of a certain number of volunteer activities and keep track of logs of any volunteer activity in charities & churches
- “Volunteer hour” value could apply to to individuals, to businesses, and to any other entity that gives and receives money. This value would increase and decrease, depending on how closely what the individual or entity did was of value to our country or to individuals in it.
Ethics (a female value according to this system) might come into play in a situation like this:
- Suppose a chicken corporation packs live chickens into cages, so they are never able to run around or do what chickens usually do. These chickens might get irritable from never being able to move around. To relieve the tension, they peck each other, causing each other wounds. The wounds lead to infections, which lead to sickness and sometimes death.
- So the company keeps them on antibiotics to keep down infections and to keep as much of their meat in a state that can be sold.
- People might get sick or become less able to handle their own antibiotics after eating the chicken from this chicken farm. Society is deemed to have been harmed, as well as the chickens. So “volunteer hour” value of the company’s product would be decreased.
- However, they treat their employees well, giving them healthcare insurance that is partly paid by the employee (a normal practice in many places now). There would be points given to the company for doing that.
- And they might also be good about promoting employees to better jobs. More plus points.
- The company then decides they need a little more value in their dollars. To do that, they decide to change the way they handle their chickens by buying a little extra acreage so they can let the chickens run cage-free. More points are added to the company’s value, which eventually helps balance out what it would have cost the company to buy more acreage.
Some of the value could even be put in the stock market/Wall Street, as a balance to the regular money value there. (I don’t know how that might work, since I don’t understand too much about the stock market. We’d have to call on experts in the stock market to figure that out.)
Value of Money in our Current System
A window into retail has shown me:
That money really only has the value we collectively decide it has. Sports collector’s cards can be worth thousands of dollars–if everyone agrees that they are and are willing to pay the price. An officially delegated group might set up standards that raised or lowered the value of sports cards based on how nice they looked, how beat-up they might be or how scarce. Because a certain price was agreed upon, that is what they would be considered to be worth.
The final price also takes into account various expenses and builds them into the total. (Otherwise, the seller will not be staying in business.)
We can give value to anything we want, in reality. In this system, instead of gold being the thing that would set the standard of value, an hour of a volunteer’s time would become the standard unit upon which a co-money system would be built.
Bottom line: I guess how much an hour of a person’s time is worth depends on how valuable we think people are, doesn’t it?
My value system says that people are the most important treasure on earth. (And God Himself says that people are His treasure.)
Every person can contribute value, whether or not there is any gold to back it up, just by what he or she chooses to use his or her time to do, or his or her decisions. That could be as simple as a word of encouragement–something that might keep someone from committing suicide, for instance.
Without people here on earth to appreciate it, gold is only one more pretty metal in the ground.
At the ends of our lives, a pile of gold is not going to mean that much to us, other than that some who know us might want us to die sooner so they can have it!
(Based on how much importance many women give to getting or sending cards for birthdays, I think there are probably other women who might consider another person’s time and input or attention to be a valid standard too.)
If the government was to set this up (so as to make the currency official), possibly in the U.S. Treasury alongside the money system, computers could record and compute the value of our volunteer hours and use it to increase or decrease the value of things we already have, or just use it as “money in the bank” for withdrawing later in the form of goods or services.
Even the government could benefit.
In a recent paper, there was an article that said that due to a budget shortfall, the city would be cutting back on park maintenance. There’s also an article that the city across the river would be laying off an employee at the library in their round of budget cuts.
Voila! Some of the county’s budget shortfall could be made up for through the volunteer system. (Part of the government’s 20% of the volunteer force for tax value would be organized to provide services to the government–local, state or national).
The volunteer club could ask for volunteers to, say, run those big cute funny lawn mowers all over the park for a certain number of hours each, or spend time helping out in the library a certain number of hours per week, in exchange for getting credits under the volunteer system.
And points would be deducted for stealing one of those big, cute, funny lawn mowers!
The Value of Using Both Negatives and Positives
Pavlov’s dog experiment showed that the most effective training comes from a balance of negative and positive reinforcements.
The volunteer currency system would do something similar to that for our money system.
For instance, our current animal control system might typically punish everyone who did not pick up their doggie’s doo-doos in the form of a fine, and an alternate/balancing system might reward a few who DID pick up their doggie’s doo-doos by putting their picture in the paper and awarding them $50 each.
Part of the volunteer task force could include secret volunteers (sort of like mystery shoppers) who went around finding people who did things right in our country–people who gave their customers extra good service, who gave an elderly neighbor a hand getting ice off her sidewalk without asking, or whatever.
An increase in value for “volunteer hours” currency could come about because you were honest, or gave service with a smile to your customers, or visited your elderly mother on a regular basis in the nursing home, or maybe because you took care of her in your own home instead of putting her in a nursing home prematurely, if she couldn’t be in her own home anymore.
A decrease might occur if it was discovered you treated your mother badly while you were taking care of her.
This would also provide social balance to the current monetary system, which typically rewards higher skills or selling better products with more amounts of money only, and doesn’t also take into account any social values connected with what we do.
Let me make this clear–we could still do these very same “volunteer” things (and I hope we would sometimes) without having to have them computed as volunteer hours. The things that are done without asking to get credit for them might actually be more valuable–because they’d be seen as being more genuine, perhaps.
Incorporating such values into the system would give greatly enhanced value in the long run, as some of these values would attract more business (service with a smile brings more of my business, I can tell you), which would ultimately bring more money to businesses and create more jobs.
I would recommend, for anyone getting credit through the volunteer club, that certain standards be adopted before anyone was given their full “volunteer hour” status under the club’s system. (It might partly depend on the abilities of the person rendering the services, however.)
While volunteering or working, there would be points given simply for doing a good (and not a sloppy) job (depending on one’s capabilities), for coming at the time they promised, for the intangibles that add up to real worth for the recipients in each case.
How Senior Citizens Might Be Affected
Senior citizens might be among the best recruits for club membership. In the latter part of life, many seniors find their greatest purpose in volunteer work. And some of them have so much time on their hands that they drive their partners crazy. It would give a lot of seniors something to live for, and might help pay some bills, too.
Being part of the volunteer club might also help them pay for (say) medicines. (One of my cousins was telling me she recently paid $1200 in one month just for medicine, up from $800 the month before! Drug companies are now allowed to not only let prices go way out of control, but they have been given the legal right to control the markets for certain drugs for certain amounts of time before generic drugs can be prescribed or even given to the poor.)
At the same time more resources are needed in order to care for their health, seniors are gradually becoming unable to perform regular tasks.
But under this kind of a system, they could also do other things that would otherwise cost them money if they had to hire it done.
Seniors might often do things for each other instead, depending on what abilities they possessed, and get volunteer points for doing so, too. That would offset some of the expenses the rest of us might have to pay to provide these services for our loved ones. It might be possible to save our country a considerable amount, overall.
The volunteer club system might help to organize it. Seniors could call in, asking for someone to take them grocery shopping with them when they go, and other seniors could call in to volunteer to take 2 or 3 other people with them, on a particular day, at a particular time.
I noticed my elderly mother and her friends often did favors for each other that reduced the burdens others would otherwise be taking on. The ones who could still drive well often picked others up when they went grocery shopping or when they had doctor’s appointments or went to meetings.
I could see even bed-ridden but clear-thinking seniors being able to, say, call other seniors periodically on the phone to ensure they were okay, eliminating a need for at least one kind of alarm system that one of my aunts had trouble using, anyway.
With my aunt’s alarm system, she had to punch a button on an alarm box every time she left the house or came back.
Unfortunately, she often forgot to punch the button due to a “senior moment”. There were a number of times that specially dispatched emergency personnel tried to break through her windows, or that we’d get a call at our house asking us to check on her, only to find out she had just forgotten to push the alarm button. (We were the first place they called when she didn’t respond to their system. If we weren’t home, the emergency personnel sent emergency personnel to her house.)
Health Care Solution
A clinic in a big city near us had a great idea. (Well, they implemented their idea after I’d had mine, but they are a great example of what I mean.)
Basically, they made an offer to their surrounding community, for the benefit of those who needed free health care:
Volunteer to work at least a certain number of hours at officially designated places in the community, and we will give you “free” or partially free health care, based on the number of hours you work for them in a certain period of time.
It is a very popular service, The Oregonian said.
I thought of a side benefit to that kind of health care: only the ones who truly try to make a contribution to our country in some way (and who were not only here for what they could get out of it) would thereby benefit from the health care system here.
For seniors, perhaps some of the benefits could be based on some of what they’d contributed to the value of society in the past too. They might be less able to volunteer now and would need more help financially than some of the rest of us.
This system would eliminate those who only wanted to take advantage of a clinic’s services without any interest in becoming citizens. OR it would cause more people to become involved (and as they say, time is money), OR it would contribute value to our society in other ways that would make healthcare more affordable, if it was interactive with other things.
Maybe there would be nurses and CNAs who might choose to volunteer a certain number of hours instead of getting paid for their scheduled working hours for (say) a nursing home, in order to get some of the perks/benefits of the volunteer club. That might save the nursing home enough money in wages and taxes they didn’t have to pay that they could offer free nursing home care to more people. (Or something along those lines.)
Creating Jobs
One of the efforts of value coordinated through the Volunteer Club System could be starting small businesses through a team effort.
Companies today sometimes have their employees do brainstorming, make prototypes, research patents, and such. The “Club” could do likewise, through groups of volunteers.
One potential problem I thought of would be where the funding might come from.
Funding is one of the first things someone who wants to start a small business needs to have in place.
I’ve heard that millions of dollars worth of grants go unused every year. And each year grants are not given out in one category or another, they decrease to the amount that were actually given out, in the next year.
What if all money that was set aside for grants that was not used by the end of the year were automatically put into a fund that would apply to starting up small businesses through the volunteer club?
The club could coordinate the process of both starting businesses or coming up with new products.
- New business teams could possibly use vacant space in churches or charity buildings, which might then give perks or points for those organizations.
- There could be “idea teams” who get together to do brainstorming
- People possessing good doses of knowledge about certain things or common sense would be recruited as volunteers to help sort out what ideas would work and the best ways of implementing them through testing.
- Volunteers could be recruited for researching the viability of businesses for the ideas that were come up with.
- People could be recruited to help make prototypes.
- People with marketing skills could be recruited to help market the products, once they were produced and the business was started.
- Dependable volunteers could then be recruited to work in shifts for manning the businesses after they got started.
- Any money these businesses made, past expenses, would go toward funding club services and accumulating perks.
- Fledgling businesses would be headed up by the Club through at least two full-year cycles (possibly 5, as most businesses fail within 5 years).
These businesses would at least need to go through enough business cycles to get a feel for whether they would be profitable, for what else might need to be done to improve the company, and to find out if they could financially sustain the number of employees they would need to adequately take care of business throughout the year.
- Then there could be official launchings, and the best-qualified of the interested volunteers could be given the chance to fill the positions in the new business on a full-time or part-time basis. At that point, the businesses would run on their own steam and regular wages would be paid to anyone who worked there.
It’s obvious that we need more jobs in this country. And a lot of the people who are laid off from jobs are older workers who thereafter have much greater difficulty finding another job than younger workers do, in most places (not Florida, though, I hear). Unfortunately, this comes at a time when they often desperately need to be putting money away for retirement, and that money is needed so they won’t have to feel they are a burden on society, either.
This system would allow seniors opportunities for work that they might not otherwise be able to get, and free up some jobs in other places (like in Florida) for younger workers who must compete with seniors who seem to flood the workforces there.
Though this part of the program would not, and should not, take the place of people starting their own businesses, it might give some people some very practical, well-rounded experience in all aspects of starting their own businesses down the road. I’ve wondered sometimes if so many small businesses fail simply because their owners are unskilled in managing one aspect of the business or another.
This initial training might be a significant boost to many, becoming a way to help many come up with more stable businesses of their own further down the road without actually having to go back to school to learn how. (And going back to school typically requires a lot of financial aid, too. That’s more money that the government could save, and stretch out the value of other financial aid funds too.)
Volunteer “Temp” Work
If someone lost his or her job, he or she could immediately get connected with the volunteer club and start earning some benefits right away. This could be doing something they might have had an interest in but didn’t have enough experience to get a regular job doing it. Volunteering through the club (just like temping does now) might also be a great way to learn or demonstrate skills and get noticed by companies that wanted to hire people.
Volunteer System Taxes
“Income” that volunteers earned through the “Club” could be tax-free (or feel like it, at least). Perhaps one-fifth of the volunteer work force coordinated by the club could be directed to do things that would help the government or do things the government currently farms out to independent contractors.
Maybe money that would have been paid out to independent contractors but was done by volunteers instead could be put directly into the club’s coffers and divided among the volunteers according to their volunteer-hour value.
One-fifth of all volunteer force hours, used to provide for government needs, might be considered “payment of taxes” for the whole group.
I know this from observing the situation of a friend of mine: The current system of requiring the poor to pay taxes on any bartering they do is a severe hardship for some. I know, because I tried to do taxes one year for my friend Rosana when the only income she had would have been considered “self-employment” (doing odd jobs for people or something).
Even people who make less than $1000 per year are required to pay self-employment taxes, according to what I understand the tax booklets to say.
If you don’t have any money, and the only “income” you got was in the form of barter (meals, a place to stay, or whatever), how are the poor supposed to pay their taxes without trying to borrow money they may not ever be able to afford to pay back once they got it? Though this is not true for all of them, their only friends might be homeless people or others without any money themselves.
I think we need a better way of helping our poor. Just giving them money or health care services without requiring anything in return doesn’t help them in the long run. We all need to be contributing members of society, according to our own abilities.
