The Town of Griffinville was developed on the banks of a small river. The founders were mostly from one extended family, the Griffins, who made a fortune in trade. They decided to relocate and made a new beginning on undeveloped land, specializing in agriculture. The town rests within a pleasant valley connected by one main road. Over time, the town developed into a thriving community, but with one frustrating geological constraint. The town was located on a dead end road.
Across the river there is another town, Smithfield. Its main industry is the manufacture of agricultural equipment. This specialty created a synergistic bond between the Griffins and the Smiths, the leading family in Smithfield, also a town on a dead end road. However, its Main Street leads to a main road connected to outlying major population centers. Smithfield also was prosperous, but saw the benefit of foregoing barges carrying mostly agricultural goods in exchange for machinery across the water. They eventually collaborated with the Griffins to undertake the building of a bridge. Upon completion, tolls were established on each side of the two towns, the income used for bridge maintenance and to (voluntarily) provide other public improvements.
The bridge opened up new markets for the Griffins. This had an impact on Griffinville. Prior to the building of the bridge, the town had a balanced economy. Money functioned as it should, not only as a medium of exchange but also as a store of value and a form of IOU. Residents set prices based upon the time spent planning for, creating and providing goods and services. There was little to no inflation and most of the money spent was recirculated within the community – from the barber, to the grocer, to the beautician, to the baker, to the shoe repair shopkeeper, to the butcher, and so on. The economics of Griffinville was conducive to the development of a strong and active community.
The residents all shared a physical bond with their town, identifying themselves proudly as “Griffinites.” There was interdependence among the residents. Everyone relied on the other community members for sustaining their shared existence and quality of life. If one suffered, they all suffered to some degree. This created a bond and solidarity expressed through mutual aid, cooperation and a sense of shared destiny. Alleviating a neighbor’s suffering was seen as necessary for the community as a whole, but also viewed as promoting self-interest. The members of Griffinville also had, to a meaningful degree, the collective capacity to govern their own affairs and make agreed upon improvements and changes to their town that were mutually agreed upon and seen a promoting the general welfare. The only major amenity that was outside their collective control was the bridge. Given that it was constructed with private funds, it was agreed that the Griffins, and their associates, would maintain control of the bridge for 99 years.
As new markets opened for the Griffins, they were fortunate to have ideal growing conditions for several years in a row and they made a windfall by exporting their farm products to areas outside of Smithfield. They used that extra money to buy out the several other smaller farms in the valley, promising to maintain the former farmers as farmhands after the purchase. Once this was done, they raised the prices for their goods to the level charged to outsiders, taking into account all the factors of planning, production, marketing, and distribution. This had a real, though still only marginal, impact on the local economy. But it set the stage for what was to come.
Given their mutual interests, the Griffin and Smith family members met frequently to discuss business. At one such meeting, they discussed the tolls on each side of the bridge. They wondered why they needed to use the accepted currency for the toll. Why not create their own currency and require its use for the bridge? They agreed, and set up exchange services in the towns and surrounding areas representing the sources of transit across the bridge. They also agreed not to spend the money used to buy the toll currency, which after some haggling the Griffins prevailed in naming “Grifto-Dollars,” or “G-Ds.” And what would they do with the currency paid to them for the G-Ds? They would accumulate the money with the intention of creating their own bank. In the meantime, they established a company, the purpose of which was to take control of the local economies of Smithfield and Griffinville. They also decided, that between themselves, they would begin to pay for their own exchanges with G-Ds.
With a monopoly on agricultural products and access to outside markets, the Griffins controlled pricing for agricultural products. With the profits gained from sales and the stockpiling of toll payments, they were able to convince local merchants and shopkeepers they were better off selling their businesses and working as employees – a steady job, regular wages, and none of the headaches of owning a business in a local economy that was becoming more volatile and unpredictable by the day.
When the Griffins controlled enough of the local economy, they wanted to restrict payment for purchases with Grifto-Dollars. There was only one problem: the law required that the national currency be honored for all purchases. The Griffins and the Smiths hired a lobbying firm and they started a campaign, under the guise of freedom and liberation from the “tyranny of the Central Bank,” to allow businesses to pay employees in, for all to accept for payment for goods and services, and for banks to lend, in the form of alternative currencies. Immediately upon passage, they began paying all their employees in Grifto=Dollars.
Over time, the alternative currency undermined the national currency in Griffin and Smithfield. The Griffin and the Smiths took over the politics of both towns. They began closing small businesses and consolidating services into multi-service mega-stores. Many lost their livelihood. The Grifto currency expanded far beyond the reaches of these two towns, with other forms of alternative currency, controlled by private parties, overtaking local economies throughout the country, with results similar to Smithfield and Griffinville.
Communities, such as Griffinville, were replaced by tenuous and insecure residential clusters inhabited by economically marginalized, isolated, and dependent workers. Main Street went from a bustling thoroughfare to a ghost town. Homeless families became housed in the local hotels, funded in large part by the federal government. Social workers and charity replaced mutual aid. Dependency and insecurity replaced collective capacity. Local political autonomy and power was replaced with political irrelevance.
In Griffinville, as with the rest of the nation, a new reality emerged. John Jay, one of our nation’s founders and our first Supreme Court Chief Justice, finally got his wish, exemplified in the famous admonition, “Those who own the nation ought to govern it.” Grifto currency adoption became the last and final phase in the transition from democracy to Kleptocracy.