You are cordially invited ...We all know that time and money have been living together. We see them together everywhere. We time work by the hour and pay for it with money. We time rent, interest, and taxes and pay them with money. And we talk about them together: "Time and money." Unmarried, money has become unreasonable. Recently, a ball player signed a contract for $50 million. How much is $50 million? At $50 an hour, 40 hours a week, 50 weeks a year, it would take 500 years to earn that much. Would not $5 million (50 years at $50 per hour) have been more than enough? Tens of millions of people in the U.S. live in poverty - many of them children who could become as good at baseball but who will never have a chance to play because one player gets 500 years of income. Time has natural limits: 60 minutes an hour, 24 hours a day, 365 days a year, 100 years for an exceptionally long life. Married, time would keep money within reasonable limits. Time money would be denominated in hours. Countries could use their national name for money preceded by "Hour." So we would have "Hour Dollars," "Hour Yen," "Hour Pesos," and so on for all monies in the world.
"This money certifies that the bearer has the right to goods or services that required an hour of work to produce."
Henceforward, fair exchange would mean exchanging the product of one person's hour of work for the product of another person's hour of work - an hour for an hour. Variations could always be negotiated by the persons directly involved. That's the beauty of money; it decentralizes the power to make decisions. With prices brought within reasonable limits, we could have economic peace as never before. Unreasonable disparities in income - some people becoming millionaires while others cannot make a decent living, annual strikes over salaries and wages, and inflation - would become things of the past, historical oddities. Today, prices are set by trial and error. Because dollar means different things to different people, no one knows what is a fair price and a fair wage. So we waste time and money disputing minimum wages and annual raises. Our economic lives are needlessly filled with stress, time stress and money stress. We never have enough time and never have enough money. With the marriage of time and money, with money disciplined by time, we will be able to live as stress free over money matters as we live with measures of length, weight, and volume. 
Meet the family. . . .Every successful unit of measure is married to an objectively calibrated measuring instrument. Yards and meters are married to yardsticks and meter sticks. Gallons and liters are married to standardized containers. Pounds and grams are married to strictly calibrated scales. So disputes over lengths, volumes, and weights rarely occur. When they do, they are resolved wisely, efficiently, and amicably by applying their respective objectively standardized measuring instruments. We expect people to work by the hour. Let's pay them by the Hour. Variations above or below the standard hour are always negotiable. The whole world is invited....Time and money live together in every country, but their national names hide their cohabitation. Work time explains more than 80 percent of the exchange value of currencies in use in the world today.
Hour money is already being used in many local currency communities, notably in Ithaca, New York. |
