- Always ask of any proposed change or innovation: What will this
do to our community? How will this affect our common wealth.
- Always include local nature – the land, the water, the air, the
native creatures – within the membership of the community.
- Always ask how local needs might be supplied from local sources,
including the mutual help of neighbors.
- Always supply local needs first (and only then think of exporting
products – first to nearby cities, then to others).
- Understand the ultimate unsoundness of the industrial doctrine of
‘labor saving’ if that implies poor work, unemployment, or any kind of
pollution or contamination.
- Develop properly scaled value-adding industries for local
products to ensure that the community does not become merely a colony
of national or global economy.
- Develop small-scale industries and businesses to support the
local farm and/or forest economy.
- Strive to supply as much of the community’s own energy as
possible.
- Strive to increase earnings (in whatever form) within the
community for as long as possible before they are paid out.
- Make sure that money paid into the local economy circulates
within the community and decrease expenditures outside the community.
- Make the community able to invest in itself by maintaining its
properties, keeping itself clean (without dirtying some other place),
caring for its old people, and teaching its children.
- See that the old and young take care of one another. The young
must learn from the old, not necessarily, and not always in school.
There must be no institutionalized childcare and no homes for the aged.
The community knows and remembers itself by the association of old and
young.
- Account for costs now conventionally hidden or externalized.
Whenever possible, these must be debited against monetary income.
- Look into the possible uses of local currency, community-funded
loan programs, systems of barter, and the like.
- Always be aware of the economic value of neighborly acts. In our
time, the costs of living are greatly increased by the loss of
neighborhood, which leaves people to face their calamities alone.
- A rural community should always be acquainted and interconnected
with community-minded people in nearby towns and cities.
- A sustainable rural economy will depend on urban consumers loyal
to local products. Therefore, we are talking about an economy that will
always be more cooperative than competitive.
