As I tried to show in my recent blog entry on “Social Credit and Usury”, the claim that usury, defined as the charging of interest on loans, is THE problem and that Social Credit means nothing more than “usury-free money” is a serious but all too common misrepresentation of the Social Credit diagnosis and remedial proposals.

Friday, 07 November 2014 14:44

Social Credit and Usury

One of the most common misunderstandings where Social Credit is concerned is the notion that the Social Credit diagnosis can be adequately summarized along the following lines: "The problem with the existing financial system is that the banks create money out of nothing in the form of bank credit and then proceed to charge interest on the money that they loan out. Unfortunately, they do not create the money to pay the interest and this leads to a continual build-up of unrepayable debts, etc., etc." This popularized interpretation of Social Credit is erroneous.

Latest Articles

  • Joshua Haldeman (Elon Musk's Grandfather) and Douglas Social Credit
    Elon Musk's Canadian Grandfather was a big proponent of Douglas Social Credit as an anti-communist programme for monetary and financial reform. It would surely make getting to Mars a lot easier.
    Written on Wednesday, 11 September 2024 08:27 Read more...
  • Douglas Social Credit and the Categories of Constraint
    After a recent conversation with Arindam Basu, it occurs to me that there is yet another method of explaining the Douglas Social Credit approach to our financial and economic systems for the benefit of newcomers. This has to do with the notion of constraints. There are natural constraints, i.e., constraints that are built into the very nature of things and are of a physical or metaphysical nature, and then there are artificial constraints, i.e., constraints that arise merely because of arbitrary (or not so arbitrary) human conventions that can be, at least in principle, abandoned, replaced, or altered at will.
    Written on Monday, 09 September 2024 09:10 Read more...
  • The Right to Cash
    The global drive to eliminate physical money is well worth viewing in a wider context. As Russian scholar Andrey Fursov noted4: from as early as the 1960s, a section of the Western ruling class pressed for a 3D policy of deindustrialization, de-rationalisation and depopulation, to retain, and indeed, extend control over the general public. To these three, we can add a fourth ‘D’ - dematerialization, and the push for an all-digital currency is one example of this.
    Written on Tuesday, 11 June 2024 20:35 Read more...