Geofrrey Dobbs’ chemical metaphor casts a brilliant light on Douglas’s Social Credit, revealing that the debt-money system is, in conjunction with an unbalanced price system, an acidic force—corrosive, unstable, and conflict-inducing. Social Credit, by contrast, provides the base money that neutralizes this acidity, infusing the economy with debt-free purchasing power (OH⁻) to balance the H⁺ of debt-laden prices. The National Credit Authority, as the economy’s alchemist, orchestrates this equilibrium, ensuring financial flows mirror real production.
In The Monopoly of Credit (1931), C.H. Douglas presents his second proof for the A+B theorem, arguing that the two core accountancy cycles of an industrial economy: the creation and destruction of money (Cycle 1) and the creation and liquidation of costs (Cycle 2) are misaligned, resulting in a systemic deficiency in purchasing power. The money cycle (Cycle 1) operates at a faster pace than the cost creation and liquidation cycle (Cycle 2), creating a gap between prices and purchasing power that widens with greater dyssynchrony and narrows with greater synchrony. Indeed, if the cycles were perfectly aligned, money creation/spending and cost creation/liquidation would occur simultaneously, eliminating the gap entirely.
[1] C.H. Douglas, The Monopoly of Credit 4th edition (Sudbury, England: Bloomfield Books, 1979), 46-50.