"The unacknowledged, but obvious, truth is that unnecessary work, imposed by either edict or contrived financial legerdemain, is slavery and servitude—totally irrational and immoral. Every engineer worthy of the name is trying to eliminate the need for human effort as a factor of production while every witless or hypocritical politician, pressured by the financial powers above and an insecure and uncomprehending population below, is professing, at least, to promote policies designed to ‘put people back to work'.”

In the modern world money is simply accountancy. It's issued by banks for production. Producers distribute it as effective purchasing-power as wages, salaries and dividends which are a part of industrial costs and prices. Industry must recover its costs through sales to the consumer and the money is then cancelled until reissued for a new cycle of production. Thus is created an endless cycle of money creation and destruction. Money is not a store of value and is increasingly a means of distribution rather than a means of exchange.

Social Credit refers to the philosophical, economic, political, and historical ideas of the brilliant Anglo-Scottish engineer, Major Clifford Hugh Douglas (1879-1952).

Tuesday, 10 March 2015 01:37

Social Credit: Then and Now

Social Credit is the brainchild of Major C. H. Douglas. During World War l, he was asked to sort out some problems at an aircraft factory in Farnborough and came across a discrepancy in their books. The factory generated costs at a much greater rate than it made available incomes to people. Thinking this curious, Douglas investigated a hundred or so British companies to discover that this imbalance was a general feature of modern industry. Wages, salaries and dividends paid to people by a factory, or other productive undertaking, were nearly always only a portion of total prices for goods made available by the same factory. This perplexed him because it guaranteed a quantity of goods that could not be sold, and what was the point of expending energy on making something that couldn’t, for financial reasons, be consumed?

The founder of the Social Credit movement, Major Clifford Hugh Douglas (1879-1952), correctly discerned the cause of our perennial economic difficulties and also developed a series of proposals to effectively deal with the  underlying problem.

The modern, industrial economy (and civilization at large) is in dire need of a Copernican-style transformation: society’s financial credit must be subordinated to its real credit. The Social Credit monetary reform provides both the policy and the appropriate mechanisms to make this superior possibility a reality.

     As interest in the economics of Social Credit grows, it is important to provide people with accurate and comprehensive summaries of C.H. Douglas' analysis and remedial proposals. In what follows, I will outline in seven points the salient features of the Social Credit approach to economic questions.

Although I disagree profoundly with Walter Russell’s ‘New-Agey’ worldview and spirituality, I think that he was on to something when he claimed that the very essence of the created universe consists in ‘rhythmic balanced interchange’. In a similar vein, I think that the type of changes envisaged by a Social Credit monetary reform (in clear contradistinction to all other monetary reform proposals) may be duly encapsulated in terms of ‘distributive self-liquidating balance’. Let us examine each of these elements in turn and in reverse order.

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