Social Credit Views

Tuesday, 08 March 2016 21:53

The Folly of Full Employment

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One of the axioms of the existing economic order is the policy of ‘Full Employment’ (FE). Everyone must work for his daily bread or be dependent on those who do (via either redistributive taxation or increased public borrowings meted out in the form of welfare, unemployment insurance, pensions, etc.) when he is unable to work or when insufficient work is available.

Such a policy makes absolutely no sense. It is neither necessary nor possible to realize it.

It is not necessary because we are physically capable of producing everything that people can use with profit to themselves while only calling on a minority of the available labour force and the situation is steadily improving or deteriorating – depending on your point of view. Because of continuing (not to say ‘accelerating’) technological advancements, we can produce more and/or better with fewer and fewer people working. Indeed, it has been predicted that 50% of existing jobs in the US will be automated within 20 years. This is a hard fact of life. Insisting on full employment in the face of the fourth industrial revolution is simply puritanical foolishness which is bound to increase unnecessary strains and stresses until we reach a breaking point ... from which they may be no return.

The policy is apparently not capable of being realized either because, outside of wartime demands and conditions, there is no economy that has managed to create enough jobs to meet the demand (largely artificial in nature) for jobs. It is already the case that a good proportion of the jobs that the economy does create has no meaningful or direct connection with the the flow of real goods and services that answer to bona fide human needs. In other words, many of the existing jobs are useless, witless, redundant, and/or destructive.

Economists are supposed to be keen on efficiency. Well, the first and most important form of efficiency has to do with getting the goods and services we need to survive and flourish with the least amount of labour and resource consumption. Any other arrangement is simply madness. Right now, the system is set up in such a way that we get the least amount of goods and services in exchange for the most amount of effort (as measured in financial terms). It's upside down and embodies an incredible amount of waste, both material and human. Much of our economic activity is pure economic sabotage.

Instead of ‘Full Employment’, the 'Minimum Employment Needed' (MEN, the feminists should be bemused!) should be the goal of public policy where employment is concerned. Indeed, the policy of the minimum employment necessary is one of the distinguishing features of the Social Credit proposals. Social Credit's National Dividend and National Discount would make this objective realizable by providing increased purchasing power to all, and especially by providing purchasing power to those whose labour is not required by the formal economy. [1]

Make no mistake, however, ‘Full Employment’ is not some innocent economic error, it also serves political purposes. It keeps people busy struggling to meet the weekly bills so that they have no time to reflect on political questions or energy to do anything more meaningful than act as cheerleaders for the latest star candidate:

“... if you can control economics, you can keep the business of getting a living the dominant factor of life, and so keep your control of politics – just that long, and no longer.” [2]

The policy of full employment is the prime method of making "the business of getting a living the dominant factor of life". We fight to pay the bills, when, from a purely physical assessment of the economy’s potential, we should be living in easy abundance.  

But there is another aspect at play. The policy also keeps people in a position of perpetual insecurity, dependent as they are on employment-givers. Under these conditions, people are naturally disinclined to take stands on controversial issues, lest their ‘rocking of the boat’ threaten their jobs or interfere with promotions, etc. For the sake of ‘playing it safe’ people naturally tend to go along with whatever the majority of people in their milieu seem to believe is right or, at the very least, they do not raise their voices in protest against the mob consensus. This way they won’t stand out and their jobs are more easily protected. At that point, all that is necessary for oligarchy to triumph is to provide the script for the mass mind to follow, through the centralized control of media, entertainment, education, etc. (all made possible by the universal dependence on the banks' monopoly of credit) and the regrettable human tendency to blindly follow the pack will do the rest. The bulk of the sheeple do not even recognize what is happening, believing that all the frenetic and previously unthinkable changes to social life are somehow part of an organic evolution, rather than instances of a revolution orchestrated from above.

For both these reasons, full employment is the policy that is primarily responsible for our intensifying dispossession and disenfranchisement. The various economic, political, and cultural policies that subvert society and further centralize power in the hands of an international elite cannot be effectively opposed and neutralized by a servile public.

     

 

 

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 [1] Unfortunately, outside of Social Credit circles, no one seems to grasp any of this. The distributists, for example, are still obsessing about providing 'jobs for all' rather than 'incomes for all'. How can we have jobs for all, when machines are doing more and more of the work? Shall we have people dig holes and fill them up again? As noted, a large proportion of existing jobs are already tantamount to such purposeless, redundant activity.

[2] C.H. Douglas, Programme for the Third World War (Liverpool: K.R.P. Publications Limited, 1943), 6.

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2 comments

  • Comment Link  Martin Ant Sunday, 11 February 2018 21:59 posted by Martin Ant

    The Douglas Movement bases its educational activities on two fundamental propositions, the one being technical and the other political. The first is that the financial system automatically causes a shortage of purchasing power. The second is that something called the Money Monopoly exists, and that the people at the head of it are deliberately preventing the public from getting to understand that this is so. The Douglas advocate, insofar as he is able to make contact with the public, is called upon to explain the “how”? of the technical proposition, and the “who”? of the political one. “Give us a reason –give us a name”, cry the multitudes, oblivious of the fact that in the first place they are without a background which would make the reason intelligible to them; and that, in the second, no direct evidence can be brought against any person at all. “Show us a sign”, cried the multitudes of old, “that the words you speak are true”; and they were told that they were not going to be given a sign –that if they could not feel the power of the truth in the words spoken, no sign would communicate that feeling.

    It is true that the reason is intelligibly communicable, but only to those who are patient enough to undergo the discipline of systematic research. But to the Douglas advocate the task of contacting such people and persuading them, in an atmosphere of mass-incredulity, to assume the antecedent possibility of the proposition being true (without which assumption who is going to spend time on study?) comes as near to being insuperable as any task that can be conceived. The masses, when they demand a reason, are demanding something which is really a substitute of reasoning –something which commands conviction without demanding thought. This is because they have trained to expect instruction in that form, and because it has always been possible for them to get it in that form in respect of the policies and programmes of which political parties have strewn about for them to wrangle over. Little pieces of irreconcilable truths is all they want, and it is all that they have been allowed to have. And, mentally disarmed as they have become by this armoury of heterogeneous convictions about trivialities, they yet expect, mostly subconsciously, to understand the financial technique for economic synthesis and political reconciliation merely by inspecting an article in a newspaper or hearing a speech in a meeting-place.

    Source: Arthur Brenton, The New Age, Vol. LIV. No. 19. Thursday March 8, 1934.

  • Comment Link  Martin Ant Sunday, 11 February 2018 21:59 posted by Martin Ant

    The Mortgage Stranglehold

    Before proceeding to explain to you in more detail the nature of this Acts, the present position of them, their objective and the probable trend of developments in connection with them, I think it desirable to give you a brief picture of the situation as we see it, and as I think we see it correctly.

    In the first place, there exits, specifically in Alberta, but to a greater or less extent all over the world, a condition of affairs, the understanding of which is absolutely essential to any grasp of world politics today. It can briefly be expressed by saying that a Government –no matter whether it is a so-called sovereign government, or whether its sovereignty is disputed, as in the case of Alberta– is regarded by the Plutocracy, by which I mean the money-lending interest, and not necessarily the rich men, primarily as the administration of an estate to be mortgaged up to the hilt, the mortgages to be created by the lending, to the population of the estate, of its own credit at the highest possible return of interest.

    It is essential also to realise that the primary objective of this policy is not merely, and certainly not in any realistic sense, the acquirement of monetary wealth by the plutocrats through the machinery of the banks, mortgage companies, and insurance companies which are their agencies. Though in comparison with the rest of the population these men are immensely rich, their scale of personal luxury could in many cases be maintained upon an income of extremely modest proportions, and their immense reserves are used to perpetuate the system and to finance the wars which are the outcome of it.


    The Threat of Grinding Toil

    With a full appreciation of the gravity of what I am saying, I am convinced that in the case of the ring of international financers who control the system, the conscious objective is to keep the great mass of the population in fear of poverty and loss of social position; by I which I do not necessarily mean in lack of physical necessities, but I do mean that it is intended that they should be kept in constant insecurity and under the threat of grinding toil, even though that toil is not demanded by anything realistic in the situation. In the main this is accomplished by immense misdirection of production effort –redundant factories, “Public Works”, “Fashions”, etc. –anything but wanted consumers’ goods.

    I can imagine that anyone unfamiliar with the techniques of the debt-creating system with which we all exist, might say that this is merely a wild assertion incapable of proof. On the contrary, it is capable of the simplest possible proof, and arises from the following propositions:

    (a) Modern life and work cannot be carried on without the use of money;

    (b) All money comes into existence as a debt from the community to the money-creating agencies;

    (c) The debtor is the servant of the lender until his debt is paid;

    (d) The debts owing by the community to the money-lending agencies are increasing in geometrical ratio, and could never possibly be paid off, since the amount of money in existence at any time in the possession of the community is only a microscopic fraction of the debts held against them by the money-lending agencies.

    The proposition which is put forward by the Government, who act as spokesman for the money-lending agencies, is that capacity to pay should be the measure of a debtor´s liability, which means that everything that he does not require for a bare existence should be at the service of the lender.

    There is another point which is frequently misunderstood, and which I should like to make to you, since it is vital in a consideration of the remedial steps which can be taken in connection with the situation, and that is that, although the debts owed by the community to the money-lending agencies are assuming astronomical proportions, they are quite small in comparison with the real wealth of the community measured in the same units.


    Alberta´s Real Wealth is £ 46,200,000,000

    Perhaps an instance of this in connection with the Province of Alberta may be illuminating. A very conservative and detailed estimate, which has been made at my suggestion, of the capital wealth of Alberta at the present time, places that wealth at the astounding figure of forty-six thousand, two hundred million sterling, or over £ 50,000 for every man, woman, and child in the Province.

    As you probably know, the population of Alberta, men, women and children, is about three-quarters of a million, little more than half of Northern Ireland in an area 50 times as large, and the greater part of this population, which might be supposed to be the titular proprietor of the Province of Alberta, on the assumption that the citizens of a country are the owners of it, which is of course not true, are for the most part in a state, not merely of grinding poverty, but hopeless debt.

    I am not saying that there is £ 50,000 potentially in the pockets of every man and woman in Alberta, but the debts of the population amount to about £ 400 a head; nevertheless, all their debts together do not present a hundredth part of the capital wealth of Alberta; but since they are money debts, and the wealth in Alberta is real wealth, and not money wealth, civilised life in Alberta is becoming impossible. This is the picture that I want you to bear in mind as a background to anything I may have to say.

    Source: Clifford Hugh Douglas, ‘Your War in Alberta’, Social Credit Supplement, December 10, 1937.

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