Social Credit Views

It seems that more and more people in various countries are starting to take proposals for the introduction of a basic income quite seriously.

The following review of my booklet The Economics of Social Credit and Catholic Social Teaching was recently published by James Reed in Australia:

One of the chief misapprehensions under which newcomers to the subject often labour is that 'Social Credit' must be some form of socialism because, after all, the phrase encompasses the word ‘social’. So that there may be no confusion, let it be made clear that in spite of the appearance of the word ‘social’ in ‘Social Credit’, Social Credit is not only not socialistic but decidedly anti-socialist.

Some time ago, I had the following conversation with a loans officer from a major Canadian bank:

Wally: When you issue these loans to borrowers you create the money out of nothing, don't you?

A few days ago, a friend of mine brought my attention to an article that had been published just recently in Crisis Magazine. The article was entitled “Why Leisure is the Remedy for Sloth”:

One of the key aspects, if not the key aspect, of the Social Credit analysis of financial and hence economic dysfunction has to do with the chronic and underlying deficiency in consumer purchasing power

As this is the inaugural blog entry for 'The Clifford Hugh Douglas Institute for the Study and Promotion of Social Credit’, it seemed fitting to deal upfront with the central question which invariably preoccupies the minds of most newcomers to the subject: what exactly is Social Credit?