Social Credit Views

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.

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.

In a blog entry that is well worth reading entitled "What Choice Do We Have?", Charles Hugh Smith discusses the extreme and ever-increasing income inequality that characterizes economic life in the modern world (amongst other closely related issues):

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.

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.

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?