"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.

Latest Articles

  • Douglas Social Credit Through the Lens of Market Failure
    Recently, perhaps as a result of some interactions on social media, it has occurred to me that the best angle for approaching the Douglas Social Credit analysis and proposals for the benefit of those on the conventional right of the economic and political spectra is to frame Douglas’ stance in terms of the concept of market failure. To the question: “What is Douglas Social Credit all about?”, we can respond as follows: Douglas Social Credit is an economic model that is based on a diagnosis and a set of prescriptions. The diagnosis is that the number one cause of economic failure is a specific category of market failure, and the number one cause of the market failure in question is the existing financial system.[1] The remedy is to reform the financial system, to correct its faulty design in such way that not only will it no longer interfere with the…
    Written on Monday, 10 February 2025 18:16 Read more...
  • Social Credit and War
    Social Crediters have repeatedly warned that there is a chronic economic cause, entirely artificial in nature and, therefore, unnecessary, which inexorably leads nations to take up arms against each other.
    Written on Monday, 11 November 2024 06:20 Read more...
  • To Regulate or not to Regulate Retail Profit-Margins on Turnover? That is the Question!
    Recent events and discussions with both Douglas Social Crediters and others have brought the profit-regulation condition that was sometimes presented by Douglas as being part and parcel of the compensated price mechanism discount into focus. While some, following Douglas’ indications, have defended the profit-regulation mechanism as a necessary and/or important feature of the compensated price discount, others, including some seasoned Social Crediters, have objected to it as unnecessary and/or problematic for a variety of reasons. Rather than attempting to solve the problem or to resolve the dispute (which perhaps can only be properly decided definitively one way or the other by an empirical trial), I will aim to put the issue in context and to outline some of the main considerations both in favour and against the profit-regulation condition.
    Written on Saturday, 09 November 2024 08:23 Read more...