Desperately Searching for a New Strategy
I certainly hope that advancing technology eliminates more "jobs"--that is what it is designed to do, i.e., replace labour with non-labour factors of production. The purpose of economics is to produce goods and services as, when and where required or desired--with maximum efficiency and minimal inconvenience for all concerned--not to create work. Life is more than bread alone. Economic orthodoxy errs fatally in equating high employment rates with social well-being. If we could achieve, e.g., an unemployment rate of ninety per cent. we would have reason to rejoice. History records that In the days of Merry England the population enjoyed about one-hundred and fifty holidays per annum and were required to work only a few weeks to supply their annual material requirements for living.
Our problem is widespread adherence to an anachronistic Puritanical philosophy that demands human effort as a qualifier for partaking in consumption. This is totally irrational if non-labour factors are increasingly the source of produced wealth. We have demonstrated the capacity to produce evermore vast and varied goods and services. They were meant to be accessed and used by consumers to the extent desired. To the extent that there is a surfeit we should be able to revert to leisure.
Conventional industrial cost-accountancy as it interacts with the issue and cancellation of credit by the banks results in a growing deficiency of effective consumer purchasing-power compared with financial costs and prices in each costing cycle. Increasingly we resort to financial debt as an inflationary mortgage upon future production in order to make the system "work". The more the replacement of labour by technology, the greater the disparity between prices and incomes. This requires us to engage in more and more production to earn the incomes required to purchase not current but past production. Even endless production of war materials is insufficient to "fill the gap" and consumers must resort ever more to debt in order to claim the products of industry. Those individuals displaced from financially remunerative activity cannot qualify for loans. We have a phenomenal capacity to produce but live in world of want, waste and destruction.
Obviously we require a mechanism to distribute goods and services and if wages, salaries and dividends are insufficient then they must be supplemented by an additional form of income that does not form a claim against future earnings. We need a system of National (Consumer) Dividends and Compensated (Retail) Prices, financed not by debt but merely by withdrawals from an actuarially determined National Credit Account, being an estimated evaluation of the real credit of the nation, i.e., all of the real assets which if used for production would result in the creation of prices. The NCA would always be growing as all new capital assets were being credited to it.
The late British engineer Major Clifford Hugh Douglas anticipated all of these problems--which are actually untold blessings if properly considered--as early as 1918 and continued expostulating on the subject until 1951 in various books, pamphlets, addresses, broadcasts and journals, and testimonies made before formal government financial enquiries. Because he challenged the fraudulent claim of the banking system to actual ownership of the financial credits which they issue as debt to monetize the real credit of the community--although they do not create the real wealth of society--his ideas were widely suppressed.
Major C.H. Douglas on "Causes of War" - part 1 - YouTube
Major C.H. Douglas on 'The Causes of War' - part 2 - YouTube
Wallace Klinck