Overview from Mark Anderson — THE TRUTH HOUND

ROUGEMONT, Quebec—Social credit, best described as economic democracy, is seen by a growing number of people as the particular kind of economic reform that can rework the world toward equity and prosperity and cancel the deep-seated dynamics that produce the warfare state, because it’s based on reality and not on speculative market mechanisms and bogus free trade pacts.

Discovered by the late Scottish engineer Major Clifford H. Douglas in the early 20th Century, social credit is a philosophy derived from the natural order which calls for specific economic policies. At its core, it pertains to the mutual trust we have in each other (real credit) to freely produce what’s needed for the common and individual good of all.

Ontario resident Oliver Heydorn, Ph.D., author of the book “Social Credit Economics,” noted on page 497 of the book that social credit exists within the realm of “economic functionalism” because under a social credit system, the economy at all levels would finally function normally—largely because today’s weak consumer purchasing power would be restored to a proper functional level so that this purchasing power is aligned with productive output.

AN OBJECTIVE OPTION

Heydorn added that under the dominant “monopoly of credit,” or “creditism,” the people are given the false options of Marxist socialism on the left, a mixed economy in the middle, and “free-market” capitalism on the right. However, social credit stands outside that entire misleading model.

Social credit, therefore, is not socialism, nor is it monopoly capitalism. Dr. Heydorn wrote that while socialists are correct in pointing out modern capitalism’s flaws, socialist-style solutions, such as they are, involve the radical centralization of economic ownership under the state and a depletion of individual freedom—while social credit opposes that and calls for “radical decentralization of economic power and wealth, which means economic independence and freedom for the individual,” as Heydorn noted.

In other words, reflecting the late Christian writer G.K. Chesterton’s observation that there aren’t enough capitalists, most people, under social credit by way of genuine free enterprise, could realize the economic upward mobility that the current rigged capitalist order reserves for the privileged few.

Currently, the paltry purchasing power among Americans, Brits, Canadians, Europeans and those from the other industrialized nations falls far short of the quantity of available products and services. Or put another way, the total prices of all available goods and services far exceed our collective ability to buy all that output and liquidate the prices so the “economic wheel” can turn naturally. As a consequence, everyone has to mortgage the future (i.e. use credit cards, refinance their homes, etc.) to pay for things in the present.

Furthermore, the totality of debts at all levels, public and private, far exceeds the amount of money in existence with which to pay those debts.

As Douglas noted, and as Heydorn explains in his books and at his website Socred.org, social credit would increase everyone’s purchasing power mainly through a citizen dividend comprised of newly created interest-free money issued through a publicly controlled National Credit Office, to supplement existing wages and salaries. Other tools help not only to keep prices stable but to lower them. Leisure would be increased since citizen dividends would be issued based on the value of production with regular labor but also with automated machinery. Under social credit, the idea is to radically reduce the prevalence of the “work state” that consigns most people to lives of excessive, obligatory labor, often not of their choosing.

TO END THE ‘WORK STATE’

As Douglas recognized, the “work state” ideology, which is itself a form of government, postulates that income can only come from human labor. But that unduly regiments society and keeps people in formation so that their fear of losing employment overrides higher moral imperatives. This is seen as a major reason why most people won’t challenge “the system” and why there are plenty of people willing to work in jobs that extend the dominance of some segments of the population over other segments. Simply put, if you pay people well enough to enforce a police state as state agents in various agencies, they’ll do it since their survival instincts are heightened. And the severe defects in the current economic order guarantee fresh crops of “criminals” that justify that very same police state.

Social credit would not be means-tested welfare for some. Rather, it would be a basic “floor” for all, regardless of class, in order to provide a solid measure of security against poverty, so everyone could stop toiling for mere survival and pursue their higher calling by realizing their true potential in the career, or personal pursuits, including spiritual endeavors, of their choice. And the increase in the money supply under social credit would be on equal par with production (in concert with other cost-control mechanisms that would serve to reduce prices) to prevent price inflation.

MIND ‘THE GAP’

Price inflation can happen when too much money chases too-few goods, but that would not be the case under social credit. Indeed, social credit helps fill “the gap” between weak purchasing power and mountains of goods (full stores, empty wallets).

That gap testifies to a deflationary spiral, in which “interest drain,” amid a money supply consisting almost completely of bank loans, siphons money out the economy as fast, or faster, than money enters the economy. This state of affairs enables the banks to commandeer society by keeping everyone on a labor-and-debt treadmill.

UPCOMING MEETINGS

The Pilgrims of St. Michael, a Catholic order which since the 1930s has operated out of Rougemont, Quebec, just east of Montreal, has carried on Douglas’s insights through its magazine, The Michael Journal, for decades (www.MichaelJournal.org).

The Pilgrims also have reprinted and collected numerous books and pamphlets to call attention to the economic liberation inherent in democratizing the monetary system in order to get all peoples and the business community off the treadmill created when virtually all money enters the economy as interest-bearing loans.

Important 2016 dates of meetings of the Pilgrims of St. Michael are as follows: