RE: [SOCIAL CREDIT] a creature called rabbit
Misstatements of fact: For some reason, I was added to the list and starting receiving its emails. - Professor Gunning himself subscribed to the list at Topica. He was sent an invitation to which he replied affirmatively. Topic software then automatically sent a confirmation message to which he again replied affirmatively for a second time. Only at that point did Topica begin to transmit socialcredit messages to him. Bill claimed to be an economist. - I never claimed to be an economist. You will not find that claim in any message that I have ever posted to the list socialcredit. Nor have I ever privately communicated that claim to Professor Gunning. Having said that, it should be noted that the austrians have a traditional proclivity for withholding the term from anyone but themselves and their close relatives. This follows Mises who assigned the term only to the austrians and their predecessors. Which seems incongruous since Professor Mises' own advanced academic credentials were in law, not economics. I don't know why he posted the message here. - I am a list subscriber. I responded to a message posted to this list that directly related to social credit that contained several gross misstatements of fact. So, hopefully, we will be spared future cross- postings. - So much for an open mind. And -- So much for considering austrian economics to be anything other than cultic pseudo-science. It is very much faith based, as is evident from Gunning's commentary in the [EMAIL PROTECTED] archives. I will compile them and post a link to them later. For an example of the methodology, take note of his response to my message. It does not address even a single substantive point I made in my message. Merely an apology for list members having to endure my cross posting followed by further misstatements, this time about myself personally. I do sincerely thank Professor Gunning for an interesting and informative discussion. I will be cross posting this message to [EMAIL PROTECTED] Bill Ryan -original message- Date: Tue, 18 Nov 2003 11:12:50 +0800 From: Pat Gunning [EMAIL PROTECTED] Subject:Re: [Austrian School of Economics] a creature called rabbit To: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Reply To: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Dear list: The posting by Bill Ryan relates to a debate we have been having on a different list -- the Social Credit list, which he moderates. For some reason, I was added to the list and starting receiving its emails. Since I had not heard of this Social Credit idea and since I have a strong interest in credit, I asked a few questions. Bill claimed to be an economist. One email led to another and another and eventually he and I were engaged in a debate. The final result was a complete impasse, as evidenced by the message relating to the Fed's ability to control the amount of bank money creation. He denied this; I affirmed it. Bill posted his message to his list and to this one. I don't know why he posted the message here. However, I have since unsubscribed to his list. So, hopefully, we will be spared future cross-postings. Sorry :-[ Get advanced SPAM filtering on Webmail or POP Mail ... Get Lycos Mail! http://login.mail.lycos.com/r/referral?aid=27005 --^ This email was sent to: [EMAIL PROTECTED] EASY UNSUBSCRIBE click here: http://topica.com/u/?a84IaC.bcVIgP.YXJjaGl2 Or send an email to: [EMAIL PROTECTED] TOPICA - Start your own email discussion group. FREE! http://www.topica.com/partner/tag02/create/index2.html --^
RE: [SOCIAL CREDIT] farewell
Brief comments inserted: -- Date: Tue, 18 Nov 2003 09:19:36 +0800 From: Pat Gunning [EMAIL PROTECTED] Subject:Re: [SOCIAL CREDIT] farewell Thanks, Bill. That is what I needed to hear. Of course, I said nothing about a money multiplier. -- [Insert] You did not. I should have deleted that sentence before I hit the send button. -- What I said was clear and I said it more than once on the list. The Federal Reserve System (Fed) -- that is, the central bank of the U.S. -- regulates the banking system. -- Of course it does. My post was in reply to an entirely different point that you made: ...[M]oney creation by one bank is ordinarily offset by money destruction by the same bank or by other banks unless the Federal Reserve Board deliberately chooses to make it otherwise. I dispute that assertion completely. -- By this power it can and does control money creation by the member banks. -- [Insert] Only in the sense of the concertmaster that I described. Bank credit is the creation of the banking system including member banks and central bank acting in concert presumably in cooperation with the public. -- So far as I know, you are the only person claiming to be an economist who has denied this. -- [Insert] Well, there are indeed a great number of persons who do claim to be economists who concur. Apparently, you are not conversant with developments in the field (regardless whether you agree with them) since the nineteenth century. See for example http://www.geocities.com/new_economics/lavoe-draft-10-03.txt I do not by the way endorse the views expressed in that paper. I object to many of them. -- The Fed is not chosen by the banks as a clearing bank, although it has occasionally acted as if it was. It was a creation of the Federal Reserve Act of 1913, which was passed by the legislature. The act was most likely the outcome of rent-seeking by some of the larger banks at the time. -- [Insert] The Federal Reserve Act was the product of intense debate and power politics throughout the latter half of the nineteenth century and the early twentieth century. To describe it as merely the result of rent seeking by some of the larger banks is rather shallow. -- Nevertheless, it created a power to regulate which has evolved into the current system in which the Board can and does limit the amount of money creation by member banks. -- [Insert] It definitely has regulatory powers. Whether it directly controls the amount of money creation by member banks is highly questionable. I believe it has broad power to determine the upper limit. -- In this message, you deny that the ruling Board of Directors does or can effectively regulate the bank money creation. To me, that is like denying that the U.S. Internal Revenue Service can effectively impose an income tax. -- [Insert] It can impose a tax but controlling the amount it actually collects is an entirely different matter. -- Moreover, your talk about upper and lower limits obfuscates. -- [Insert] That may seem so because you don't understand the argument. I've offered to go through it point by point. Between zero and the shifting upper limit banks may increase credit without limit. -- You did not directly answer the question. -- [Insert] I thought I did. This gives readers the impression that you agree with those on the list who apparently don't recognize that the Federal Reserve Board can and does limit money creation by banks. -- [Insert] I never said that the Fed can't limit money creation. I was addressing an entirely different point. -- Although this may seem like a legitimate debating tactic to you, I am not interested in debate for the sake of debate. -- [Insert] Neither am I. -- Your claim is far away from the truth and your obfuscation merely makes the task of education -- [Insert] The better word is indoctrination. -- , a very hard one at best, more difficult. Further discussion on any issue related to money and inflation with you is a waste of my time. -- [Insert] It probably is. But that would be due to your closed mind. I do not regard discussion on my part with you to have been a waste of time. -- Since the main practical argument against the social creditors is that their program to subsidize retailers with newly created money is inflationary -- [Insert] Not if income is falling in respect to the costs of production. -- and since you are apparently the economic adviser to most of those who hold the erroneous view to the contrary, I do not intend to write any more about social credit. -- [Insert] I'm nobody's adviser. I'm merely
Re: [SOCIAL CREDIT] The Alberta Experiment: Readily available--Wally
The Alberta Experiment by C.H. Douglas This book is still in print. It was last republished in 1984 by Veritas Publishing Company Pty. Ltd. This new 1984 edition has a new introduction by Eric D. Butler and new background notes by L.D. Byrne both of which enhance the book. I carry stock in the United Kingdom. As the owner, together with my wife, of the copyright of the works of C. H. Douglas I can assure you that the copyright has not expired. Donald A. Martin From: Pat Gunning [EMAIL PROTECTED] Reply-To: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Date: Sat, 15 Nov 2003 10:58:40 +0800 To: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Subject: Re: [SOCIAL CREDIT] The Alberta Experiment: Readily available--Wally Wallace M. Klinck wrote: Note to All Subscribers re Douglas's book The Alberta Experiment It is indeed a very important work, being the communications between Alberta Premier William Aberhart and C. H. Douglas, first published in 1937 by Eyre and Spottiswoode in London. If the book was published in 1937, why doesn't someone scan it and post it on the web? The copyright will have expired. -- Pat Gunning, Feng Chia University, Taiwan; New book: UNDERSTANDING DEMOCRACY http://www.constitution.org/pd/gunning/votehtm/covebuy.htm Web pages on Praxeological Economics, Democracy, Taiwan, Ludwig von Mises, Austrian Economics, and my University Classes; http://www.constitution.org/pd/gunning/welcome.htm and http://knight.fcu.edu.tw/~gunning/welcome.htm --^ This email was sent to: [EMAIL PROTECTED] EASY UNSUBSCRIBE click here: http://topica.com/u/?a84IaC.bcVIgP.YXJjaGl2 Or send an email to: [EMAIL PROTECTED] TOPICA - Start your own email discussion group. FREE! http://www.topica.com/partner/tag02/create/index2.html --^
RE: [SOCIAL CREDIT]
VB. I have always suggested that it would be simple to prove the proposals ofSocial Credit wrong. Call up all credit cards, stop banks lending forconsumption and have people live on their current incomes (plus savings) andnot mortgage their future incomes. PG. No doubt this would disrupt things sufficiently to cause a recession or depression. But that would not prove a deficiency of purchasing power. I will not bother to discuss the other points of difference as the above answer is sufficient to show that there exists a wide gulf between us. The corollory to the above answer would be that during a recession or depression there is not necessarily ashortage of purchasing power. Try telling that to those of us who lived through the 1930s. I am not interested in the meanings given to recession by economists (e.g. a period in which real output falls for 6 months or more - or any other meaning) or depression the fact is that if credit cards were called up etc as suggested above there would be - not might be - a shortage of purchasing power caused by a shortage of money even though physically the materials, men and knowhow would still be available to produce. I leave others do debate the question whilst I resign from this discussion. Vic Bridger --^^--- This email was sent to: [EMAIL PROTECTED] EASY UNSUBSCRIBE click here: http://topica.com/u/?a84IaC.bcVIgP.YXJjaGl2 Or send an email to: [EMAIL PROTECTED] TOPICA - Start your own email discussion group. FREE! http://www.topica.com/partner/tag02/create/index2.html --^^---
Re: [SOCIAL CREDIT] farewell
Thanks, Bill. That is what I needed to hear. Of course, I said nothing about a money multiplier. What I said was clear and I said it more than once on the list. The Federal Reserve System (Fed) -- that is, the central bank of the U.S. -- regulates the banking system. By this power it can and does control money creation by the member banks. So far as I know, you are the only person claiming to be an economist who has denied this. The Fed is not chosen by the banks as a clearing bank, although it has occasionally acted as if it was. It was a creation of the Federal Reserve Act of 1913, which was passed by the legislature. The act was most likely the outcome of rent-seeking by some of the larger banks at the time. Nevertheless, it created a power to regulate which has evolved into the current system in which the Board can and does limit the amount of money creation by member banks. In this message, you deny that the ruling Board of Directors does or can effectively regulate the bank money creation. To me, that is like denying that the U.S. Internal Revenue Service can effectively impose an income tax. Moreover, your talk about upper and lower limits obfuscates. You did not directly answer the question. This gives readers the impression that you agree with those on the list who apparently don't recognize that the Federal Reserve Board can and does limit money creation by banks. Although this may seem like a legitimate debating tactic to you, I am not interested in debate for the sake of debate. Your claim is far away from the truth and your obfuscation merely makes the task of education, a very hard one at best, more difficult. Further discussion on any issue related to money and inflation with you is a waste of my time. Since the main practical argument against the social creditors is that their program to subsidize retailers with newly created money is inflationary and since you are apparently the economic adviser to most of those who hold the erroneous view to the contrary, I do not intend to write any more about social credit. Cheers -- Pat Gunning, Feng Chia University, Taiwan; New book: UNDERSTANDING DEMOCRACY http://www.constitution.org/pd/gunning/votehtm/covebuy.htm Web pages on Praxeological Economics, Democracy, Taiwan, Ludwig von Mises, Austrian Economics, and my University Classes; http://www.constitution.org/pd/gunning/welcome.htm and http://knight.fcu.edu.tw/~gunning/welcome.htm --^ This email was sent to: [EMAIL PROTECTED] EASY UNSUBSCRIBE click here: http://topica.com/u/?a84IaC.bcVIgP.YXJjaGl2 Or send an email to: [EMAIL PROTECTED] TOPICA - Start your own email discussion group. FREE! http://www.topica.com/partner/tag02/create/index2.html --^
Re: [SOCIAL CREDIT] The Alberta Experiment: Readily available--Wally
Dear Mr.Klink Thank you for your e-mail I'd like to purchase a copy. Telegraphic remittance is preferable to me than aBanker's Draft/Money Order. May I send by TT? If so please advise details. Awaiting to hear from you. Yours faithfully - D/Pateras. - Original Message - From: "Wallace M. Klinck" [EMAIL PROTECTED] To: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Sent: Friday, November 14, 2003 11:19 PM Subject: RE: [SOCIAL CREDIT] The Alberta Experiment: Readily available--Wally Note to All Subscribers re Douglas's book "The Alberta Experiment" It is indeed a very important work, being the communications between Alberta Premier William Aberhart and C. H. Douglas, first published in 1937 by Eyre and Spottiswoode in London. While it is always good to go back to originals, I would personally recommend the reprint by Veritas Publishing of Western Australia in 1984. This is an attractive paperback, not of the highest print quality through the text, but containing an eleven page introduction by Eric D. Butler and a nineteen page section entitled "A Background Picture" by the late L. Denis Byrne who Douglas sent in 1937, preceded by George Powell, from the United Kingdom to advise the then newly elected (1935) "Social Credit" Government of the Province of Alberta. Powell soon returned to the United Kingdom but Byrne remained as Technical Advisor to the Alberta Government and was highly regarded by Premier Aberhart until the latter's death in 1943. Shortly after, Denis Byrne fell victim to the destructive purges of more genuine Social Crediters orchestrated under the new Premier, Ernest C. Manning. Denis Byrne, remained until his death, however, a tireless advocate for Social Credit as Douglas had presented it. This edition of "The Alberta Experiment" is readily available for $12.00 each, postpaid, in Canadian dollars: Send a money-order for that amount to "Wallace M. Klinck", C.H. Douglas Social Credit, P.O. Box 3003, Sherwood Park, AB, Canada T8H 2T1 and the book will be dispatched promptly. Sincerely Wally [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: Chick,The 'Alberta Experiment" is an excellent book. There are used copies available through Barnes Noble, and I believe one of them is stocked by The Edmonton Bookstore, (which may or may not be close to you, depending where you are in Alberta). I've just recently secured an original copy, printed in 1937, through B N myself. It's well worth reading, believe me. Very, very interesting, and well worth the price. There may also be reprints available still through the Australian League of Rights, (www.alor.org), but by all means try to get an original if you can.Joe --^^--- This email was sent to: [EMAIL PROTECTED] EASY UNSUBSCRIBE click here: http://topica.com/u/?a84IaC.bcVIgP.YXJjaGl2 Or send an email to: [EMAIL PROTECTED] TOPICA - Start your own email discussion group. FREE! http://www.topica.com/partner/tag02/create/index2.html --^^---
absolute rubbish. - Re: [SOCIAL CREDIT] Canada' experiment with social credit
Vic Your dismissive one-liner comment doesn't enlighten anyone. The phenomenon of restricting the power to issue money, to a few, rather than give it to the community where it should rightly belong, for a healthier more sustainable economy, is one that is becoming increasingly apparent to more more around the world. If you have an objection, it would be better if you took the time to make a constructive criticism, rather than a sweeping negative one, that shows disrespect for the thousands that are interested in study new money systems ways to establish more genuine democracy freedom for the individual. Yours - Dimantis. --- - Original Message - From: Victor Bridger To: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Sent: Sunday, November 16, 2003 3:25 AM Subject: Re: [SOCIAL CREDIT] Canada' experiment with social credit This is absolute rubbish. Vic Bridger - Original Message - From: douglas-McLellan Cc: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Sent: Friday, November 14, 2003 2:34 PM Subject: [SOCIAL CREDIT] Canada' experiment with social credit Did Canada not experiment with social credit in the 30's ands nearly go bankrupt . The idea that banks can give money to people , surely just causes inflation . Dougie .--^^--- This email was sent to: [EMAIL PROTECTED] EASY UNSUBSCRIBE click here: http://topica.com/u/?a84IaC.bcVIgP.YXJjaGl2 Or send an email to: [EMAIL PROTECTED] TOPICA - Start your own email discussion group. FREE! http://www.topica.com/partner/tag02/create/index2.html --^^---
- Re: [SOCIAL CREDIT] Canada' experiment with social credit
As inflation as defined by the establishment, is more money chasing the same goods, it's just is a tautology. With say twice the money in circulation, the price - with a Price Mechanism geared to exploit the greatest profit not merely cover costs + some 'added value' from a competitive customer base - will double, IF all the extra money is used to acquire the same goods as before. But WILL it? Some will be used for new invesment, some to repay debts that may then be used by the creditor for the purchase of goods not acquired earlier in the last inflation measurement some will be put aside for savings that will be sed to fund further consumption - hence put upward pressure on prices (given our current, ubiquitous Price Mechanism). Why indeed, does not increased money - lent at interest no less! - not therefore constitute a greater threat to inflation? Why not use an alternative system eg a 'first-in-line' queue, Price Mechanism to adjust balance supply demand? The current exploitative one, still leavess shortages misallocates resources. Or why not use a flag or call-to-register/claim system? Even with a deadline-to-commit, element, if required. In today's high-tech information/data, orientated world with computers, that - the recording of demand claims/logs - is EXACTLY what is possible. There are as many systems, as our imaginations will allow. A different system might be as bad - in terms of not being able to satisfy ALL demand - but at least it wouldn't prey on the economically weaker. Why do we object to bullying-physically taking advantage of the weaker, violence-the same, theft-taking when another's guard is down, extortion-taking under threat, and war-national bullying, between unequal powers but accept economic violence-profit in excess of cost + something economic exploitation-inequitable exchange at preferential terms owing to exceptional need-at-the-moment? The one (Price Mechanism - with a legal framework established by prima facie principles modified by experience) that is preferred in practice - possibley more than one would be used simultaneously - would be the one to replace the existing system. (Lost for words eh?)(-; - - Original Message - From: Janos Abel [EMAIL PROTECTED] To: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Sent: Friday, November 14, 2003 5:01 PM Subject: Re: [SOCIAL CREDIT] Canada' experiment with social credit The message from douglas-McLellan contains these words: ...The idea that banks can give money to people, surely just causes inflation. Yes this is the stock answer that is so effective in shutting down any further enquiry. Yet it is important to inquire further, and ask why is it not inflationary when the banks advance the same money in the form of a debt *and* add interest on top? Various details are teased out by this question. One of the most important is the further question, what do banks actually do when they lend? Most of the time, (in more than nine cases out of ten) they simply authorize the borrower to overdraw on an account, i.e. banks lend credit, not cash. In brief *lending* funny(money) can be just as inflationary as giving it. Ken Palmeton is right, Dougie. One has to do the reading unless one wants to trust that we already have the best of an unavoidable bad deal. Regards, Janos -- Evolution is happening here and now; The capacity for foresight in the human species is its latest innovation. --^ This email was sent to: [EMAIL PROTECTED] EASY UNSUBSCRIBE click here: http://topica.com/u/?a84IaC.bcVIgP.YXJjaGl2 Or send an email to: [EMAIL PROTECTED] TOPICA - Start your own email discussion group. FREE! http://www.topica.com/partner/tag02/create/index2.html --^
Re: [SOCIAL CREDIT] Canada' experiment with social credit
Dear William. Certainly since the beginning of the Twentieth Century the trading banks as a whole have recognised that their collective security, such as it is, depends upon them collectively presenting a face to the world that appears solid and united. It must be believed that banking is sound and safe. And operates within rigid probity. The locksteop you refer to is to the tune of their own making. And its success depends upon the rest of the population being deaf to it. The marching tune that the rest of us are expected to hear and respond to is very different. And is taught to us by a class of teachers that can be relied upon to propagate and maintain the deception. All this to shroud a fraudulent trade, constantly on the brink of meltdown. It is totally unstable. With society as its perpetual victims. Ken. Message has been scanned by Webshield --^ This email was sent to: [EMAIL PROTECTED] EASY UNSUBSCRIBE click here: http://topica.com/u/?a84IaC.bcVIgP.YXJjaGl2 Or send an email to: [EMAIL PROTECTED] TOPICA - Start your own email discussion group. FREE! http://www.topica.com/partner/tag02/create/index2.html --^
RE: [SOCIAL CREDIT] Talk Fest and nonsense
Dear Vic. I recognise your anger and frustration in having to engage in a constant tussle with those who start from a different perspective. I too have spent something like Thirty years since my own frustration with attempting to learn an economics that made no sense brought me into the land of the Heretics. Please reconsider. Some of us still engaged in day to day practical politics need the support of the sort of insight you have to offer. Difficult though it may be for you. Ken. Message has been scanned by Webshield --^ This email was sent to: [EMAIL PROTECTED] EASY UNSUBSCRIBE click here: http://topica.com/u/?a84IaC.bcVIgP.YXJjaGl2 Or send an email to: [EMAIL PROTECTED] TOPICA - Start your own email discussion group. FREE! http://www.topica.com/partner/tag02/create/index2.html --^
Re: [SOCIAL CREDIT] Canada' experiment with social credit
Phillip Dru COME OUT OF THE CLOSET. Reveal yourself. WHO ARE YOU :-))) I am sure that there are many here who recognise the name through the interesting book of fiction by that title. By the way, and on a serious note, who offers The creature from Jekyll island for sale please? I have read it, but would like to have my own copy. Ken. Message has been scanned by Webshield --^ This email was sent to: [EMAIL PROTECTED] EASY UNSUBSCRIBE click here: http://topica.com/u/?a84IaC.bcVIgP.YXJjaGl2 Or send an email to: [EMAIL PROTECTED] TOPICA - Start your own email discussion group. FREE! http://www.topica.com/partner/tag02/create/index2.html --^
Re: [SOCIAL CREDIT] Canada' experiment with social credit
I am a 27 year old nobody from Austin. The name is a holdover from my radio show (looking for a new one) which required a pseudonym due to the uh... nature of the station (which no longer exists). You can get Jekyll Island at http://www.realityzone.com/creature.html Best Wishes, Scott Horton (philip dru dot com) ps: I like the ironic quotes around fiction - Original Message - From: [EMAIL PROTECTED] To: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Cc: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Sent: Sunday, November 16, 2003 7:19 AM Subject: Re: [SOCIAL CREDIT] Canada' experiment with social credit Phillip Dru COME OUT OF THE CLOSET. Reveal yourself. WHO ARE YOU :-))) I am sure that there are many here who recognise the name through the interesting book of fiction by that title. By the way, and on a serious note, who offers The creature from Jekyll island for sale please? I have read it, but would like to have my own copy. Ken. Message has been scanned by Webshield --^ This email was sent to: [EMAIL PROTECTED] EASY UNSUBSCRIBE click here: http://topica.com/u/?a84IaC.bcVIgP.YXJjaGl2 Or send an email to: [EMAIL PROTECTED] TOPICA - Start your own email discussion group. FREE! http://www.topica.com/partner/tag02/create/index2.html --^
RE: [SOCIAL CREDIT] Canada' experiment with social credit
What is interesting is that you and the socialist Dougie are in complete agreement on this matter, which should tell us something about both socialism and Austrian economics. Is it any wonder that Hayek was affiliated with the London School of Economics, founded by the Fabians? original message Date: Sat, 15 Nov 2003 21:29:33 -0500 From: Daniel Morin [EMAIL PROTECTED] Subject: RE: [SOCIAL CREDIT] Canada' experiment with social credit To: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Reply To: [EMAIL PROTECTED] The idea that banks can give money to people, surely just causes inflation . ... and create social poverty. I agree with you. For all you who think giving money to everyone is the solution to wealth, I encourage you to read http://www.mises.org. -Original Message- From: Victor Bridger [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] Sent: Saturday, November 15, 2003 8:25 PM To: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Subject: Re: [SOCIAL CREDIT] Canada' experiment with social credit This is absolute rubbish. Vic Bridger - Original Message - From: douglas-McLellan Cc: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Sent: Friday, November 14, 2003 2:34 PM Subject: [SOCIAL CREDIT] Canada' experiment with social credit Did Canada not experiment with social credit in the 30's ands nearly go bankrupt . The idea that banks can give money to people, surely just causes inflation . Dougie . _ Is your computer infected with a virus? Find out with a FREE computer virus scan from McAfee. Take the FreeScan now! http://clinic.mcafee.com/clinic/ibuy/campaign.asp?cid=3963 --^ This email was sent to: [EMAIL PROTECTED] EASY UNSUBSCRIBE click here: http://topica.com/u/?a84IaC.bcVIgP.YXJjaGl2 Or send an email to: [EMAIL PROTECTED] TOPICA - Start your own email discussion group. FREE! http://www.topica.com/partner/tag02/create/index2.html --^
Re: [SOCIAL CREDIT] The Creature from Jekyll Island: A Second Look at the Feder
You know, Ed Griffins book World Without Cancer is just as good as his The Creature from Jekyll Island. Best, Philip Dru dot com - Original Message - From: Daniel Morin [EMAIL PROTECTED] To: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Sent: Sunday, November 16, 2003 8:54 AM Subject: RE: [SOCIAL CREDIT] The Creature from Jekyll Island: A Second Look at the Feder Glad someone knows about this book :) The story is also available on an audio CD. I have the speech of Mr. Griffin (the author of the book) on an old audio tape (about 74 minutes). The story is excellent. I have listened to this tape many, many times. Cheers, -- Dan Morin. -Original Message- From: Philip Dru [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] Sent: Sunday, November 16, 2003 9:16 AM To: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Subject: Re: [SOCIAL CREDIT] Canada' experiment with social credit I am a 27 year old nobody from Austin. The name is a holdover from my radio show (looking for a new one) which required a pseudonym due to the uh... nature of the station (which no longer exists). You can get Jekyll Island at http://www.realityzone.com/creature.html Best Wishes, Scott Horton (philip dru dot com) ps: I like the ironic quotes around fiction - Original Message - From: [EMAIL PROTECTED] To: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Cc: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Sent: Sunday, November 16, 2003 7:19 AM Subject: Re: [SOCIAL CREDIT] Canada' experiment with social credit Phillip Dru COME OUT OF THE CLOSET. Reveal yourself. WHO ARE YOU :-))) I am sure that there are many here who recognise the name through the interesting book of fiction by that title. By the way, and on a serious note, who offers The creature from Jekyll island for sale please? I have read it, but would like to have my own copy. Ken. Message has been scanned by Webshield --^ This email was sent to: [EMAIL PROTECTED] EASY UNSUBSCRIBE click here: http://topica.com/u/?a84IaC.bcVIgP.YXJjaGl2 Or send an email to: [EMAIL PROTECTED] TOPICA - Start your own email discussion group. FREE! http://www.topica.com/partner/tag02/create/index2.html --^
RE: [SOCIAL CREDIT] Canada' experiment with social credit
I don't like to see poverty and human suffering. My father was minister of a Christian church and I grew up with those values. When I was in my early 20's, I was asking myself What can the Government could/should do to make the community/country/world better?. Giving money and/or subsidizing corporations was something I thought would be best to make essential goods and services affordable to the poor. After reading more and more on this topic, I learned that wealth redistribution is not the solution, but the cause of poverty. Wherever there is a government redistributing wealth, there is always more poverty. Wealth is based on what goods and services one can enjoy. Wealth is not linked with the money but with the quantity and quality of goods and services available to the population. The more goods are available, the more they become accessible to everyone. Think about the telephone, the television, the computer, the car, or everything else that only the wealthy could afford earlier. Today, these goods and services are available to the masses. To increase wealth, we have to increase the production of goods and services. Increasing the production can be done by increasing productivity and having an incentive for everyone to work. The best incentive to work is being rewarded with a paycheck after the work is done. Taking money away from the worker and shuffling it to the lazy does not encourage employment and promotes social poverty. Cheers, -- Dan Morin. -Original Message- From: [EMAIL PROTECTED] [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] Sent: Sunday, November 16, 2003 9:53 AM To: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Subject: RE: [SOCIAL CREDIT] Canada' experiment with social credit What is interesting is that you and the socialist Dougie are in complete agreement on this matter, which should tell us something about both socialism and Austrian economics. Is it any wonder that Hayek was affiliated with the London School of Economics, founded by the Fabians? original message Date: Sat, 15 Nov 2003 21:29:33 -0500 From: Daniel Morin [EMAIL PROTECTED] Subject: RE: [SOCIAL CREDIT] Canada' experiment with social credit To: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Reply To: [EMAIL PROTECTED] The idea that banks can give money to people, surely just causes inflation . ... and create social poverty. I agree with you. For all you who think giving money to everyone is the solution to wealth, I encourage you to read http://www.mises.org. -Original Message- From: Victor Bridger [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] Sent: Saturday, November 15, 2003 8:25 PM To: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Subject: Re: [SOCIAL CREDIT] Canada' experiment with social credit This is absolute rubbish. Vic Bridger - Original Message - From: douglas-McLellan Cc: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Sent: Friday, November 14, 2003 2:34 PM Subject: [SOCIAL CREDIT] Canada' experiment with social credit Did Canada not experiment with social credit in the 30's ands nearly go bankrupt . The idea that banks can give money to people, surely just causes inflation . Dougie . _ Is your computer infected with a virus? Find out with a FREE computer virus scan from McAfee. Take the FreeScan now! http://clinic.mcafee.com/clinic/ibuy/campaign.asp?cid=3963 --^ This email was sent to: [EMAIL PROTECTED] EASY UNSUBSCRIBE click here: http://topica.com/u/?a84IaC.bcVIgP.YXJjaGl2 Or send an email to: [EMAIL PROTECTED] TOPICA - Start your own email discussion group. FREE! http://www.topica.com/partner/tag02/create/index2.html --^
Re: [SOCIAL CREDIT] Canada' experiment with social credit
The message of 15/11 from Pat Gunning contains these words: Janos, you seem to be leaving out the fact that a bank may act only as an intermediary. In the U.S., there is a legal limit to how much money a single bank can lend. My response related to the statement by Douglas-McLellan: *...The idea that banks can give money to people, surely just causes inflation.* What you say sounds correct but does not relate to my concluding counter-statement (and justification, thereof) that, *giving* (credit)money is no more inflationary than *lending* it at interest. The small matter of banks destroying credit(money) when a loan is repaid, thereby ensuring that the quantity of money is not inflated, is a very feeble justification for the privileged role they wrested from society. You also seem to be somewhat complacent about banks having *the the power to create and destroy money*. Private institutions, striving for private profit, have *absolute power* over a vital element that can make or break a nations economy !!?? Surely, there is something very wrong with this arrangement. The fact that a central bank controls this activity is neither her nor there. Indeed, one can argue that *loan sharks* operate the more honest business of lending actual cash, not something manufactured out of nothing at virtually no cost. Having said all this, I greatly respect your staying with this discussion regardless of some irritated critics of some of your posts. Best wishes, Janos - Evolution is happening here and now; The capacity for foresight in the human species is its latest innovation. --^ This email was sent to: [EMAIL PROTECTED] EASY UNSUBSCRIBE click here: http://topica.com/u/?a84IaC.bcVIgP.YXJjaGl2 Or send an email to: [EMAIL PROTECTED] TOPICA - Start your own email discussion group. FREE! http://www.topica.com/partner/tag02/create/index2.html --^
RE: [SOCIAL CREDIT] [FixGov] Social Credit and TOP According To Wes Burt
**This diagnosis, and the next one, should provide a standard test by which any third world village idiot will be able to tell who is on the side of the Angels and who is on the WHIP's payroll.**Dammit, Wes, this isn't helpful. The best that I can tell by digging into this rather lengthy most recent post of yours (that seems to repeat your previous posts ad infinitum), is that you are proposing some kind of tax scheme. But for the life of me I can't tell what.Perhaps somebody out there - if not yourself - will kindly tell us.-- - Original Message - DATE: Sun, 16 Nov 2003 18:35:32 From: [EMAIL PROTECTED] To: [EMAIL PROTECTED],[EMAIL PROTECTED],[EMAIL PROTECTED],[EMAIL PROTECTED],[EMAIL PROTECTED],[EMAIL PROTECTED],[EMAIL PROTECTED],[EMAIL PROTECTED],[EMAIL PROTECTED],[EMAIL PROTECTED] Cc: [EMAIL PROTECTED]To: The wealthy, healthy, Intelligent, and powerful folks, the WHIPs; who want 100% Capitalism for themselves and 50% Capitalism = Welfarism for their competitors, customers, and employees.Good day folks,I'll begin this note with Bill Ryan's last message to me,and then continue with my diagnosis of how Social Credit relates to the 2916 year old optimum policy (TOP) as a cure for what ails the US economy. On Tue, 11 Nov 2003 10:46:06 -0800 [EMAIL PROTECTED] writes, in part:Wes, I've been enduring your stuff for what? - three years now, and still don't have the slightest idea what specifically it is you are proposing to do.Tell us, finally - please please please - in simple declarative sentences.Whatever *it* is, you say *it* requires "only one third" asmuch "money" to implement. But the social creditproposals don't require any money at all, just simpleadjustments enabling demand to balance supply as a matter of accounting. End Bill Ryan ~~Bill has me at a severe disadvantage. With my 2.5/4.0 grade point average in mechanical engineering; and expired US patents in electronic circuits, optics, and distributed analog control systems, I would not know a "simple declarative sentence" if I stepped in one while dancing bare foot in the moon light through Pat Gunning's cow pasture. I have always thought that my eight figure global model of an industrial economy at the Website below was simpler and more declarative than many million of sentences could be. At least for that majority of Americans who might want a valid reason to change their minds about the status quo.But since the figures first became available in digital form in 1994, only two social scientists on the Internet have dared to post the global model on their Websites. In 1999, Derek Darves posted the figures in the freespeech.org Website just below an article by Noam Chomsky. In October 2002, W. Curtiss Priest posted the figures to the epie.orgWebsite, at the URL below, in the midst of all sorts of socially uplifting articles. The results were the same in each case. The two posters seemed to have drained their accumulated "social capital" by the very act of posting visual-aids on a subject which has historically been discussed and documented only with words, whole libraries full of words. From all this, we should conclude that the Internet, like the print media, radio, and TV before it, are all designed and operated by the dominant WHIPs to preserve the status quo. Nothing has changed since the 1890s, when the workforce changed its mind about the "Baker's Dozen," and the status quo continues to date in the US as shown by the 200 year profile of the US Consumer Price Index on Fig10b 10d.In addition to the 2.3%/year "natural rate of inflation" the century old status quo in the US is characterized by three other symptomatic economic defects:!, Unemployment ranging from 4% to 10%.2, Periodic injections of new money as shown on Figures 2-3, 10b, 10d.3, A perennial 3% to 5% of GDP shortage of purchasing power among parenting families.4, The above mentioned "natural rate of inflation."Who knows which is the chicken, and which the egg.I am delighted that the exchange of emails between Pat Gunning, Wally Klinck, and Bill Ryan, on various aspects of C. H. Douglas' Social Credit theory, have lured Ken Palmerton, Scott Horton, and Victor Bridger out of the closet. A good sized crowd is more likely to depart from the politically correct status quo than two recent graduates from Jesuit debating schools. It is hard to tell whether they are teaching subscribers (to list social credit) the principle of the "Family Wage" or the principle of "subsidiarity." Those principles are mutually exclusive.The cardinal remedial features of SC, the universal "Social Dividend" and the "Compensated Price" have been concisely described by the debate, and each feature targets a specific structural defect in the US domestic policy. The A+B theory, on the other hand, may be brought out of the closet, and concisely described, if the debate continues for a few more weeks. Please be patient while I enlist the assistance of
Re: [SOCIAL CREDIT] Canada' experiment with social credit
Janos Abel wrote: The message of 15/11 from Pat Gunning contains these words: Janos, you seem to be leaving out the fact that a bank may act only as an intermediary. In the U.S., there is a legal limit to how much money a single bank can lend. My response related to the statement by Douglas-McLellan: *...The idea that banks can give money to people, surely just causes inflation.* What you say sounds correct but does not relate to my concluding counter-statement (and justification, thereof) that, *giving* (credit)money is no more inflationary than *lending* it at interest. If A lends his money to B, the amount of money is not increased. If a bank creates new money to lend or to give to A or B, new money is created. Other things equal, the former is not inflationary. The latter is. The small matter of banks destroying credit(money) when a loan is repaid, thereby ensuring that the quantity of money is not inflated, is a very feeble justification for the privileged role they wrested from society. The destruction of money is a fact, not a justification. I'm waiting for economist Bill to agree with this. You also seem to be somewhat complacent about banks having *the the power to create and destroy money*. Private institutions, striving for private profit, have *absolute power* over a vital element that can make or break a nations economy !!?? Surely, there is something very wrong with this arrangement. Not at all complacent. But the real problem is not that the banks create money. In a free society, it is practically impossible to prevent this. The real problem is the system of bank regulation. The power to create money with impunity was conferred by the government. The banks are not the culprits here at least not directly. Bankers, like other rent seekers, naturally seek special privileges from the government. To stop this, the people must be smart enough not to permit their government to give them these privileges. The fact that a central bank controls this activity is neither her nor there. I don't understand the basis for this remark. There is a lot of interesting work on free enterprise in banking. It might be worth taking a look at. Indeed, one can argue that *loan sharks* operate the more honest business of lending actual cash, not something manufactured out of nothing at virtually no cost. I agree with this, except that I don't particuarly like their collection methods. Having said all this, I greatly respect your staying with this discussion regardless of some irritated critics of some of your posts. Best wishes, Janos - Evolution is happening here and now; The capacity for foresight in the human species is its latest innovation. -- Pat Gunning, Feng Chia University, Taiwan; New book: UNDERSTANDING DEMOCRACY http://www.constitution.org/pd/gunning/votehtm/covebuy.htm Web pages on Praxeological Economics, Democracy, Taiwan, Ludwig von Mises, Austrian Economics, and my University Classes; http://www.constitution.org/pd/gunning/welcome.htm and http://knight.fcu.edu.tw/~gunning/welcome.htm --^ This email was sent to: [EMAIL PROTECTED] EASY UNSUBSCRIBE click here: http://topica.com/u/?a84IaC.bcVIgP.YXJjaGl2 Or send an email to: [EMAIL PROTECTED] TOPICA - Start your own email discussion group. FREE! http://www.topica.com/partner/tag02/create/index2.html --^
Re: [SOCIAL CREDIT] in still further reply to gunning
Whoops, I guess I was wrong about the tone of our debate. I stand corrected. Bill, I am going to suspend the discussion of the A = A + B theorem in order to deal with the money issue. If economists can't agree on anything else, they should be able to agree on how the Federal Reserve system functions to limit the quantity of money creation by banks. So I confine my comments here to the money issue. I wrote a long reply to your comments yesterday, but I will also withhold them for the moment. [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: Pat wrote: **I'm sorry, Wally, but I regard this as incorrect. Money existed long before the banking system. Moreover, until the gold standard was arbitrarily abandoned, gold money existed and was used widely in exchange independently of the banking system.** When was this actually the case? You've just made an assertion that is refutable historically. After the invention of double entry accounting in the twelfth century, most transactions were conducted with creditary instruments--such as letters of credit, not gold or any precious metal. From the seventeenth century onward (with the development of fractional reserve banking) most transactions in final settlement were consummated in something other than gold. Your assertion is mere gold bug article of faith without historical foundation. Sounds pretty provacative, Bill. Under the gold and silver standards, anyone who was afraid of newly created money could exchange a fixed amount of dollars (determined by contract or by a durable law) of his paper money, which banks could create, into gold or silver, which banks could not create. Transactions were carried out in gold or silver in many places. Do you remember the gold dollar and the silver dollar? In gold mining towns, even gold dust was used as money. Often, however, transactions were carried out on paper for a time and gold was only transferred on dates that were agreed upon as dates of settlement. The gold was held in reserve. And, of course, before double-entry bookkeeping, metal coins and a variety of other things were used as money. Tobacco leaves were used as money in North Carolina during the 18th century, for example. Wally's statement was an all-or-nothing statement. Mine was made to correct Wally. You have taken it out of context. I did not say and did not intend to say that gold was the main form of money used in the recent centuries. I said that gold was used widely not that it was used exclusively. -- **If I understand the basis of Bill's message to Ken today, he agrees with me. So here's a subject you can work on privately.** I do not. Douglas's theorem from his book *Social Credit* that loans create deposits; the repayment of loans cancel deposits pertains to the banking system as a whole not any single bank acting independently. It is a statistical concept which of course you abjure. Are you serious? Do you believe that the central bank's reserve ratio requirement ordinarily forces banks to curb their money creation so that when one bank creates money, that same bank or another bank must destroy it? It is possible, of course, for the federal reserve bank to allow the quantity of money to rise or to fall. But, assuming that it does not decide to do this, is it not correct to say that when a bank creates money by making a loan, money will be destroyed by it or another bank in short order (if it has not been destroyed already)? -- **I agree that when a business pays off a loan, money is destroyed. In the modern banking system, however, new money is almost immediately created to replace it.** The keyword is almost which according to my dictionary means something other than necessarily equal. If banks change their policy and tighten credit sufficiently, the economy collapses. It is as simple as that. Even if it takes some time for other banks to destroy the money in order to meet the reserve requirement, it ordinarily happens.And sometimes, a bank has already destroyed the old money before it or another bank creates the new money. That is my point. Do you disagree with this? **Well, some people believe that new money is likely to cause inflation. And everyone knows that if a very large amount of new money was created, people would shift to barter.** Where from the historical record can you demonstrate that has occurred? I think in every historical case where great quantities of fiat money has been introduced, that money has continued to circulate as money so long has the issuing institution has continued to exist. The general economy has most definitely not reverted to barter though there is definitely inflation. But of course the isolating method disallows consulting the actual historical record. You are wrong about the facts. Besides, that people will shift to barter follows from common sense. They even barter to avoid taxes. But if you wish
Re: [SOCIAL CREDIT] talkfest and nonsense?
ahve been made that it would be an enormous task but as I have said it would require no more than already exists within our taxation system and probably a lot less. I am not sure what is meant regarding the comment, I hope that the money issue has been cleared up. If not, we need to discuss it more fully; since it appears to be a point of disagreement among the social creditors. What is the point of disagreement? Vic Bridger - Original Message - From: Pat Gunning [EMAIL PROTECTED] To: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Sent: Sunday, November 16, 2003 3:17 PM Subject: Re: [SOCIAL CREDIT] talkfest and nonsense? Victor Bridger wrote: Because of the tenor of the discussions occurring and the lack of knowledge by some participants on the subject of Social Credit I have refrained from entering into the discussions. I have said repeatedly that it is a waste of time debating when one or more of the participants have no knowledge let alone understanding of the subject. The discussion develops into a talk fest with opinions being offered from their restricted viewpoint and mostly from /their /own personal learning or beliefs. If anyone is interested in the subject of Social Credit I suggest they do some serious reading of Social Credit literature. To attain some knowledge on the basis of eliciting answers to questions based on /their/ premises will achieve absolutely nothing. Unless the format alters I will have no alternative but to disengage as the volume of mail takes up too much time for no positive outcome. Vic, I certainly value your suggestion to do some reading. I have done so. But your remarks about the tenor of the discussions and lack of knowledge seem odd. Nevertheless, welcome to the discussion. First, I assume that by tenor you mean pitch or tone. I believe that given the wide gulf between the views of the participants, the tone has, in general, been quite respectful. Indeed, I have been pleasantly surprised by this. Second, it is not consistent with the tone of the discussions up to now to begin your comment with the lack of knowledge remark, which I assume refers mostly to me. That I lacked knowledge initially was evident even in my own remarks. One of the purposes of the list, as I understand, is to help people develop knowledge. However, that I now lack knowledge, after having read and thought more deeply about the subject, remains to be shown. Your message does not help much. Specific comments are interspersed with yours. . The discount that would be applied under the Compensated price mechanism is not a subsidy. The use of the word subsidy provides the basis for an argument that is not valid under the Compensated Price mechanism. Why, how? Subsidy is the word traditionally used in the field that deals with problems of the sort your are discussing -- economics. If you look in economics textbooks for compensated price, you will find an entirely different meaning from the one you have in mind. Thus, not only have social creditors chosen not to use the traditional terminology, they have chosen terminology with an entirely different meaning. It is little wonder that they have trouble communicating with economists. The question of /how much new money would be needed/ and /it would be necessary to create enough money during a year to pay for the annual output of the economy at before-policy prices/, displays a complete misunderstanding of the Compensated Price mechanism. The amount of new money would be determined /after/ the event not before. It could occur on a regular basis depending upon the flow of information on the performance of the economy in the relationship between consumption and production in a particular period. To answer the question, How much new money would be needed, can be answered by saying enough. Enough to obtain the objective. So long as the rate of flow of money out equalled the rate of flow of money in there would be sufficient. The notion of sufficiency can be best explained by an analogy to the toilet cistern. It matters not /how much/ water is needed to flush the toilet (the objective), so long as the rate of flow of water going out is equalled by the rate of flow of water coming in. So long as there is enough to do the job is the main criteria. Well, some people believe that new money is likely to cause inflation. And everyone knows that if a very large amount of new money was created, people would shift to barter. So the question seems reasonable to me. It is the answer that seems to obfuscate. It refers to a theory of deficiency of purchasing power that has not been satisfactorily defended. As I view this, we are in the process of working out a satisfactory defense on this list, since I am challenging the beginning point of the theory. /What is physically possible is financially possible/. This statement is a truism that eludes those who do not wish to or fail to understand the policies of Social Credit. They are so occupied
RE: [SOCIAL CREDIT] final comment: Wally to Prof. Gunning
REPLY TO PROF. GUNNING: BILL HAS ANSWERED THE POINTS BELOW ALREADY BUT I WILL INSERT MY OWN COMMENTS IN CAPITAL LETTERS THOUGHOUT THE TEXT. I hope that they may clarify most, at least, of the points you have raised. -- Wally Pat Gunning wrote: Thanks, Wally. Unless I am mistaken, you and Bill have quite different reasons for wanting what you broadly call social credit policy. WALLY: NOT SO FAR AS I AM AWARE. Bill feels that the lack of purchasing power by consumers is a crucial aspect of the theory. You do not. WALLY: I MOST CERTAINLY DO REGARD IT AS THE CENTRAL TECHNICAL PROBLEM. To you, the problem appears to be slave wages and alienation. The latter seem Marxian to me. WALLY: THE SLAVERY ARISES FROM THE DEFECT IN THE FINANCIAL SYSTEM WHICH REQUIRES INCREASINGLY UNECESSARY WASTE EFFORT IN ORDER THAT CONSUMERS MIGHT ACCESS THE FRUITS OF INDUSTRY. THE SABOTAGE OF THE POTENTIAL FOR INCREASING LEISURE, I.E., FREELY CHOSEN ACTIVITY IS A KEY ISSUE HERE. MARX SAW INJUSTICE IN THE CAPITALIST THROUGH PROFIT APPROPRIATING SURPLUS VALUE BELONGING TO THE WORKER. SOCIAL CREDIT SEES A CULTURAL INHERITANCE BEING DENIED ALL CITIZENS DUE TO A DEFECTIVE FINANCIAL SYSTEM WHICH PRODUCES A DEFICIENCY OF BUYING POWER. BOTH PRODUCERS AND CONSUMERS (AND GOVERNMENTS) ARE PLACED IN AN IMPOSSIBLE FINANCIAL IMPASSE. THIS LEADS TO AN ENTIRELY DIFFERENT REMEDIAL APPROACH. SEE MY POSTING AHEAD ON CENTRAL PLANNING TO EXAMINE MY NEGATIVE VIEW OF STATE DIRECTION OF THE ECONOMY. SOCIAL CREDIT IS ENTIRELY FREE OF ANY WORK FETISH OR LABOR THEORY OF VALUE WHICH HOLDS THAT LABOR ALONE IS ENTITLED TO THE FRUITS OF THE INDUSTRIAL ECONOMIC SYSTEM. ONE'S ENTITLEMENT IS BASED ON THE FACT THAT ONE EXISTS. THE MARXIST CONCEPTION LEADS INEVITABLY TO TYRANNY; THE SOCIAL CREDIT CONCEPTION TO INCREASING FREEDOM, CULTURAL, POLITICAL AND ECONOMIC. Please excuse me if some of the remarks in this message sound overly critical. My concern is with the ideas, not the people who hold them. I do not know how this list originated or what purpose the originator aimed to achieve. WALLY: OBVIOUSLY THE PURPOSE WAS TO STIMULATE DISCUSSION AND AWARENESS OF SOCIAL CREDIT OVER A WIDER AUDIENCE. But I will be happy to bow out at any time if he finds my ideas or words unpalatable. Wallace M. Klinck wrote: I think that Prof. Gunning, admittedly new to Douglas's ideas, does not appreciate the nature and consequences of Social Credit policy: The Dividend is not lent to anyone. It is a recognized, constitutionally guaranteed, inaleinable birthright payable to ALL citizens, rich and poor. Sorry, that was a mistake. I know that the plan you described /gives/ the money to consumers and retailers as a kind of subsidy WALLY: IN ADDITION TO THE NATIONAL DIVIDEND, RETAIL PRICES WOULD BE COMPENSATED. It does not expect consumers and retailers to pay back anything. The issue that I raised, which you appreciate, is whether a government agency charged with the job can achieve the practical results you envision. That said, I must say that I don't understand why you need to introduce the concept of a birthright or inalienable. WALLY: TO EMPHASIZE BEYOND ANY DOUBT THAT THE DIVIDEND AND LOWER PRICES ARE A NON-NEGOTIABLE RIGHT BY INHERITANCE TO WHICH EVERY CITIZEN IS ENTITLED. The compensated price is a universal or global payment directed at ALL retail businesses in order to bring about an OVERALL uniform percentage reduction in the price level. I understand that, even under the limitations of the present debt system, credits were issued in wartime Australia to subsidize low prices and that the system, although not Social Credit, apparently worked very well. I don't know the facts here. But I'll bet that you will also find substantial inflation of consumer goods prices in Australia. WALLY: OF COURSE. I WAS TALKING ABOUT MEASURES IMPLEMENTED IN AUSTRALIA DURING THE SECOND WORLD WAR. In any case, you say it is directed at all retail businesses. Do you assume that a uniform amount will be give to each businesss? WALLY: A UNIFORM PERCENTAGE, NOT AN ABSOLUTE OR EQUAL AMOUNT--AS BILL EXPLAINED IN HIS RESPONSE. Will rich businesses be given as much as poor ones. Will successful businesses be given as much as unsuccessful ones? Will self-financed businesses be given as much as those that borrow financing or issue shares of stock to get started and keep going? WALLY: THE UNIFORM PERCENTAGE PRICE COMPENSATION APPLIES TO ALL LICENSED RETAIL OUTLET WHICH SUBSCRIBE. IT IS ANTICIPATED THAT VIRTUALLY ALL WILL DO SO BECAUSE IT IS TO THEIR ADVANTAGE IN ORDER TO REMAIN COMPETITIVE. Will legal gambling and prostitution businesses be treated in the same way as other businesses? WALLY: UNLICENCED, ILLEGAL BUSINESSES WOULD NOT BE SUBSIDIZED INASMUCH THAT THIS WOULD OBVIOUSLY BE UNLAWFUL. I suspect that administration would be
Re: [SOCIAL CREDIT] Canada' experiment with social credit
Quite frankly I am totally amazed by Pats reply to Janos. It is some time since any bank had the balls to repeat the old lie that there was some LEGAL or PRACTICAL limit upon their trade of creating money. That lie was blown out of the water a long time ago, and has not been generally used since. To have a tenured Professor repeat it is quite beyond belief. Certainly bankers have applied to themselves a crude, but flexible, reserve ratio, that gives then SOME safety in the fraudulent and unstable world they have created for themselves. This has always been referred to, usually by themselves, as bankers prudence, but it is a fig leaf, and it does no one any credit to attempt to hide behind it. As for central bank control, or the rules it is said they apply in these circumstances. Then pull the other one. Its a fiction. The reality is that there is no enforceable power that can restrain a trading bank from lending to any credit worthy victim that they can find. The test of creditworthiness is theirs also. What rules, or even national law, that have been made over the centuries, have ALL been breached. A very good example is the UK 1844 bank charter act. And though I cannot speak with any authority about the US similar experience applies there also. Ken. Message has been scanned by Webshield --^ This email was sent to: [EMAIL PROTECTED] EASY UNSUBSCRIBE click here: http://topica.com/u/?a84IaC.bcVIgP.YXJjaGl2 Or send an email to: [EMAIL PROTECTED] TOPICA - Start your own email discussion group. FREE! http://www.topica.com/partner/tag02/create/index2.html --^
Re: [SOCIAL CREDIT] Canada' experiment with social credit
[EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: Quite frankly I am totally amazed by Pats reply to Janos. It is some time since any bank had the balls to repeat the old lie that there was some LEGAL or PRACTICAL limit upon their trade of creating money. That lie was blown out of the water a long time ago, and has not been generally used since. To have a tenured Professor repeat it is quite beyond belief. Certainly bankers have applied to themselves a crude, but flexible, reserve ratio, that gives then SOME safety in the fraudulent and unstable world they have created for themselves. This has always been referred to, usually by themselves, as "bankers prudence", but it is a fig leaf, and it does no one any credit to attempt to hide behind it. As for central bank control, or the rules it is said they apply in these circumstances. Then pull the other one. Its a fiction. The reality is that there is no enforceable power that can restrain a trading bank from lending to any credit worthy victim that they can find. The test of "creditworthiness" is theirs also. What "rules", or even national law, that have been made over the centuries, have ALL been breached. A very good example is the UK 1844 bank charter act. And though I cannot speak with any authority about the US similar experience applies there also. Ken. Message has been scanned by Webshield Ken, my analysis is in all the standard economics and money and banking textbooks, although this is not the reason I presented it. This is the first time I have heard a denial. Perhaps you can refer me to a banker who says he (she) is free to create all of the money he (she) wants with impunity. Or perhaps you can refer me to a source that "blew this lie out of the water." Are you sure that you understand the reasoning? -- Pat Gunning, Feng Chia University, Taiwan; New book: UNDERSTANDING DEMOCRACY http://www.constitution.org/pd/gunning/votehtm/covebuy.htm Web pages on Praxeological Economics, Democracy, Taiwan, Ludwig von Mises, Austrian Economics, and my University Classes; http://www.constitution.org/pd/gunning/welcome.htm and http://knight.fcu.edu.tw/~gunning/welcome.htm --^^--- This email was sent to: [EMAIL PROTECTED] EASY UNSUBSCRIBE click here: http://topica.com/u/?a84IaC.bcVIgP.YXJjaGl2 Or send an email to: [EMAIL PROTECTED] TOPICA - Start your own email discussion group. FREE! http://www.topica.com/partner/tag02/create/index2.html --^^---
Re: [SOCIAL CREDIT] Social creditors and the Ponzi game
**The lender's wealth has not been reduced unless the borrower is unable to repay the loan.** It has been reduced if the borrower throws the money into the ocean, as is reflected in the valuation of the borrower's securities in the secondary market for notes, stocks and bonds. -- **My claim is that, at the time this transaction is made (and before B commences to use the borrowings), both saving and wealth are increased.** I invite you to revise this statement. It appears to be complete nonsense. Before anything is done with the money, both saving and wealth are increased? -- **What we may disagree about is whether the method used by the borrower's accountant to record the transaction is important insofar as one's goal is to understand the capitalist economy.** The power of double-entry bookkeeping has been praised by many notable authors throughout history. In *Wilhelm Meister*, Goethe states: 'What advantage does he derive from the system of bookkeeping by double-entry! It is among the finest inventions of the human mind.' Werner Sombart, a German economic historian, says: '...double-entry bookkeeping is borne of the same spirit as the system of Galileo and Newton' and 'Capitalism without double-entry bookkeeping is simply inconceivable. They hold together as form and matter. And one may indeed doubt whether capitalism has procured in double-entry bookkeeping a tool which activates its forces, or whether double-entry bookkeeping has first given rise to capitalism out of its own (rational and systematic) spirit.' -- **You (all) believe that you are smarter than the entrepreneurs. This is precisely why your arguments do not attempt to predict how real entrepreneurs are likely to react if the policies you propose are adopted. You assume also that, besides receiving distorted information, the entrepreneurs are too stupid to realize that the information is distorted.** Accounting is a technology whereas marginalism is hypothetical idealism. In the real world entrepreneurs use information supplied to them by their accountants not the practitioners of marginalism. Improving the technology of accounting will only help the entrepreneurial decision making process. We maintain that the money and credit system is part and parcel of that process. As to the crack about entrepreneurs being too stupid to realize they are getting distorted information, entrepreneurs know they are getting distorted information. It is the economists not the entrepreneurs who are too stupid to know the entrepreneurs are getting distorted information: It is common to hear adventurers in the different channels of industry assert, that their difficulty lies not in the production, but in the disposal of commodities; that produce would always be abundant, if there were but a ready demand, or vent. When the vent for their commodities is slow, difficult, and productive of little advantage, they pronounce money to be scarce; the grand object of their desire is, a consumption brisk enough to quicken sales and keep up prices... Adventurers is the translator's interpretation of J. B. Say's use of the French word entrepreneur. It would appear that Say was calling the entrepreneurs stupid. He proceeded to lecture them on money: Wherefore, it is products that you want, and not money. Which ignored the fact they needed money not goods to pay their bills. The silver coin you will have received on the sale of your own products, and given in the purchase of those of other people, will the next moment execute the same office between other contracting parties, and so from one to another to infinity; just as a public vehicle successively transports objects one after another. But if the number of public vehicles remain constant, it is impossible for them to transport an increasing quantity of goods per unit time. -- Original Message Follows From: Pat Gunning [EMAIL PROTECTED] [snipped] _ Great deals on high-speed Internet access as low as $26.95. https://broadband.msn.com (Prices may vary by service area.) --^ This email was sent to: [EMAIL PROTECTED] EASY UNSUBSCRIBE click here: http://topica.com/u/?a84IaC.bcVIgP.YXJjaGl2 Or send an email to: [EMAIL PROTECTED] TOPICA - Start your own email discussion group. FREE! http://www.topica.com/partner/tag02/create/index2.html --^
Re: [SOCIAL CREDIT] Canada' experiment with social credit
Ken, the indidivual bank has to keep in lockstep with the banking system as a whole. That's why we call it the monopoly of credit. Original Message Follows From: [EMAIL PROTECTED] [snipped] _ Is your computer infected with a virus? Find out with a FREE computer virus scan from McAfee. Take the FreeScan now! http://clinic.mcafee.com/clinic/ibuy/campaign.asp?cid=3963 --^ This email was sent to: [EMAIL PROTECTED] EASY UNSUBSCRIBE click here: http://topica.com/u/?a84IaC.bcVIgP.YXJjaGl2 Or send an email to: [EMAIL PROTECTED] TOPICA - Start your own email discussion group. FREE! http://www.topica.com/partner/tag02/create/index2.html --^
Re: [SOCIAL CREDIT] Canada' experiment with social credit
This is absolute rubbish. Vic Bridger - Original Message - From: douglas-McLellan Cc: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Sent: Friday, November 14, 2003 2:34 PM Subject: [SOCIAL CREDIT] Canada' experiment with social credit Did Canada not experiment with social credit in the 30's ands nearly go bankrupt . The idea that banks can give money to people , surely just causes inflation . Dougie .--^^--- This email was sent to: [EMAIL PROTECTED] EASY UNSUBSCRIBE click here: http://topica.com/u/?a84IaC.bcVIgP.YXJjaGl2 Or send an email to: [EMAIL PROTECTED] TOPICA - Start your own email discussion group. FREE! http://www.topica.com/partner/tag02/create/index2.html --^^---
RE: [SOCIAL CREDIT] Canada' experiment with social credit
The idea that banks can give money to people , surely just causes inflation . ... and create social poverty. I agree with you. For all you who think giving money to everyone is the solution to wealth, I encourage you to read http://www.mises.org. -Original Message-From: Victor Bridger [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]Sent: Saturday, November 15, 2003 8:25 PMTo: [EMAIL PROTECTED]Subject: Re: [SOCIAL CREDIT] Canada' experiment with social credit This is absolute rubbish. Vic Bridger - Original Message - From: douglas-McLellan Cc: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Sent: Friday, November 14, 2003 2:34 PM Subject: [SOCIAL CREDIT] Canada' experiment with social credit Did Canada not experiment with social credit in the 30's ands nearly go bankrupt . The idea that banks can give money to people , surely just causes inflation . Dougie .--^^--- This email was sent to: [EMAIL PROTECTED] EASY UNSUBSCRIBE click here: http://topica.com/u/?a84IaC.bcVIgP.YXJjaGl2 Or send an email to: [EMAIL PROTECTED] TOPICA - Start your own email discussion group. FREE! http://www.topica.com/partner/tag02/create/index2.html --^^---
RE: [SOCIAL CREDIT] Talk Fest and nonsense
Because of the tenor of the discussions occurring and the lack of knowledge by some participants on the subject of Social Credit I have refrained from entering into the discussions. I have said repeatedly that it is a waste of time debating when one or more of the participants have no knowledge let alone understanding of the subject. The discussion develops into a talk fest with opinions being offered from their restricted viewpoint and mostly from their own personal learning or beliefs. If anyone is interested in the subject of Social Credit I suggest they do some serious reading of Social Credit literature. To attain some knowledge on the basis of eliciting answers to questions based on their premises will achieve absolutely nothing. Unless the format alters I will have no alternative but to disengage as the volume of mail takes up too much time for no positive outcome. The following are some very brief comments on items that have been expressed in the discussion group. . The discount that would be applied under the Compensated price mechanism is not a subsidy. The use of the word subsidy provides the basis for an argument that is not valid under the Compensated Price mechanism. The question of how much new money would be needed and it would be necessary to create enough money during a year to pay for the annual output of the economy at before-policy prices, displays a complete misunderstanding of the Compensated Price mechanism. The amount of new money would be determined after the event not before. It could occur on a regular basis depending upon the flow of information on the performance of the economy in the relationship between consumption and production in a particular period. To answer the question, How much new money would be needed, can be answered by saying enough. Enough to obtain the objective. So long as the rate of flow of money out equalled the rate of flow of money in there would be sufficient. The notion of sufficiency can be best explained by an analogy to the toilet cistern. It matters not how much water is needed to flush the toilet (the objective), so long as the rate of flow of water going out is equalled by the rate of flow of water coming in. So long as there is enough to do the job is the main criteria. Social credit is a distraction from the real problems facing humanity such as war starvation and poverty .Which can only be solved by getting rid of capitalism and replacing it with socialism . WD Mclellan Socialist. The above statement is a perfect example of the time wasted on discussing social Credit with those who have a different philosophical approach. It is not about changing one ism with another. It is either an acceptance or rejection of the Social Credit principle that the individual is more important than the group. Neither capitalism (whatever Mr. Mcllelan means by that) nor socialism deal with the question of the group versus the individual, although socialism does by its very nature i.e. State Capitalism does place the group above the individual that composes the group. "What is physically possible is financially possible." This statement is a truism that eludes those who do not wish to or fail to understand the policies of Social Credit. They are so occupied with attempting to justify their theories or are so beleaguered by money, what it consists of, who should have more, how it should be distributed, how much there ought to be, how banks create credit etc.etc., that they cannot see the wood for the trees. The reality is that the world and its physical elements allow the people in it to exist only because of those physical attributes, which provide for life, none of which was originally created by man. Money is a man made creation and although a very good one has been perverted to the extent that it has become more important than the things it is supposed to represent. The image reflection in the mirror is more real than the person or object it is reflecting. We reject the scarcity postulate. We start from the premise of abundancy. There is nothing in this world or universe that is necessary for life on this planet, that is scarce. We do start from a premise of abundance, which is opposite to the theoretical scarcity assumptions of economists "Properly accounted ... You have a great deal more confidence in what statisticians can do than I have. If you base the redistribution process on statistical principles, . Properly accounted means simply that properly accounted. It has nothing to do with statistical projections as with orthodox economics. It has to do with operating a proper set of accounts in the same manner as is expected from any operating business small or large. When the barber takes my money after he finishes cutting my hair, our transaction is over. But he goes out and spends the money or he saves it. This is
Re: [SOCIAL CREDIT] Canada' experiment with social credit
As I have said repeatedly to the extent that I am beginning to sound like a cracked record. (a) Banks do create credit which when drawn upon and used becomes money. (b) Banks are limited by regulatory authorities to the extent to which they can continue to create credit. (c) The measures of control have altered over the years from an LGS Ratio (Deposits to Loans) to Statutory Reserve Deposit requirements to the Prime Asset Ratio. (d) None of the above negates the argument that banks do create the major portion of the nation's money supply. (e) Banks do not give money they lend it. (f) How banks can increase their lending and maintain their liquidity requirements can be the result of a number of factors. Government deficit spending, the Central Bank's action of buying and selling government securities, a favourable balance of trade, Capital (money) inflow for investments or speculation, or simply by a bank borrowing off shore. (g) The fact remains that bank's do create the major portion of the nation's money supply. In Australia this is currently (it does vary slightly) about 97% I do not understand why this is continually denied, sidestepped or hidden under a maize of verbiage Vic Bridger - Original Message - From: Pat Gunning To: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Sent: Saturday, November 15, 2003 12:55 PM Subject: Re: [SOCIAL CREDIT] Canada' experiment with social credit Janos Abel wrote: ...The idea that banks can give money to people, surely just causes inflation. Yes this is the stock answer that is so effective in shutting down any further enquiry. Yet it is important to inquire further, and ask why is it not inflationary when the banks advance the same money in the form of a debt *and* add interest on top? Various details are teased out by this question. One of the most important is the further question, what do banks actually do when they lend? Most of the time, (in more than nine cases out of ten) they simply authorize the borrower to overdraw on an account, i.e. banks lend credit, not cash. In brief *lending* funny(money) can be just as inflationary as giving it. Janos, you seem to be leaving out the fact that a bank may act only as an intermediary. In the U.S., there is a legal limit to how much money a single bank can lend. Ordinarily banks have an incentive to lend up to the limit. Once that limit is reached, they cannot lend any more unless they receive more deposits. If effect, this means that the money created by means of a new loan corresponds to money being destroyed by the calling in of an old loan. For example, suppose that you take your deposit of $100 out of Bank A and put it in bank B. If bank A and bank B have reached the limits of their loans, bank A will have to destroy money by calling in $x worth of loans. Bank B will be allowed to create money by making $x worth of loans. Other things equal, the total money will stay the same.Banks have the power to create and destroy money. But in all of the major capitalist countries, this power is regulated by central banks. The main cause of an increase or decrease in the quantity of deposits at banks in modern capitalist countries is central bank policy.-- Pat Gunning, Feng Chia University, Taiwan; New book: UNDERSTANDING DEMOCRACY http://www.constitution.org/pd/gunning/votehtm/covebuy.htm Web pages on Praxeological Economics, Democracy, Taiwan, Ludwig von Mises, Austrian Economics, and my University Classes; http://www.constitution.org/pd/gunning/welcome.htm and http://knight.fcu.edu.tw/~gunning/welcome.htm--^^--- This email was sent to: [EMAIL PROTECTED] EASY UNSUBSCRIBE click here: http://topica.com/u/?a84IaC.bcVIgP.YXJjaGl2 Or send an email to: [EMAIL PROTECTED] TOPICA - Start your own email discussion group. FREE! http://www.topica.com/partner/tag02/create/index2.html --^^---
Re: [SOCIAL CREDIT] final comment: Pat to Wally
Thanks, Wally, for clearing up my misperception about possible differences with Bill regarding the theory. If you are correct, then if I am unsuccessful in debunking the theory in my discussions with Bill, I would also be unsuccessful with you. And vice versa. I assume that you also agree with Bill's notion of labor displacement and that you think that he agrees with your notions of "slave wages" and "regimentation." But you are apparently not in full agreement regarding money, as I point out below. Also thanks for elucidating the social credit program. As I have mentioned, however, I think that at this stage I understand it quite well. This, of course, was not the case when I first commented on this list. Nothing you tell me about the theory or policies in this message is new although it is possible that there are aspects that you have not yet explained. So my focus now is fully on the reasoning used by people like yourself to defend the theory and the policies. Regardless of whether your plan is somehow more Christian or more moral than some other plan, the crucial questions for me are these. 1. WILL THE CONSUMERS NORMALLY BE UNABLE TO PURCHASE THE PRODUCED GOODS? First, are you correct to believe that individuals acting as consumers in a capitalist economy will, under normal circumstances, be unable to purchase the goods that producers have produced. So far, I have only been persuaded that you are on the wrong track by trying to defend this proposition with the accounting logic of the A + B theorem. I am convinced that in order to defend your belief properly, you must begin at a point where the idea to produce by means of a firm is first conceived. Under modern financial conditions, this is the point at which the idea in the mind of financing and producing entrepreneurs becomes actualized through the transfer of funds. These people must combine their knowledge and money in order to get a production process by means of a firm started. When I use the term "financing entrepreneur," I mean a person who saves by trying to earn an income on his savings. These two kinds of entrepreneurs are roles. It is possible that a single individual would finance his own firm. Since you are concerned with financing, however, it is appropriate to separate the roles. To begin with an accounting identity that refers to a process that is already started and ongoing is a major conceptual shortcoming. If you care at all about persuading those who do not accept your views on faith, you should address this issue. It makes no sense to me to claim that slave wages are an inherent characteristic of the current capitalist system without examining the conditions under which those wages are determined. And it makes no sense to me to discuss those conditions without conceiving of the entire production process from start to finish -- i.e., from the point where the idea to produce occurs and financing is provided to the point where the product is sold and the proceeds of the sale distributed. What the A + B theorem does is to carve out a cross section of the market economy at a point in time, stop all the movement, and form theorems as if the said static cross section represents the steadily evolving market economy. This procedure is a faulty way of achieving the goal you want to achieve. 2. WILL THE SALES SUBSIDY ACHIEVE THE GOAL YOU INTEND? Second, will the sales subsidy (or whatever name you wish to give it), financed with new money, achieve the goal you believe it will achieve? Here there are two points. On the one hand, you have not satisfactorily explained how it is possible to increase the quantity of money without causing inflation. I liked the idea of financing it by reducing government spending. But that does not seem to be an integral part of your program. Instead, you want to introduce new money into the system. The main long term effect of this is inflation. However, even the program was financed by existing taxes by means of reducing government spending, I have not been persuaded that the program will work. If the program artificially makes the prices of current consumer goods lower than they would otherwise be, all that would happen is that resources would be shifted from longer-term to shorter-term projects. The prices that exist at any time reflect, in an indirect way, the scarcities perceived by the numerous entrepreneurs involved in current and prospective future production projects. If "social credit" policies were adopted, the scarcities that would otherwise manifest themselves in higher current consumer goods prices would end up manifesting itself in relatively higher consumer goods prices in the future. Just like the government of the U.S. is taking purchasing power away from our sons and daughters in order to pay for our social security, the subsidy plan would take money away from them to pay for our increased indulgence in the near future. In other words, the policies are, in effect though not
Re: [SOCIAL CREDIT] talkfest and nonsense?
Victor Bridger wrote: Because of the tenor of the discussions occurring and the lack of knowledge by some participants on the subject of Social Credit I have refrained from entering into the discussions. I have said repeatedly that it is a waste of time debating when one or more of the participants have no knowledge let alone understanding of the subject. The discussion develops into a talk fest with opinions being offered from their restricted viewpoint and mostly from /their /own personal learning or beliefs. If anyone is interested in the subject of Social Credit I suggest they do some serious reading of Social Credit literature. To attain some knowledge on the basis of eliciting answers to questions based on /their/ premises will achieve absolutely nothing. Unless the format alters I will have no alternative but to disengage as the volume of mail takes up too much time for no positive outcome. Vic, I certainly value your suggestion to do some reading. I have done so. But your remarks about the tenor of the discussions and lack of knowledge seem odd. Nevertheless, welcome to the discussion. First, I assume that by tenor you mean pitch or tone. I believe that given the wide gulf between the views of the participants, the tone has, in general, been quite respectful. Indeed, I have been pleasantly surprised by this. Second, it is not consistent with the tone of the discussions up to now to begin your comment with the lack of knowledge remark, which I assume refers mostly to me. That I lacked knowledge initially was evident even in my own remarks. One of the purposes of the list, as I understand, is to help people develop knowledge. However, that I now lack knowledge, after having read and thought more deeply about the subject, remains to be shown. Your message does not help much. Specific comments are interspersed with yours. . The discount that would be applied under the Compensated price mechanism is not a subsidy. The use of the word subsidy provides the basis for an argument that is not valid under the Compensated Price mechanism. Why, how? Subsidy is the word traditionally used in the field that deals with problems of the sort your are discussing -- economics. If you look in economics textbooks for compensated price, you will find an entirely different meaning from the one you have in mind. Thus, not only have social creditors chosen not to use the traditional terminology, they have chosen terminology with an entirely different meaning. It is little wonder that they have trouble communicating with economists. The question of /how much new money would be needed/ and /it would be necessary to create enough money during a year to pay for the annual output of the economy at before-policy prices/, displays a complete misunderstanding of the Compensated Price mechanism. The amount of new money would be determined /after/ the event not before. It could occur on a regular basis depending upon the flow of information on the performance of the economy in the relationship between consumption and production in a particular period. To answer the question, How much new money would be needed, can be answered by saying enough. Enough to obtain the objective. So long as the rate of flow of money out equalled the rate of flow of money in there would be sufficient. The notion of sufficiency can be best explained by an analogy to the toilet cistern. It matters not /how much/ water is needed to flush the toilet (the objective), so long as the rate of flow of water going out is equalled by the rate of flow of water coming in. So long as there is enough to do the job is the main criteria. Well, some people believe that new money is likely to cause inflation. And everyone knows that if a very large amount of new money was created, people would shift to barter. So the question seems reasonable to me. It is the answer that seems to obfuscate. It refers to a theory of deficiency of purchasing power that has not been satisfactorily defended. As I view this, we are in the process of working out a satisfactory defense on this list, since I am challenging the beginning point of the theory. /What is physically possible is financially possible/. This statement is a truism that eludes those who do not wish to or fail to understand the policies of Social Credit. They are so occupied with attempting to justify their theories or are so beleaguered by money, what it consists of, who should have more, how it should be distributed, how much there ought to be, how banks create credit etc.etc., that they cannot see the wood for the trees. The reality is that the world and its physical elements allow the people in it to exist only because of those physical attributes, which provide for life, none of which was originally created by man. Money is a man made creation and although a very good one has been perverted to the extent that it has become more important than the
Re: [SOCIAL CREDIT] Canada' experiment with social credit
Victor Bridger wrote: As I have said repeatedly to the extent that I am beginning to sound like a cracked record. (a) Banks do create credit which when drawn upon and used becomes money. (b) Banks are limited by regulatory authorities to the extent to which they can continue to create credit. (c) The measures of control have altered over the years from an LGS Ratio (Deposits to Loans) to Statutory Reserve Deposit requirements to the Prime Asset Ratio. (d) None of the above negates the argument that banks do create the major portion of the nation's money supply. (e) Banks do not /give /money they /lend /it. (f) How banks can increase their lending and maintain their liquidity requirements can be the result of a number of factors. Government deficit spending, the Central Bank's action of buying and selling government securities, a favourable balance of trade, Capital (money) inflow for investments or speculation, or simply by a bank borrowing off shore. (g) The fact remains that bank's do create the major portion of the nation's money supply. In Australia this is currently (it does vary slightly) about 97% I do not understand why this is continually denied, sidestepped or hidden under a maize of verbiage Vic Bridger Vic, I don't think that anyone would deny that banks create money. The issue is /not/ whether banks have created money in the past. They have. Nor is the issue whether most of modern money is bank-created. It is. Indeed, this borders on a truism, since economists distinguish a bank from other intermediaries by the fact that a bank has the power to create money. However, as you recognize, in the modern banking system, the power is limited. The error we have been discussing is that of neglecting the fact that in the modern banking system, the action of money creation by one bank is normally offset by another action of money destruction by another bank. Don't you agree? Now it is possible for the banking system, through central bank policy, to increase the quantity of money. But when this occurs it is always the consequence of a conscious decision by the monetary authorities, typically a central bank. This is precisely how the subsidy plan (you have not given me a good reason to change the standard economic terminology) would be financed. It is also possible for money substitutes to replace money in some transactions, and vice versa. But this is not what we have been discussing. It is not evident how your final fact is relevant. Why do you think it is important? -- Pat Gunning, Feng Chia University, Taiwan; New book: UNDERSTANDING DEMOCRACY http://www.constitution.org/pd/gunning/votehtm/covebuy.htm Web pages on Praxeological Economics, Democracy, Taiwan, Ludwig von Mises, Austrian Economics, and my University Classes; http://www.constitution.org/pd/gunning/welcome.htm and http://knight.fcu.edu.tw/~gunning/welcome.htm --^ This email was sent to: [EMAIL PROTECTED] EASY UNSUBSCRIBE click here: http://topica.com/u/?a84IaC.bcVIgP.YXJjaGl2 Or send an email to: [EMAIL PROTECTED] TOPICA - Start your own email discussion group. FREE! http://www.topica.com/partner/tag02/create/index2.html --^
Re: [SOCIAL CREDIT] Canada' experiment with social credit
You guys all ought to read The Creature from Jekyll Island: A Second Look at the Federal Reserve by G edward Griffin. I contains the entire history of fractional banking and its consequences. May it race to the top of your to-read list. By the way, I don't sell it, I'm just sayin. Best Wishes, Philip Dru dot com - Original Message - From: Pat Gunning [EMAIL PROTECTED] To: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Sent: Saturday, November 15, 2003 11:19 PM Subject: Re: [SOCIAL CREDIT] Canada' experiment with social credit Victor Bridger wrote: As I have said repeatedly to the extent that I am beginning to sound like a cracked record. (a) Banks do create credit which when drawn upon and used becomes money. (b) Banks are limited by regulatory authorities to the extent to which they can continue to create credit. (c) The measures of control have altered over the years from an LGS Ratio (Deposits to Loans) to Statutory Reserve Deposit requirements to the Prime Asset Ratio. (d) None of the above negates the argument that banks do create the major portion of the nation's money supply. (e) Banks do not /give /money they /lend /it. (f) How banks can increase their lending and maintain their liquidity requirements can be the result of a number of factors. Government deficit spending, the Central Bank's action of buying and selling government securities, a favourable balance of trade, Capital (money) inflow for investments or speculation, or simply by a bank borrowing off shore. (g) The fact remains that bank's do create the major portion of the nation's money supply. In Australia this is currently (it does vary slightly) about 97% I do not understand why this is continually denied, sidestepped or hidden under a maize of verbiage Vic Bridger Vic, I don't think that anyone would deny that banks create money. The issue is /not/ whether banks have created money in the past. They have. Nor is the issue whether most of modern money is bank-created. It is. Indeed, this borders on a truism, since economists distinguish a bank from other intermediaries by the fact that a bank has the power to create money. However, as you recognize, in the modern banking system, the power is limited. The error we have been discussing is that of neglecting the fact that in the modern banking system, the action of money creation by one bank is normally offset by another action of money destruction by another bank. Don't you agree? Now it is possible for the banking system, through central bank policy, to increase the quantity of money. But when this occurs it is always the consequence of a conscious decision by the monetary authorities, typically a central bank. This is precisely how the subsidy plan (you have not given me a good reason to change the standard economic terminology) would be financed. It is also possible for money substitutes to replace money in some transactions, and vice versa. But this is not what we have been discussing. It is not evident how your final fact is relevant. Why do you think it is important? -- Pat Gunning, Feng Chia University, Taiwan; New book: UNDERSTANDING DEMOCRACY http://www.constitution.org/pd/gunning/votehtm/covebuy.htm Web pages on Praxeological Economics, Democracy, Taiwan, Ludwig von Mises, Austrian Economics, and my University Classes; http://www.constitution.org/pd/gunning/welcome.htm and http://knight.fcu.edu.tw/~gunning/welcome.htm --^ This email was sent to: [EMAIL PROTECTED] EASY UNSUBSCRIBE click here: http://topica.com/u/?a84IaC.bcVIgP.YXJjaGl2 Or send an email to: [EMAIL PROTECTED] TOPICA - Start your own email discussion group. FREE! http://www.topica.com/partner/tag02/create/index2.html --^
Re: [SOCIAL CREDIT] Canada' experiment with social credit
Well Dougie, that was, and is still the propaganda. The reality is somewhat different. If you are really interested in the truth, do the reading. There are many here who will point you in the direction of finding out for yourself. The only way to be convinced. Either way. Always be aware of the red herring inflation. Ken. Message has been scanned by Webshield --^ This email was sent to: [EMAIL PROTECTED] EASY UNSUBSCRIBE click here: http://topica.com/u/?a84IaC.bcVIgP.YXJjaGl2 Or send an email to: [EMAIL PROTECTED] TOPICA - Start your own email discussion group. FREE! http://www.topica.com/partner/tag02/create/index2.html --^
Re: [SOCIAL CREDIT] Canada' experiment with social credit
The message from douglas-McLellan contains these words: ...The idea that banks can give money to people, surely just causes inflation. Yes this is the stock answer that is so effective in shutting down any further enquiry. Yet it is important to inquire further, and ask why is it not inflationary when the banks advance the same money in the form of a debt *and* add interest on top? Various details are teased out by this question. One of the most important is the further question, what do banks actually do when they lend? Most of the time, (in more than nine cases out of ten) they simply authorize the borrower to overdraw on an account, i.e. banks lend credit, not cash. In brief *lending* funny(money) can be just as inflationary as giving it. Ken Palmeton is right, Dougie. One has to do the reading unless one wants to trust that we already have the best of an unavoidable bad deal. Regards, Janos -- Evolution is happening here and now; The capacity for foresight in the human species is its latest innovation. --^ This email was sent to: [EMAIL PROTECTED] EASY UNSUBSCRIBE click here: http://topica.com/u/?a84IaC.bcVIgP.YXJjaGl2 Or send an email to: [EMAIL PROTECTED] TOPICA - Start your own email discussion group. FREE! http://www.topica.com/partner/tag02/create/index2.html --^
Re: [SOCIAL CREDIT] Social creditors and the Ponzi game
It is however true that much debt will masquerade as equity. -- **It is as true in a barter society as in a money economy that a person can save by accepting others' promises. So long as the lender expects the promises to be kept, those promises are equity to him. There is no masquerade.** The comment simply pertains to peculiarity in definition within accounting. When a firm sells a bond it books the transaction to debt. When it sells a stock it books the transaction to equity. From the perspective of social credit analysis, that is debt masquerading as equity. -- **The borrower has agreed to give up her claim to future goods or work in exchange for the benefits she expects to receive from having the goods or purchasing power now. She may use her borrowings to buy consumer goods or to finance production of future goods.** It is true that the borrower might have a variety of reasons for borrowing. The entrepreneur's incentive is not to finance the production of future goods but to make a profit. -- **She may throw it in the ocean. It doesn't matter what she does with it.** Doing so may be in violation of the loan agreement and put the borrower into technical default if not jail for fraud. Very few loans are no strings attached we don't care what you do with it loans. -- **So long as the lender can expect to be paid back, it is equity. That is, it is part of his wealth. By contrast, the equity, or wealth, of the borrower has been reduced. I don't see the point in suggesting that there is a masquerade.** If the borrowed money is thrown into the ocean the borrower's wealth has indeed been reduced. But so has the lender's. Normally, the loan is based on the credit-worthiness of the borrower, which is reduced if the borrower self-destructs. The negotiable value of the borrower's note is reduced and will be so reflected (at any rate it should--a lot of hanky- panky has gone on recently in the field of accounting) in the books of the lender or the holder in due course. -- **We live in a society in which promises are made on the basis of expectations that other promises will be kept. One might say that the entire structure of production and exchange is built on the promises men live by, to use the title of Harry Scherman's book, which I recommended earlier. W. G. Langworthy Taylor called this the credit system. He rightly pointed out that, without it, the steadily increasing standard of living that we have observe in the more capitalist countries of the world could not have occurred. J. A. Schumpeter concurred, as did Veblen. Moreover, it is just simple common sense.**? Of course. -- **Such a complex and intricate network can break down, so to speak. The promises are made in terms of the common medium of exchange.** A relatively small percentage of transactions are conducted with what we usually think of as being money. Our mental image of money is merely the form of credit we receive in our pay vouchers. That is merely the fungible means of final settlement of contracts that concatenate through time from production to consumption out of the larger spectrum of creditary or contractual instruments. The modern economy does not require a medium of exchange. What it does require is more in the nature of a ticket or claim check against production at the point of sale into final consumption. Without that, everything stops. -- **If someone -- usually a government or central bank -- messes with the money and causes unexpected inflation or deflation** What do you mean by messing with the money? Presumably from the context it means unexpectedly changing the rate of inflation or deflation. So you have no problem with inflation or deflation per se. Correct? -- **The scheme you have in mind messes with the money. That is why I regard it as dangerous.** We propose to mess with those who are messing with money. Do you not also propose to mess with those who are messing with money by stopping them from messing with money? You apparently want to keep inflation or deflation to an expected level and there is no problem with either so long as it is expected. We say both are harmful, period. But this does get us back to the definition of inflation in Austrian economics which we do not share. You define inflation as any addition to the quantity of money. We define it differently. -- **Entrepreneurs try to earn wealth by capturing what they believe will be gains from exchange.** This is fundamentally a false definition of entrepreneurship. They do not look for gains from exchange because the modern economy is not primarily one of exchange of things already produced, but contract for *future* performance. -- **If you cannot tell why your policy is likely to work by referring to how you think entrepreneurs will act after the
Re: [SOCIAL CREDIT] The Alberta Experiment
If you are seeking The Alberta Experiment new Chick, the best place to try is Bloomfield books, in Sudbury, Suffolk, England. If they do not have it in their lists, it is the second hand trade for you my friend. Ken. Message has been scanned by Webshield --^ This email was sent to: [EMAIL PROTECTED] EASY UNSUBSCRIBE click here: http://topica.com/u/?a84IaC.bcVIgP.YXJjaGl2 Or send an email to: [EMAIL PROTECTED] TOPICA - Start your own email discussion group. FREE! http://www.topica.com/partner/tag02/create/index2.html --^
RE: [SOCIAL CREDIT] The Alberta Experiment: Readily available--Wally
Note to All Subscribers re Douglas's book The Alberta Experiment It is indeed a very important work, being the communications between Alberta Premier William Aberhart and C. H. Douglas, first published in 1937 by Eyre and Spottiswoode in London. While it is always good to go back to originals, I would personally recommend the reprint by Veritas Publishing of Western Australia in 1984. This is an attractive paperback, not of the highest print quality through the text, but containing an eleven page introduction by Eric D. Butler and a nineteen page section entitled A Background Picture by the late L. Denis Byrne who Douglas sent in 1937, preceded by George Powell, from the United Kingdom to advise the then newly elected (1935) Social Credit Government of the Province of Alberta. Powell soon returned to the United Kingdom but Byrne remained as Technical Advisor to the Alberta Government and was highly regarded by Premier Aberhart until the latter's death in 1943. Shortly after, Denis Byrne fell victim to the destructive purges of more genuine Social Crediters orchestrated under the new Premier, Ernest C. Manning. Denis Byrne, remained until his death, however, a tireless advocate for Social Credit as Douglas had presented it. This edition of The Alberta Experiment is readily available for $12.00 each, postpaid, in Canadian dollars: Send a money-order for that amount to Wallace M. Klinck, C.H. Douglas Social Credit, P.O. Box 3003, Sherwood Park, AB, Canada T8H 2T1 and the book will be dispatched promptly. Sincerely Wally [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: Chick, The 'Alberta Experiment is an excellent book. There are used copies available through Barnes Noble, and I believe one of them is stocked by The Edmonton Bookstore, (which may or may not be close to you, depending where you are in Alberta). I've just recently secured an original copy, printed in 1937, through B N myself. It's well worth reading, believe me. Very, very interesting, and well worth the price. There may also be reprints available still through the Australian League of Rights, (www.alor.org), but by all means try to get an original if you can. Joe --^ This email was sent to: [EMAIL PROTECTED] EASY UNSUBSCRIBE click here: http://topica.com/u/?a84IaC.bcVIgP.YXJjaGl2 Or send an email to: [EMAIL PROTECTED] TOPICA - Start your own email discussion group. FREE! http://www.topica.com/partner/tag02/create/index2.html --^
Re: [SOCIAL CREDIT] The Alberta Experiment: Readily available--Wally
Wallace M. Klinck wrote: Note to All Subscribers re Douglas's book The Alberta Experiment It is indeed a very important work, being the communications between Alberta Premier William Aberhart and C. H. Douglas, first published in 1937 by Eyre and Spottiswoode in London. If the book was published in 1937, why doesn't someone scan it and post it on the web? The copyright will have expired. -- Pat Gunning, Feng Chia University, Taiwan; New book: UNDERSTANDING DEMOCRACY http://www.constitution.org/pd/gunning/votehtm/covebuy.htm Web pages on Praxeological Economics, Democracy, Taiwan, Ludwig von Mises, Austrian Economics, and my University Classes; http://www.constitution.org/pd/gunning/welcome.htm and http://knight.fcu.edu.tw/~gunning/welcome.htm --^ This email was sent to: [EMAIL PROTECTED] EASY UNSUBSCRIBE click here: http://topica.com/u/?a84IaC.bcVIgP.YXJjaGl2 Or send an email to: [EMAIL PROTECTED] TOPICA - Start your own email discussion group. FREE! http://www.topica.com/partner/tag02/create/index2.html --^
Re: [SOCIAL CREDIT] Social creditors and the Ponzi game
[EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: The comment simply pertains to peculiarity in definition within accounting. When a firm sells a bond it books the transaction to debt. When it sells a stock it books the transaction to equity. From the perspective of social credit analysis, that is debt masquerading as equity. I was not just commenting on the "masquerade" sentence. You left out the first part of your paragraph. The entire paragaph is as follows "When the individual saves he is purchasing from his income something other than goods and services for his personal consumption. In the broad model he is purchasing "investments" which will prospectively bring him future income. That future income is income that is "unearned" as opposed to income that is "earned." He isn't saving in any physical sense nor is the community as a whole saving in any physical sense. The relationship is contractual between creditors and debtors. It is however true that much debt will masquerade as equity." I understand the accounting. My basic point, which was perhaps somewhat obscure, relates to the whole paragraph. It is that you were using the terms "earned" and "unearned" to describe income from investment. And you seemed, with your denial that a capitalist entreprener's loan to a producing entrepreneur is saving, to be denying that this adds anything to wealth. My counterargument is that, on the contrary, so long as the capitalist entrepreneurs who finance the businesses do not systematically make errors, their investment adds to wealth. I think that your distinction between a "contractual relationship" and a "real one" is a non-starter. A vast portion of the production and exchange system in a capitalist economy is built on a pyramid of promises. Some are contractual; others are merely compacts in which the actors have expectations about others' future actions. Your paragraph seems to deny the significance of this "pyramid" and to implicitly suggest that wealth in a capitalist economy could be just as high if it was absent. I don't know whether you actually believe this. But it seemed to be implied by your paragraph. If the borrowed money is thrown into the ocean the borrower's wealth has indeed been reduced. But so has the lender's. Normally, the loan is based on the credit-worthiness of the borrower, which is reduced if the borrower self-destructs. The "negotiable" value of the borrower's note is reduced and will be so reflected (at any rate it should--a lot of hanky- panky has gone on recently in the field of accounting) in the books of the lender or the holder "in due course." The lender's wealth has not been reduced unless the borrower is unable to repay the loan. But this is a side issue. The main issue concerns what I perceive to be your implication that A's lending to B and A's financing of B's production does not add to saving and wealth. My claim is that, at the time this transaction is made (and before B commences to use the borrowings), both saving and wealth are increased. If, later, B throws the money in the ocean, defrauds the lender or financier by spending it on a holiday in Fiji, or wastes it in his business; saving and wealth fall. I think we agree on this. What we may disagree about is whether the method used by the borrower's accountant to record the transaction is important insofar as one's goal is to understand the capitalist economy. I think not. Of course, accounting procedures can facilitate fraud. And the accounting procedure may affect the amount of taxes that must be paid. But these are other matters. **Such a complex and intricate network can "break down," so to speak. The promises are made in terms of the common medium of exchange.** A relatively small percentage of transactions are conducted with what we usually think of as being "money." Our mental image of money is merely the form of credit we receive in our pay vouchers. That is merely the fungible means of final settlement of contracts that concatenate through time from production to consumption out of the larger spectrum of creditary or contractual instruments. The modern economy does not require a "medium of exchange." What it does require is more in the nature of a ticket or claim check against production at the point of sale into final consumption. Without that, everything stops. I think that this is a fundamental error. But I am uncertain. It seems to deny the importance to the entrepreneur of being able to plan for the future by comparing money flows. What you call "our mental image of money" refers to the money of one subset of people only -- employees. The producing entrepreneurs who hire employees, as well as those who don't hire them and those who finance the producing entrepreneurs, also have mental images of money. It is those images that drive the
RE: [SOCIAL CREDIT] Social Credit--Tenor of the Discussion
Fellow Subscribers: I agree that genuine debate involves first of all an attempt to get at the precise truth of matters. Social Credit attempts to bind back to reality in a most fundamental sense and its policies should be able to stand rigid logical examination, which many years of study have convinced me that it can easily do. Nevertheless, Social Credit starts from a distinct philosphical base which in the final analysis is something we CHOOSE to BELIEVE (on what we regard as realistic grounds) is rooted in reality. The only way to demonstrate the truth or falsity of this is to apply policies and observe the results. However, even this involves belief because not everyone might seek the same end results--and most people have over a long time been psychologically conditioned to pursue ends which are, indeed, quite incompatible with Social Credit goals. This psychological factor is probably the biggest stumbling block to those outside of the movement in understanding the nature of Social Credit philosophy and policy. The basic relationships of physical production and consumption may be more or less immutable. But the financial system is an entirely man-made construct which is, or is not (according to Social Credit), harmonized with these physical economic relationships--or with desirable social ends. It is therefore subject to conscious, deliberate modification in order that it might achieve certain desired ends. There is a political aspect. Social Credit is not merely academically passive. It is militantly political on a non-party basis--it seeks a general consumer rebellion--political and social, not violent--against the established financial order. To merely bask in the comfort of academic debate while the world is deteriorating to the great disadvantage and suffering of increasing numbers of ordinary people would be entirely immoral. Social Credit is not engaged in a sterile battle of egos. We mean to CHANGE the world--and this involves strategy. As Douglas said, we seek to move from one civilization into a new kind of civilizaton. When we engage in exchanges amongst ourselves or with others, we must never forget that we are seeking by the active exercise of intellect and will to give Flesh to the Word. Thought without action is futile. I believe that civilized but rigorous debate is the best way to make our position clear and to achieve our ultimate ends. We must not allow our energies to be consumed by frivolous or egotistic wrangling. But we should not miss any useful opportunities to engage in discussion, public and private, in order to make our point--and also to sharpen our own understanding of the issues at hand. I am not in any way afraid to juxtapose Social Credit with the existing world order and I favor exhaustive discussion and debate. Khandakar, if you are troubled by the tenor of some exchanges on this site, I can understand your reaction. But if you feel this way, why not enter the fray in your own mode of decorum and so make your own contribution. You have already begun this process by your call for civility and academic discipline. I do not know, of course, whether you are one who is familiar with the territory or a new observer. In any case, I hope that you will remain in the group and look past personal style for the underlying substance of the debate--an understanding of which we Social Crediters, at least, are convinced is essential to the survival of civilization. If you so desire, I can send many Adobe PDF documents to you to elucidate the Social Credit position. Sincerely Wally [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: In a message dated 11/12/03 9:19:55 PM Pacific Standard Time, [EMAIL PROTECTED] writes: I hope Professor Gunning and others are enjoying these exchanges on Social Credit. However, they should also consider what other members of the e-group feel about these exchanges. Academic criticism ordinarily involves comments indicating logical gaps in the author's argument and the author is given a chance to rebut. But this is not the case here. Here the debaters are trying to convince one another. And this not certainly the norm of academic debate. It is the responsibility of the list moderator to ensure that members of the group get involved in constructive criticism, not in crucifying one another. Khandakar Elahi Guelph, Ontario. You have a point, Khandakar, but I, for one, would like to see this current debate continue as it has been going for awhile yet. In Pat Gunning and Bill Ryan we have two very knowledgeable economists, and they have demonstated abilities to explore this subject from a different perspective than most of us do. I'd like to see them continue, and thoroughly explore the 'theoretical' side of the subject. For those of us who are 'social credit' supporters it may give us some new
Re: [SOCIAL CREDIT] Social creditors and the Ponzi game
Dear Professor Gunning. I have lurked patiently in the hope that I would learn something useful from a respected Academic. With this post what I have seen is a blatant attempt to subvert an honourable analysis by attempting to reduce the debate to absurdity. This does none of us any favours, but devalues any respect due to you. Although the compensated price, one of the original Social Credit policies, was seen as a possible mechanism for price stability, no one to my knowledge ever proposed that what you choose to call a subsidy, should ever be set at 100% of cost. As you seem to have chosen to ignore the idea of actually calculating the amount of money required to clear the market AT ANY ONE TIME. AND NO MORE. You have attempted to make a nonsense of a movement that offers possible release from the insanity of the models that are maintained as acceptable to the ruling powers. Shame on you Professor Gunning. Ken. Original Message What would happen if the government adopted and successfully implemented the following policy of subsidizing retailers. It compensates them completely 100% for their costs. In other words, if it costs $1 to supply a product, it gives retailers a $1 subsidy. It pays the subsidy with newly-created national government currency. In the usual microeconomic model of competition, firms would tend to sell each product at a zero price. How much new money would be needed? At first, it might seem that it would be necessary to create enough money during a year to pay for the annual output of the economy at before-policy prices, that is, at the prices that exist today. But this seems wrong. First, at a zero price, the quantities of all goods demanded would be substantial higher than at the current prices. If the government based its subsidy on before-policy prices, it would have to pay quite a bit more than that. To know how much more, we must ask the question: how many more units of each good would people want to buy if the price was zero. For the basic necessities of food, clothing and housing the answer is: not too much more. But for other goods, the answer might be: an infinite amount. How many mansions would you demand if the price was zero? How many diamonds? And so on. Second, no sensible speculator on prices would expect the market price to stay at zero. A sensible strategy would be to borrow as much money as possible in order to buy durable goods at the zero price in the expectation that all of the new money, in light of the limited capacity to supply goods, would cause future prices to soar. Assuming that speculators do, in fact, try to borrow as much money as possible, the result would be much higher market prices of durable consumer goods and a much greater subsidy than we would expect if we disregard speculation. In addition, the increased borrowing would lead to extremely high interest rates, which would choke off private investment. Another way to look as this is to say that investors would shift from investing in real production for the future and toward speculating on future prices of the durable goods they could buy today. Todays producers would respond by shifting from the production of goods for the future to durable goods that people could buy today. For example, it would become more profitable to produce new houses and less profitable to maintain farm productivity. The disaster would come when consumers of the future try to buy goods that havent been produced. Even though many people may have wheelbarrows full of national government notes, the goods would simply not exist to supply their wants. Admittedly, the social creditors program does not entail a 100% subsidy. However, considering this extreme situation should indicate some of the pressures that social creditors appear to ignore when the advocate a subsidy to retailers based on sales. The pressures would be on consumer goods prices in the longer term (up much more than otherwise and than anticipated), on interest rates (up), and on investment in the supply of future consumer goods (down). The subsidy amounts to robbing Peter to pay Paul. In addition, because it is bound to cause a largely unpredictably inflation, it destabilizes markets and is likely to lead to greater entrepreneurial error. In my view, the policy of subsidizing creditors with newly created money is like a ponzi game. It benefits some people initially but all those who continue to play the game are harmed in the long run. I realize that the logic here is difficult for ordinary people to follow. But a good economist should be able to follow it. -- Pat Gunning, Feng Chia University, Taiwan; New book: UNDERSTANDING DEMOCRACY http://www.constitution.org/pd/gunning/votehtm/covebuy.htm Web pages on Praxeological Economics, Democracy, Taiwan, Ludwig von Mises, Austrian Economics, and my University Classes;
Re: [SOCIAL CREDIT] Social creditors and the Ponzi game
My view too Joe. But let us be sure that grosse distortions do not pass uncommented. Ken. Original Message --part1_1c7.11aaf46b.2ce47d83_boundary Content-Type: text/plain; charset=US-ASCII Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit In a message dated 11/12/03 9:19:55 PM Pacific Standard Time, [EMAIL PROTECTED] writes: I hope Professor Gunning and others are enjoying these exchanges on Social Credit. However, they should also consider what other members of the e-group feel about these exchanges. Academic criticism ordinarily involves comments indicating logical gaps in the author's argument and the author is given a chance to rebut. But this is not the case here. Here the debaters are trying to convince one another. And this not certainly the norm of academic debate. It is the responsibility of the list moderator to ensure that members of the group get involved in constructive criticism, not in crucifying one another. Khandakar Elahi Guelph, Ontario. You have a point, Khandakar, but I, for one, would like to see this current debate continue as it has been going for awhile yet. In Pat Gunning and Bill Ryan we have two very knowledgeable economists, and they have demonstated abilities to explore this subject from a different perspective than most of us do. I'd like to see them continue, and thoroughly explore the 'theoretical' side of the subject. For those of us who are 'social credit' supporters it may give us some new perspectives on some of the things that may stand in the way of applying social credit in a 'practical' manner. Assuming, of course, that we're eventually ever able to get in a position to do that somewhere. There are several things in Prof. Gunning's last post that any Social Crediter could question, but lets not 'muddy the waters' just yet until we see Bill's reply. So Pat and Bill, please continue. There needent be any 'winners' or 'losers' in an opportunity for us all to gain from both your knowledge. Joe Thomson Courtenay, BC --part1_1c7.11aaf46b.2ce47d83_boundary Content-Type: text/html; charset=US-ASCII Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit HTMLFONT FACE=arial,helveticaFONT COLOR=#80 SIZE=3 FAMILY=SERIF FACE=Times New Roman LANG=0BIn a message dated 11/12/03 9:19:55 PM Pacific Standard Time, [EMAIL PROTECTED] writes:BR BR /FONTFONT COLOR=#00 style=BACKGROUND-COLOR: #ff SIZE=2 FAMILY=SANSSERIF FACE=Arial LANG=0/BBR BLOCKQUOTE TYPE=CITE style=BORDER-LEFT: #ff 2px solid; MARGIN-LEFT: 5px; MARGIN-RIGHT: 0px; PADDING-LEFT: 5pxI hope Professor Gunning and others are enjoying these exchanges on SocialBR Credit. However, they should also consider what other members of the e-groupBR feel about these exchanges.BR BR Academic criticism ordinarily involves comments indicating logical gaps inBR the author's argument and the author is given a chance to rebut. But this isBR not the case here. Here the debaters are trying to convince one another. AndBR this not certainly the norm of academic debate.BR BR It is the responsibility of the list moderator to ensure that members of theBR group get involved in constructive criticism, not in crucifying one another.BR BR Khandakar ElahiBR Guelph, Ontario.BR BR /BLOCKQUOTEBR /FONTFONT COLOR=#80 style=BACKGROUND-COLOR: #ff SIZE=3 FAMILY=SERIF FACE=Times New Roman LANG=0BBR You have a point, Khandakar, but I, for one, would like to seenbsp; this current debate continue as it has been going for awhile yet.nbsp; In Pat Gunning and Bill Ryan we have two very knowledgeable economists, and they have demonstatednbsp; abilities to explore this subject from a different perspective than most of us do.nbsp; I'd like to see them continue, and thoroughly explore the 'theoretical' side of the subject.nbsp; For those of us who are 'social credit' supporters it may give usnbsp; some new perspectives on some of the things that may stand in the way of applying social credit in a 'practical' manner. Assuming, of course, that we're eventually ever able to get in a position to do that somewhere.nbsp;nbsp; There are several things in Prof. Gunning's last post that any Social Crediter could question, but lets not 'muddy the waters' just yet until we see Bill's reply.nbsp;nbsp; Sonbsp; Pat and Bill, please continue.nbsp; There needent be any 'winners' or ! 'losers' in an opportunity for us all to gain from both your knowledge.BR BR Joe ThomsonBR Courtenay, BC/B/FONT /HTML --part1_1c7.11aaf46b.2ce47d83_boundary-- Message has been scanned by Webshield --^ This email was sent to: [EMAIL PROTECTED] EASY UNSUBSCRIBE click here: http://topica.com/u/?a84IaC.bcVIgP.YXJjaGl2 Or send an email to: [EMAIL PROTECTED] TOPICA - Start your own email discussion group. FREE! http://www.topica.com/partner/tag02/create/index2.html --^
RE: [SOCIAL CREDIT] Turmell
Hi Bill, Be warned. Becoming involved in discussions with Turmell will prove fruitless, a waste of time and energy. I went through this over ten years ago. Vic--^^--- This email was sent to: [EMAIL PROTECTED] EASY UNSUBSCRIBE click here: http://topica.com/u/?a84IaC.bcVIgP.YXJjaGl2 Or send an email to: [EMAIL PROTECTED] TOPICA - Start your own email discussion group. FREE! http://www.topica.com/partner/tag02/create/index2.html --^^---
RE: [SOCIAL CREDIT] Turmell
Hi Bill, Be warned. Becoming involved in discussions with Turmell will prove fruitless, a waste of time and energy. I went through this over ten years ago. Vic--^^--- This email was sent to: [EMAIL PROTECTED] EASY UNSUBSCRIBE click here: http://topica.com/u/?a84IaC.bcVIgP.YXJjaGl2 Or send an email to: [EMAIL PROTECTED] TOPICA - Start your own email discussion group. FREE! http://www.topica.com/partner/tag02/create/index2.html --^^---
RE: [SOCIAL CREDIT] more on debt virus
A few points in closing: Of the five hypothetical examples, three from Turmel, one from myself - The right side up bowl, the upside down bowl and the ball rolling along the plane, and the terminal velocity example - Arguably, not one of them demonstrates any type of feedback properly defined. The two real world examples that I supplied definitely do: the clock escapement and the triode amplifier that demonstrate the beneficial effects of *positive* feedback that revolutionized the world we live in. The first for the first time enabled navigation across open oceans. The second enabled modern communications. Turmel's assertion that positive feedback is always unacceptably unstable is proven to be complete nonsense beyond the shadow of doubt. He furthermore claims that *interest* is positive feedback in the physical sense, which it definitely isn't. It is feedback only in the social sense that it is information that flows to entrepreneurs and their financiers. It is defined by consumer choice in free markets. It is measured through the rules of accounting. No analogy from the physical world therefore is relevant. Now on to the question of Turmel's honesty: He has repeatedly claimed to be an engineer, and continues to do so. In answer to an earlier challenge from me, he replied that he has a four-year B.S. in electronics engineering diploma from Carleton, I believe. In further query he admitted that he has never been employed even for a single day as an engineer, that he has always been self-employed as a professional gambler. He admitted that he has never been recognized as an engineer through the registration process in Alberta or anywhere else. But-- This is how he styles himself that you can see at the bowl link: http://www.cyberclass.net/turmel/bankmath.htm John C. Turmel, B. Eng. It is what in business and law we would call a deceptive trade practice. Registered professional engineers style themselves R. Eng. Presumably, Turmel hangs on the technicality that the B derives from the B.S. in engineering that he claims he possesses. But there is no accreditation anywhere in the world that styles itself, B. Eng. Possibly in the history of the world no one has every styled himself B. Eng. except for John Turmel. Purely and simply it is concocted to deceive, to fool those who don't look closely into believing he is really an engineer. -- [EMAIL PROTECTED] (Bill Ryan) wrote in message news:[EMAIL PROTECTED]... Okay, I found bowl. **If you have a bowl and you put a ball in it and then give the ball a little shove, it will travel up one side, gravity will bring it down and it will rock back and forth until it settles back to the middle. That's how engineers use negative feedback to bring back things which have been pushed out of normal operation back to normal.** Which is a demonstration of the concept of stable equilibrium. Turmel has failed to direct our attention to the source of negative feedback in this demonstration, however. There is merely momentum countervailed by gravity. No feedback. Turmel continues to claim that he is an engineer. In response to an earlier question he said he was a graduate of Carleton, I think. Will he give me permission to access his Carleton transcript and student records so I might confirm his claim? -- **If you turn the bowl upside down and put the ball at the top, one small push and the gravity will make the ball fall faster and faster. That's unstable. If you put the ball on a platform and give it a push, without friction, it will just continue in rolling steady state.** Which merely demonstrates the concept of unstable equilibrium. There is also no feedback in this demonstration, merely the effects of gravity. -- **Both zero and negative feedback are acceptable while positive feedback is always unacceptably unstable.** Which does not follow from the two examples because neither contains feedback. Turmel arbitrarily asserts, both zero and negative are acceptable and positive feedback is always unacceptably unstable. Both assertions are complete nonsense. -- Drag on a falling object is *negative* feedback that increases to the square of the object's velocity, so is therefore exponential. It will increase to the point where the force from drag and the force from gravity equal. From that point downward the object is falling at its terminal velocity which is constant. So the change to that point is exponential but from that point downward there is nothing exponential about it whatsoever. But this is negative feedback that this eminent engineer says is acceptable. I wonder if he will admit that it also demonstrates that negative feedback can be exponential. What is it about the clock escapement that feeds energy into the pendulum that keeps it going with each tick of the clock that makes it always unacceptably unstable? Will this eminent engineer
Re: [SOCIAL CREDIT] Social creditors and the Ponzi game
I hope Professor Gunning and others are enjoying these exchanges on Social Credit. However, they should also consider what other members of the e-group feel about these exchanges. Academic criticism ordinarily involves comments indicating logical gaps in the author's argument and the author is given a chance to rebut. But this is not the case here. Here the debaters are trying to convince one another. And this not certainly the norm of academic debate. It is the responsibility of the list moderator to ensure that members of the group get involved in constructive criticism, not in crucifying one another. Khandakar Elahi Guelph, Ontario. - Original Message - From: Pat Gunning [EMAIL PROTECTED] To: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Sent: Wednesday, November 12, 2003 9:48 PM Subject: [SOCIAL CREDIT] Social creditors and the Ponzi game What would happen if the government adopted and successfully implemented the following policy of subsidizing retailers. It compensates them completely 100% for their costs. In other words, if it costs $1 to supply a product, it gives retailers a $1 subsidy. It pays the subsidy with newly-created national government currency. In the usual microeconomic model of competition, firms would tend to sell each product at a zero price. How much new money would be needed? At first, it might seem that it would be necessary to create enough money during a year to pay for the annual output of the economy at before-policy prices, that is, at the prices that exist today. But this seems wrong. First, at a zero price, the quantities of all goods demanded would be substantial higher than at the current prices. If the government based its subsidy on before-policy prices, it would have to pay quite a bit more than that. To know how much more, we must ask the question: how many more units of each good would people want to buy if the price was zero. For the basic necessities of food, clothing and housing the answer is: not too much more. But for other goods, the answer might be: an infinite amount. How many mansions would you demand if the price was zero? How many diamonds? And so on. Second, no sensible speculator on prices would expect the market price to stay at zero. A sensible strategy would be to borrow as much money as possible in order to buy durable goods at the zero price in the expectation that all of the new money, in light of the limited capacity to supply goods, would cause future prices to soar. Assuming that speculators do, in fact, try to borrow as much money as possible, the result would be much higher market prices of durable consumer goods and a much greater subsidy than we would expect if we disregard speculation. In addition, the increased borrowing would lead to extremely high interest rates, which would choke off private investment. Another way to look as this is to say that investors would shift from investing in real production for the future and toward speculating on future prices of the durable goods they could buy today. Todays producers would respond by shifting from the production of goods for the future to durable goods that people could buy today. For example, it would become more profitable to produce new houses and less profitable to maintain farm productivity. The disaster would come when consumers of the future try to buy goods that havent been produced. Even though many people may have wheelbarrows full of national government notes, the goods would simply not exist to supply their wants. Admittedly, the social creditors program does not entail a 100% subsidy. However, considering this extreme situation should indicate some of the pressures that social creditors appear to ignore when the advocate a subsidy to retailers based on sales. The pressures would be on consumer goods prices in the longer term (up much more than otherwise and than anticipated), on interest rates (up), and on investment in the supply of future consumer goods (down). The subsidy amounts to robbing Peter to pay Paul. In addition, because it is bound to cause a largely unpredictably inflation, it destabilizes markets and is likely to lead to greater entrepreneurial error. In my view, the policy of subsidizing creditors with newly created money is like a ponzi game. It benefits some people initially but all those who continue to play the game are harmed in the long run. I realize that the logic here is difficult for ordinary people to follow. But a good economist should be able to follow it. -- Pat Gunning, Feng Chia University, Taiwan; New book: UNDERSTANDING DEMOCRACY http://www.constitution.org/pd/gunning/votehtm/covebuy.htm Web pages on Praxeological Economics, Democracy, Taiwan, Ludwig von Mises, Austrian Economics, and my University Classes; http://www.constitution.org/pd/gunning/welcome.htm and http://knight.fcu.edu.tw/~gunning/welcome.htm --^ This email was sent to: [EMAIL PROTECTED] EASY UNSUBSCRIBE click here:
Re: [SOCIAL CREDIT] final comments--Wally comments on War-time Australian Cons
million can only be obtained in the main by industry obtaining increased overdrafts from the banking system. This newly created money required to finance increased wages must be repaid, plus interest, and the only way this can be done at present is by charging increased prices It is surely elementary that if new money can be created in such a manner that the result is further inflation, not a genuine increase in purchasing power, then it could be brought into circulation without increasing prices. He then explains how the required money just as easily have been created by a government instrumentality as a credit, for the cost of administration...not more than three per cent...and MADE AVAILABLE BY ALL-ROUND REDUCTION OF PRICES THROUGH PRICE DISCOUNTS [emphasis added], increased pension payments, directly to employers as a National Production Bonus, etc. The result would be a genuine benefit to all. To suggest that a man-made monetary system cannot be used to provide the individual with the benefits of his economic system, instead of producing increased inflation and economic dislocation, is a manifestation of madness. It elevates a system over the individual. In his six-point Limited Objective Programme concluding the address, Mr. Butler suggests in Item No. 6 that the Arbitration Commission continue assessing the economy and determining periodically what increase in purchasing power is legitimate. The Federal Government then to instruct the Reserve Bank TO CREATE AS A CREDIT THE AMOUNT NECESSARY AND APPLY TO A CONSUMER DISCOUNT OR SUBSIDY SCHEME, STARTING WITH THE BASIC ITEMS IN THE ECONOMY SUCH AS FOOD, CLOTHING, HOUSING AND TRANSPORT. NO GOVERNMENT PRICE CONTROL IS NECESSARY, NOR WOULD UNWANTED PRODUCTION BE SUBSIDIZED. RETAILERS WISHING TO AVAIL THEMSELVES OF REDUCING PRICES TO THEIR CUSTOMERS BY THE AMOUNT OF DISCOUNT, WOULD BE INVITED TO REGISTER WITH AN APPROPRIATE GOVERNMENT INSTITUTION, WHICH MIGHT BE CALLED THE 'NATIONAL CREDIT AUTHORITY' IN EXACTLY THE SAME WAY THAT BUSINESS MEN REGISTER FOR THE COLLECTION AND PAYMENT OF SALES TAX. GOVERNMENT STAFF SAVED FROM ABOLITION OF THE SALES TAX COULD BE USED FOR THE DISCOUNT SCHEME. UPON CONSUMERS INDICATING THE PRODUCTION THEY REQUIRED, THOSE ITEMS CARRYING A DISCOUNT WOULD BE AUTOMATICALLY REDUCED BY THE AMOUNT OF THE DISCOUNT, THE RETAILER KEEPING A RECORD AND PERIODICALLY MAKING A CLAIM FOR TOTAL DISCOUNT FROM THE 'NATIONAL CREDIT AUTHORITY.' THIS WOULD IN ESSENCE BE THE SALES TAX IN REVERSE--INSTEAD OF PRICES BEING INFLATED, THEY WOULD BE REDUCED. [emphasis added] Concluding the author says, a program of increasing purchasing power through lower prices, and much lower taxation, would provide the basis for greater co-operation in industry between staff and management. The basic cause of costly strikes would be removed. I hope that the preceding documentation may prove helpful. I thought that the Australian League of Rights www.alor.org might have posted this entire document on their website with Eric Butler's other published material but they have not yet done so. Sincerely Wally - Original Message - From: [EMAIL PROTECTED] To: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Sent: Saturday, November 08, 2003 10:26 AM Subject: RE: [SOCIAL CREDIT] final comments--Wally **credits were issued in wartime Australia to subsidize low prices and that the system, although not Social Credit, apparently worked very well.** Which would be partial confirmation of the utility of the social credit concept, as is the Alaska dividend program. Wally, do you know enough about the Australian wartime program to talk about it? I don't know anything about it. Perhaps Victor or another of our Australian members will jump in. I would really like to learn more. -- --^ This email was sent to: [EMAIL PROTECTED] EASY UNSUBSCRIBE click here: http://topica.com/u/?a84IaC.bcVIgP.YXJjaGl2 Or send an email to: [EMAIL PROTECTED] TOPICA - Start your own email discussion group. FREE! http://www.topica.com/partner/tag02/create/index2.html --^
Re: [SOCIAL CREDIT] further questions and answers
On Monday 10 Nov 2003 5:41 pm, you wrote: That's right, I hadn't thought of that. It is obviously correct. Thanks, Jessop. But what is a Spaza shop? --- A Spaza shop is something that evolved in our townships where a householder simply trades groceries etc. from a room in the dwelling. They sometimes occupy separate buildings, or add-on buidings, sometimes even a shipping container, in the informal settlements (shack developments.) They are cash businesses and generally are not registered with the Revenue department. A business with a turnover of (used to be!) less than R250,000 can register for VAT but is not obliged to -- but I doubt if anyone knows just how much a Spaza shop may be turning over. Jessop. --^ This email was sent to: [EMAIL PROTECTED] EASY UNSUBSCRIBE click here: http://topica.com/u/?a84IaC.bcVIgP.YXJjaGl2 Or send an email to: [EMAIL PROTECTED] TOPICA - Start your own email discussion group. FREE! http://www.topica.com/partner/tag02/create/index2.html --^
RE: [SOCIAL CREDIT] [FixGov] Fw: Social Credit and Planning According To Wally
To get a good idea of what we are missing by defending the status quo, read Wally's message below and replace the words "Social Credit" with the words "The Optimum Policy" (TOP) as you read. Both sets of words, when implemented, would produce the result that Wally and all of us desire. But, "The Optimum Policy" requires only one third as much money to implement, and would restore and preserve the "work ethic" of the US workforce.--- Wes, I've been enduring your stuff for what? - three years now, and still don't have the slightest idea what specifically it is you are proposing to do. Tell us, finally - please please please - in simple declarative sentences. Whatever *it* is, you say *it* requires "only one third" asmuch "money" to implement. But the social creditproposals don't require any money at all, just simpleadjustments enabling demand to balance supply as a matter of accounting. So, it is the "work ethic" you want, is it? Find a time machine that will take you back to Soviet Russia, or perhaps to Auschwitz, where the sign on the main gate proclaimed: "Arbeit Mact Frei." -- - Original Message - DATE: Tue, 11 Nov 2003 11:30:00 From: [EMAIL PROTECTED] To: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Cc: [EMAIL PROTECTED],[EMAIL PROTECTED],[EMAIL PROTECTED],[EMAIL PROTECTED],[EMAIL PROTECTED],[EMAIL PROTECTED],[EMAIL PROTECTED],[EMAIL PROTECTED],[EMAIL PROTECTED],[EMAIL PROTECTED],[EMAIL PROTECTED]To: The wealthy, healthy, intelligent, and powerful folks, the WHIPs, who insist on "The Optimum Policy" for themselves and 50% of TOP for everyone else. Good day folks,To get a good idea of what we are missing by defending the status quo, read Wally's message below and replace the words "Social Credit" with the words "The Optimum Policy" (TOP) as you read. Both sets of words, when implemented, would produce the result that Wally and all of us desire. But, "The Optimum Policy" requires only one third as much money to implement, and would restore and preserve the "work ethic" of the US workforce.Foll owing Wally's post are two posts by Walter Hart, on the same subject, to two different mail lists, with a consequent loss of impact, IMHO. My sincere thanks to Wally and Walter for wrapping fresh words around my favorite topic. My apologies to Bill Ryan for posting to several lists.If there is any question about how long "The Optimum Policy" has been practiced by the WHIPs and withheld from everyone else, the attached file, Fig7-9d.gif, "The Whole Divine Law," will provide a few clews.Kind Regards,Wes BurtTo further explore "The Optimum Policy" illustrated at URL http://www.epie.org/cyber-soc/default.htm send a blank e-mail to [EMAIL PROTECTED].- Forwarded message --From: "Wallace M. Klinck" [EMAIL PROTECTED]To: [EMAIL PROTECTED]Date: Mon, 10 Nov 2003 09:24:29 + Subject: [SOCIAL CREDIT] Social Credit and PlanningDear Members of the Discussion Group:Social Credit is opposed to the policies of central economic planning and state ownership of the means of production. Social credit asserts that the essential problems of production have been solved long ago and that the primary economic problem is inadequate and faulty distribution. Any problems of production that may exist are primarily an inability to adequately respond because of a faulty system of distribution. This defect is considered to derive from a faulty financial system which can easily be rectified from a technical standpoint. Such rectification faces, however, unrelenting political and legal opposition by those who seek to centralize power over mankind--whether for erroneous reasons of misguided idealism, or the naked (or concealed) desire for power.Any system that util izes real capital (i.e., "tools") to produce wealth is capitalist. The Soviet union instituted the most capital intensive "economy" in that it gave preference to real capital projects over the production of consumer goods. The communist fetish for "work" resulted in the most oppressive form of "wage slavery" with little return for effort (as I have been told, "We work--but nothing seems to happen.") and the slave labor camp or firing squad if you were deemed to be an "anti-social" who questioned your obligation to serve the State. The "capital vs socialist" debate obscures the real issues and sets one part of society against the other, just as the "Left vs right" blinds and divides the people. Social Credit asserts that the problem lies with faulty finance which fails properly to deliver to the consuming public the results that flow from the productive system. The socialist s, those "knights in rusty armour" have never really appreciated the implications of the power age as it relates to the financial credit system (and more recently to the information revolution) which has provided a stupendous actual and potential physical abundance. Nor, (due to financial ignorance) have the finance-capitalists, modern industrialists and political
Re: [SOCIAL CREDIT] final comments--Wally comments on War-time Australian Cons
On Tuesday 11 Nov 2003 11:29 am, you wrote: Bill, Prof. Gunning and Other Subscribers: purchasing power is legitimate. The Federal Government then to instruct the Reserve Bank TO CREATE AS A CREDIT THE AMOUNT NECESSARY AND APPLY TO A CONSUMER DISCOUNT OR SUBSIDY SCHEME, STARTING WITH THE BASIC ITEMS IN THE ECONOMY SUCH AS FOOD, CLOTHING, HOUSING AND TRANSPORT. NO GOVERNMENT PRICE CONTROL IS NECESSARY, NOR WOULD UNWANTED PRODUCTION BE SUBSIDIZED. RETAILERS WISHING TO AVAIL THEMSELVES OF REDUCING PRICES TO THEIR CUSTOMERS BY THE AMOUNT OF DISCOUNT, WOULD BE INVITED TO REGISTER WITH AN APPROPRIATE GOVERNMENT INSTITUTION, WHICH MIGHT BE CALLED THE 'NATIONAL CREDIT AUTHORITY' IN EXACTLY THE SAME WAY THAT BUSINESS MEN REGISTER FOR THE COLLECTION AND PAYMENT OF SALES TAX. GOVERNMENT STAFF SAVED FROM ABOLITION OF THE SALES TAX COULD BE USED FOR THE DISCOUNT SCHEME. UPON CONSUMERS INDICATING THE PRODUCTION THEY REQUIRED, THOSE ITEMS CARRYING A DISCOUNT WOULD BE AUTOMATICALLY REDUCED BY THE AMOUNT OF THE DISCOUNT, THE RETAILER KEEPING A RECORD AND PERIODICALLY MAKING A CLAIM FOR TOTAL DISCOUNT FROM THE 'NATIONAL CREDIT AUTHORITY.' THIS WOULD IN ESSENCE BE THE SALES TAX IN REVERSE--INSTEAD OF PRICES BEING INFLATED, THEY WOULD BE REDUCED. - I previously made this suggestion to the forum. I think it was not well received! :-) On Wednesday 27 Aug 2003 8:50 pm, Bill wrote: The National Credit Account carries a balance available to fund dividends that is estimated to be the totality of latent productive capacity. With all the national statistics produced monthly, quarterly, yearly, is there a short way by which this figure can be calculated? I would like to piggy-back on existing structures as far as possible. For instance, we have a VAT system which could surely be used to achieve (something of) the just price compensation, simply by reducing, zeroising, or ´negativising´ the rate. This could be done selectively as well, penalising luxury goods and subsidising essential basics. Jessop. -- On Thursday 28 Aug 2003 8:24 pm, William wrote: It is the reverse of a sales tax except it is not charged against tax collections but is charged against the National Credit Account. --- Jessop here:- The National Credit Account could simply pay an amount over to Revenue to replace the loss in Sales Tax or VAT. This entirely avoids setting up a separate delivery system for the Just Price procedure. * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * Jessop. --^ This email was sent to: [EMAIL PROTECTED] EASY UNSUBSCRIBE click here: http://topica.com/u/?a84IaC.bcVIgP.YXJjaGl2 Or send an email to: [EMAIL PROTECTED] TOPICA - Start your own email discussion group. FREE! http://www.topica.com/partner/tag02/create/index2.html --^
Re: [SOCIAL CREDIT] further questions and answers
On Monday 10 Nov 2003 2:55 am, Bill wrote: **An enterprising consumer may buy consumer goods from a retailer. Then, he can open up his own business to resell them. Will subsidies be given to the latter? Why not? If the retailer keeps good records, things that he sells that are purchased from him for resale rather than consumption are excluded from the sales tax he has to pay and collect. Presumably something like it would apply to the discount. Things that he sells for resale do not qualify for the retail discount. The person who resells those things will qualify for the discount if he is enrolled in the program. --- If I buy from a retailer at the discounted price, goods to sell in my unregistered Spaza shop, my customers get the benefit of the lower price anyway. I do not need to register and receive the discount. Pre-discount purchases + markup - discount comes to the same thing as Discounted goods + markup. Our VAT system has the same effect, in reverse -- registered vendors collect VAT so that unregistered vendors buy at cum-VAT prices, add their markup, but don't collect VAT from their customers. We don't have to complicate the system for registered vendors. Jessop. -- --^ This email was sent to: [EMAIL PROTECTED] EASY UNSUBSCRIBE click here: http://topica.com/u/?a84IaC.bcVIgP.YXJjaGl2 Or send an email to: [EMAIL PROTECTED] TOPICA - Start your own email discussion group. FREE! http://www.topica.com/partner/tag02/create/index2.html --^
Re: [SOCIAL CREDIT] Austrian economics and the new economics
Thanks for this information. By the way, in using the term sounding board I didn't intend for you to be a strawman. A sounding board is something that you bounce off of. I am a firm believer in the Socratic method of adversarial discussion in that it helps all discussants - on all sides of the issues - to learn and sharpen their individual thought. That will occur even though there might never be formal agreement between them. Everybody benefits, even the observers who merely listen. Recently I have been focusing my thought on marginalism and need your help. Original Message Follows From: Pat Gunning [EMAIL PROTECTED] Reply-To: [EMAIL PROTECTED] To: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Subject: [SOCIAL CREDIT] Austrian economics and the new economics Date: Mon, 10 Nov 2003 17:16:44 +0800 I'm glad that I asked, Bill. The new economics in Veblen's time was the Austrian economics of the late 19th century [snipped] _ Send a QuickGreet with MSN Messenger http://www.msnmessenger-download.com/tracking/cdp_games --^ This email was sent to: [EMAIL PROTECTED] EASY UNSUBSCRIBE click here: http://topica.com/u/?a84IaC.bcVIgP.YXJjaGl2 Or send an email to: [EMAIL PROTECTED] TOPICA - Start your own email discussion group. FREE! http://www.topica.com/partner/tag02/create/index2.html --^
Re: [SOCIAL CREDIT] further questions and answers
**If I buy from a retailer at the discounted price, goods to sell in my unregistered Spaza shop, my customers get the benefit of the lower price anyway...** That's right, I hadn't thought of that. It is obviously correct. Thanks, Jessop. But what is a Spaza shop? The point is that as a general matter we want to apply the discount at the point of retail, with the metaphor being a negative sales tax, not a negative VAT. Ideally, both the dividend and discount programs should be in place and tested in actual operation with small dividends and discounts to the general population, so they are there to immediately compensate for a collapse of credit such as occurred in the United States within two years after the 1929 crash, when the money supply contracted by a third, paralyzing trade and commerce initiating the Great Depression that engulfed the world. Original Message Follows From: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Reply-To: [EMAIL PROTECTED] To: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Subject: Re: [SOCIAL CREDIT] further questions and answers Date: Mon, 10 Nov 2003 11:42:14 +0200 On Monday 10 Nov 2003 2:55 am, Bill wrote: **An enterprising consumer may buy consumer goods from a retailer. Then, he can open up his own business to resell them. Will subsidies be given to the latter? [snipped] _ MSN Messenger with backgrounds, emoticons and more. http://www.msnmessenger-download.com/tracking/cdp_customize --^ This email was sent to: [EMAIL PROTECTED] EASY UNSUBSCRIBE click here: http://topica.com/u/?a84IaC.bcVIgP.YXJjaGl2 Or send an email to: [EMAIL PROTECTED] TOPICA - Start your own email discussion group. FREE! http://www.topica.com/partner/tag02/create/index2.html --^
Re: [SOCIAL CREDIT] USSR as a model?
- Original Message - From: Pat Gunning [EMAIL PROTECTED] To: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Sent: Sunday, November 09, 2003 4:46 AM Subject: [SOCIAL CREDIT] USSR as a model? The message by Wes Burt, on which I am commenting in this email, was apparently sent to several lists and to others but not to the Social Credit list, which is the only one to which I subscribe. Wes has a mailing list and, for some reason, has decided to add me to it. The subject of his message was Final Comment on Social Credit by Wally, Pat, Bill and it began with a comment on one of Wally's posts. It begins with the following: Begin Hi folks, The recent exchange of emails by Wally, Pat, and Bill on list [EMAIL PROTECTED] has persuaded me that the national dividend and compensated price of the social credit policy (SCP) should produce the same stable and efficient operation of a national economy as the much simpler optimum policy (TOP). It seems to me that Wally has captured the moral high ground with his description of the benefits to be realized by a successful implementation of social credit. We are free to choose between a complex solution and a simple solution which has been reduced to practice since 1946 in Europe and Japan. I have inserted two comments in the text of Wally's post below, and added some more background material on social credit in Europe and Japan below Wally's post. end Wes's main goal seems to be to present a message he had sent earlier on Aug. 6th with the following preface: To: A few friends and many devious defenders of the status quo (DDotSQ) who want the US economy to crash so they can buy America at bargain prices. end However, Wes also writes about the discussion between Wally and me. I want to comment briefly on one of his paragraphs. I apologize for taking this out of the context. I presume that if he objects, he can express this to the list. [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: (WSB In nations with low levels of indirect taxation, like Japan and the United States, the compensated price would not be necessary. In the late great USSR, 92% of the public revenue was collected from indirect taxes on the capital plant. Subsidies were used to keep the price of necessities low enough for wage earners to buy the necessities. WSB) Often the necessities were not available. When they were, in order to get them, people had to wait in line for hours. And what about luxuries? And how about the millions who starved while the czars experimented with this and that wacky production experiment? Surely you are not suggesting that we take North Korea or Cuba as a model. Wes, I believe that the debate over communism-socialism is over, I think. The communist-socialists lost both in theory and practice. I would highly recommend that you read Mises's Socialism. It had transformed many an idealistic mind. Two versions are available on line for free. You can find them at the following web site. Mises arguements were against state capitalism and central planning they do not deal with production for use and common ownership . I have read some one say how would we know what to produce in socialism , the answer is fairly simple you can monitor what is being consumed and produce products accordingly You could use bar codes . computers , items in catolouges etc. .For projects that are larger such as building bridges or planes or trains you have successful models to go by and improvements can be made quite rationaly . Social credit is a distraction from the real problems facing humanity such as war starvation and poverty .Which can only be solved by getting rid of capitalim and replacing it with socialism . WD Mclellan Socialist . http://www.mises.org/scholar.asp -- Pat Gunning, Feng Chia University, Taiwan; New book: UNDERSTANDING DEMOCRACY http://www.constitution.org/pd/gunning/votehtm/covebuy.htm Web pages on Praxeological Economics, Democracy, Taiwan, Ludwig von Mises, Austrian Economics, and my University Classes; http://www.constitution.org/pd/gunning/welcome.htm and http://knight.fcu.edu.tw/~gunning/welcome.htm --^ This email was sent to: [EMAIL PROTECTED] EASY UNSUBSCRIBE click here: http://topica.com/u/?a84IaC.bcVIgP.YXJjaGl2 Or send an email to: [EMAIL PROTECTED] TOPICA - Start your own email discussion group. FREE! http://www.topica.com/partner/tag02/create/index2.html --^
Re: [SOCIAL CREDIT] Alaska Provisional Governing Council
Iraq, not Alaska. Enter now for a chance to win a 42 Plasma Television! http://ad.doubleclick.net/clk;6413623;3807821;f?http://mocda1.com/1/c/563632/113422/313631/313631 AOL users go here: http://ad.doubleclick.net/clk;6413623;3807821;f?http://mocda1.com/1/c/563632/113422/313631/313631 This offer applies to U.S. Residents Only --^ This email was sent to: [EMAIL PROTECTED] EASY UNSUBSCRIBE click here: http://topica.com/u/?a84IaC.bcVIgP.YXJjaGl2 Or send an email to: [EMAIL PROTECTED] TOPICA - Start your own email discussion group. FREE! http://www.topica.com/partner/tag02/create/index2.html --^
RE: [SOCIAL CREDIT] final comment-Gunning
**In any case, you say it is directed at all retail businesses. Do you assume that a uniform amount will be given to each business?** No, it is a flat percentage of each firm's sales, like a sales tax in reverse, except the program has no connection with the taxing authority; it is a cash credit, not a tax credit. If the firm's gross sales for the accounting period are X and the discount is two percent, the firm will be given a check for 0.02X. -- **Will rich businesses be given as much as poor ones.** -- In terms of the percentage on gross sales, yes. -- **Will successful businesses be given as much as unsuccessful ones?** Same answer. -- **Will self-financed businesses be given as much as those that borrow financing or issue shares of stock to get started and keep going?** Yes. -- **Will legal gambling and prostitution businesses be treated in the same way as other businesses?** The short answer is yes. But it does become more complex as a practical matter. The program has record keeping requirements that may not be enforced by other authorities. Businesses are not required to join the program which is national. The program is entirely voluntary and every firm has the right to join. The information provided to the national credit account is a public record available to any member of the public. I would expect that a great number of businesses that are willing to put a state sales tax certificate on their wall will be reluctant to put a national credit account certificate on their wall. I will expect that ANY business that refuses to participate in the state sales tax program will be reluctant to apply for inclusion in the national credit account program in any case. Those are the businesses that prefer to stay off the books in the alternative economy. -- **Bill proposes to distribute the money on the basis of gross sales, like Forbes' flat tax. This means that small retailers specializing in personal relations and service will receive small amounts while large retail stores that specialize in volume sales will receive large amounts.** Yes, exactly like the sales tax except it operates like a sales tax in reverse. Typically, smaller retailers specializing in personal relations and service are operating with larger markups than the retailers competing on price with less personal relations and service. The discount will benefit small and large retailers equally because it is based on gross sales, not profit. -- **If you base the redistribution process...** There is no redistribution. -- **When money is spent, it is received by someone else who plans to spend it or save it. Otherwise, a person would not want the money. It is not canceled in any sense that I know. When the barber takes my money after he finishes cutting my hair, our transaction is over. But he goes out and spends the money or he saves it. Suppose that I can't afford the haircut, so that I otherwise would let my hair grow long. Then the barber would not have my money to spend. If someone created new money and used it to pay for my haircut, the new money would be spent by the barber and would add to the total money demand for goods...** Complete agreement to this point in the narration. -- **...The new money would first drive up the price of haircuts; then it would drive up the prices of the goods that the barber tends to buy.** But complete disagreement with this. -- **To fully understand the effects of an increase in the quantity of money, other things equal, one must have a firm grasp on the entire market economy, in which scarcity presents itself in a very different way than it does to the hermit.** We reject the scarcity postulate. We start from the premise of abundancy. -- **People who think that they can understand monetary or credit phenomena without knowledge of economics are suffering from a delusion. Often, they think that the solution to a problem is to throw more money at it. The solution to the problem of scarcity, they think, is...** Which assumes there IS a problem of scarcity. The problem is scarcity amidst plenty - a completely unnatural condition. -- **...to produce a money tree. Will the money tree can benefit those who first receive the money, it harms others by reducing the purchasing power of their money. And if it is somehow given equally to everyone, its almost immediate effect is to reduce the purchasing power of all money.** -- That assumes that the pie is only of fixed size, and increasing demand made effective has nothing to do with the size. Our theory is that increasing demand made effective facilitates increase to the size of the pie. -- **When gold was used as money, the discovery of new
Re: [SOCIAL CREDIT] final comment-Gunning
Thanks, Bill. I have been mistaken in thinking that you were an economist. This is where we part company. It is only in a world without scarcity that a money tree could take root. In such a world, there is no need for economists. [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: -- **To fully understand the effects of an increase in the quantity of money, other things equal, one must have a firm grasp on the entire market economy, in which scarcity presents itself in a very different way than it does to the hermit.** We reject the scarcity postulate. We start from the premise of abundancy. -- Pat Gunning, Feng Chia University, Taiwan; New book: UNDERSTANDING DEMOCRACY http://www.constitution.org/pd/gunning/votehtm/covebuy.htm Web pages on Praxeological Economics, Democracy, Taiwan, Ludwig von Mises, Austrian Economics, and my University Classes; http://www.constitution.org/pd/gunning/welcome.htm and http://knight.fcu.edu.tw/~gunning/welcome.htm --^ This email was sent to: [EMAIL PROTECTED] EASY UNSUBSCRIBE click here: http://topica.com/u/?a84IaC.bcVIgP.YXJjaGl2 Or send an email to: [EMAIL PROTECTED] TOPICA - Start your own email discussion group. FREE! http://www.topica.com/partner/tag02/create/index2.html --^
Re: [SOCIAL CREDIT] USSR as a model?
Thanks Douglas. With all due respect, it is evident that you do not understand the critique of socialist central planning. There is so much specialization today that it would be impossible to monitor everything, even if one knew what to monitor. Computers are wonderful instruments. But I'm afraid one would need a much higher power, one that could not be produced by mortal men. I recommend again that you read the book. douglas-McLellan wrote: Mises arguements were against state capitalism and central planning they do not deal with production for use and common ownership . I have read some one say how would we know what to produce in socialism , the answer is fairly simple you can monitor what is being consumed and produce products accordingly You could use bar codes . computers , items in catolouges etc. .For projects that are larger such as building bridges or planes or trains you have successful models to go by and improvements can be made quite rationaly . Social credit is a distraction from the real problems facing humanity such as war starvation and poverty .Which can only be solved by getting rid of capitalim and replacing it with socialism . WD Mclellan Socialist . -- Pat Gunning, Feng Chia University, Taiwan; New book: UNDERSTANDING DEMOCRACY http://www.constitution.org/pd/gunning/votehtm/covebuy.htm Web pages on Praxeological Economics, Democracy, Taiwan, Ludwig von Mises, Austrian Economics, and my University Classes; http://www.constitution.org/pd/gunning/welcome.htm and http://knight.fcu.edu.tw/~gunning/welcome.htm --^^--- This email was sent to: [EMAIL PROTECTED] EASY UNSUBSCRIBE click here: http://topica.com/u/?a84IaC.bcVIgP.YXJjaGl2 Or send an email to: [EMAIL PROTECTED] TOPICA - Start your own email discussion group. FREE! http://www.topica.com/partner/tag02/create/index2.html --^^---
Re: [SOCIAL CREDIT] USSR as a model?
Wes is a member of this and is invited to participate in the discussions. As moderator I didn't forward this specific message to the list because the very same message was forwarded to several other lists as he commonly does. I think practically everyone on this list already gets his messages. I myself get several copies. I have encouraged Wes to actually participate in our discussions rather than posting onesided monologues. As to what he means by this, I don't know. I seriously doubt he is proposing the Soviet system as a model to emulate: (WSB In nations with low levels of indirect taxation, like Japan and the United States, the compensated price would not be necessary. In the late great USSR, 92% of the public revenue was collected from indirect taxes on the capital plant. Subsidies were used to keep the price of necessities low enough for wage earners to buy the necessities. WSB) I invite Wes to clarify this matter in a posting to this list. ***The recent exchange of emails by Wally, Pat, and Bill on list [EMAIL PROTECTED] has persuaded me that the national dividend and compensated price of the social credit policy (SCP) should produce the same stable and efficient operation of a national economy as the much simpler optimum policy (TOP).*** Similarly, I don't know what he means by the much simpler crack because I have never understand what he is proposing. Perhaps he will tell us in simple declarative sentences. - Original Message - DATE: Sun, 09 Nov 2003 12:46:53 From: Pat Gunning [EMAIL PROTECTED] To: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Cc: The message by Wes Burt, on which I am commenting in this email, was apparently sent to several lists and to others but not to the Social Credit list, which is the only one to which I subscribe. [snipped] Enter now for a chance to win a 42 Plasma Television! http://ad.doubleclick.net/clk;6413623;3807821;f?http://mocda1.com/1/c/563632/113422/313631/313631 AOL users go here: http://ad.doubleclick.net/clk;6413623;3807821;f?http://mocda1.com/1/c/563632/113422/313631/313631 This offer applies to U.S. Residents Only --^ This email was sent to: [EMAIL PROTECTED] EASY UNSUBSCRIBE click here: http://topica.com/u/?a84IaC.bcVIgP.YXJjaGl2 Or send an email to: [EMAIL PROTECTED] TOPICA - Start your own email discussion group. FREE! http://www.topica.com/partner/tag02/create/index2.html --^
Re: [SOCIAL CREDIT] final comment-Gunning-sarcasm
Well, this is a relief. A couple of weeks ago I was sure I saw what appeared to be an agreeement between you two that natural resources are abundant. Then last week someone showed me some quotations which suggest that economists (Wm Nordhaus for one) have discovered that capital has succeeded in eliminating the need for any raw resources at all. I have spent a week with the dizzy sensation that scarcity is no longer the foundational premise of economic thinking. Just what was the content of your agreement? While you are scratching heads on that, I will dig up the statements purportedly by respectable economists which do indeed seem to repudiate scarcity. Keith Wilde - Original Message - From: Pat Gunning [EMAIL PROTECTED] To: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Sent: Sunday, November 09, 2003 7:48 PM Subject: Re: [SOCIAL CREDIT] final comment-Gunning-sarcasm Bill, I think that you misinterpreted my remarks. [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: **Thanks, Bill. I have been mistaken in thinking that you were an economist. This is where we part company. It is only in a world without scarcity that a money tree could take root. In such a world, there is no need for economists.** There is no need for sarcasm. Scarce does not mean zero. Abundant does not mean infinite. It simply means that resources are sufficiently abundant to accomplish what we want to accomplish. The old social credit slogan was: What is physically possible is financially possible. It goes to the validity of the marginalist approach which is a welter of false assumption and contradiction. Certainly time is a limiting resource. Starting from the abundancy postulate allows you to come to completely different conclusions than starting from the scarcity postulate in the chain of logic. Just as the rejection of Euclid's parallel postulate and its replacement by the Riemann postulate allowed Einstein to formulate general relativity. He couldn't have done so otherwise. I will admit that without the abundancy postulate social credit is incomprehensible. Economics, by definition, is the study of choice in a world of scarcity -- where one must make sacrifices in order to get what one wants. No sarcasm was intended. If you deny scarcity in the traditional sense, you cannot be an economist in the traditional sense. Frankly, I think you do not understand the scarcity postulate. It does not mean that goals cannot be accomplished. It means only that choices must be made. With respect to the quantity theory of money, it means that a system of production and consumption exists in which there is a tendency to identify, produce, and use all resources that are worth using to cause goods to be produced that will satisfy the wants of consumers, as expressed through their demands for goods. Scarcity manifests itself in the fact that goods and resources have prices. Unless you can show how an increase in the quantity of money will increase the amount of resources or how it will improve their use, you must admit that the main effect will be to raise prices. Anti-marginalism has a long and honorable history, back to the time of Veblen. In the 1920s and 30s it was called the new economics. Australian economics professor Steve Keen recently published *Debunking Economics* which takes up the anti-marginalist cause. Take a look at it. See: http://www.debunking-economics.com Well, if you want my opinion on this, you will have to define standard marginalism in your terms. After all, you raised the issue. You seem to use terms very differently than I have used them and that I have seen others use them. I know a great deal more about the history of the debate relating to the new economics than you realize. But I cannot answer the question you asked until you tell me what standard marginalism means to you. -- Pat Gunning, Feng Chia University, Taiwan; New book: UNDERSTANDING DEMOCRACY http://www.constitution.org/pd/gunning/votehtm/covebuy.htm Web pages on Praxeological Economics, Democracy, Taiwan, Ludwig von Mises, Austrian Economics, and my University Classes; http://www.constitution.org/pd/gunning/welcome.htm and http://knight.fcu.edu.tw/~gunning/welcome.htm --^ This email was sent to: [EMAIL PROTECTED] EASY UNSUBSCRIBE click here: http://topica.com/u/?a84IaC.bcVIgP.YXJjaGl2 Or send an email to: [EMAIL PROTECTED] TOPICA - Start your own email discussion group. FREE! http://www.topica.com/partner/tag02/create/index2.html --^
Re: [SOCIAL CREDIT] final comment-Gunning-sarcasm
**Well, if you want my opinion on this, you will have to define standard marginalism in your terms.** How about intro Nordhaus or Samuelson, any edition? Or perhaps Heilbroner's micro? I am simply trying to establish you as a legitimate proxy for the mainstream position in regard to marginalism, so I can use you as a sounding board. I think in regard to marginalism that Austrians are very close to the mainstream. Am I not correct? Old Economics 1. Resources are scarce. 2. Progress occurs through capitalist accumulation, 3. accomplished by parsimony, 4. resulting in the division of labor. New Economics 1. Resources are abundant. 2. Progress occurs through entreprenueurial initiative, 3. facilitated by credit, 4. resulting in the displacement of labor. The Process of the New Economics [1] Loan credit arises from the private contract between banker and entrepreneur, [2] creating a generalized claim against the community as a whole, [3] enabling the entrepreneur to organize the factors of production into their most efficient combination, [4] as ultimately judged by consumers through the democracy of the market, [5] the informational feedback mechanism being profit and loss. [6] Investment is the process of improving the quantity and quality of capital; [7] is facilitated by credit, [8[ driven by entrepreneurial initiative, [9] discovery of resources, and [10] invention of technology. [11] Saving is the process of acquiring beneficial ownership claims against capital, which generate increasing [12] income in the form of dividends or their functional equivalent, as [13] capital accumulates. -- Original Message Follows From: Pat Gunning [EMAIL PROTECTED] Reply-To: [EMAIL PROTECTED] To: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Subject: Re: [SOCIAL CREDIT] final comment-Gunning-sarcasm Date: Mon, 10 Nov 2003 11:48:18 +0800 Bill, I think that you misinterpreted my remarks. [snipped] _ Send a QuickGreet with MSN Messenger http://www.msnmessenger-download.com/tracking/cdp_games --^ This email was sent to: [EMAIL PROTECTED] EASY UNSUBSCRIBE click here: http://topica.com/u/?a84IaC.bcVIgP.YXJjaGl2 Or send an email to: [EMAIL PROTECTED] TOPICA - Start your own email discussion group. FREE! http://www.topica.com/partner/tag02/create/index2.html --^
Re: [SOCIAL CREDIT] final comment-Gunning-sarcasm
**A couple of weeks ago I was sure I saw what appeared to be an agreement between you two that natural resources are abundant.** I think you may be thinking of Professor Rosser over on the Post Keynesian list, which I believe you subscribe to. Good to hear from you. Original Message Follows From: Keith Wilde [EMAIL PROTECTED] Reply-To: [EMAIL PROTECTED] To: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Subject: Re: [SOCIAL CREDIT] final comment-Gunning-sarcasm Date: Sun, 9 Nov 2003 23:08:52 -0800 Well, this is a relief. A couple of weeks ago [snipped] _ Send a QuickGreet with MSN Messenger http://www.msnmessenger-download.com/tracking/cdp_games --^ This email was sent to: [EMAIL PROTECTED] EASY UNSUBSCRIBE click here: http://topica.com/u/?a84IaC.bcVIgP.YXJjaGl2 Or send an email to: [EMAIL PROTECTED] TOPICA - Start your own email discussion group. FREE! http://www.topica.com/partner/tag02/create/index2.html --^
RE: [SOCIAL CREDIT] final comment
Thank you for the citations to the three books in your concluding paragraph. They are new to me. I'll definitely look them up. -- **Regarding the exogenous-endogenous distinction, unless I missed something, you proposed to add exogenous money through the national dividend or national credit office. Obviously, you cannot add endogenous money. And you deny that this addition will displace endogenous money. Logically, this means that the total amount of money used to buy and sell things will rise. If you want to substitute the term credit or credit money, you may. But the result is the same. There is more of the stuff and people will want to use it to buy things. Other things equal -- that is, if there is no rise in production of goods -- prices would rise (subject to the usual caveats of the quantity theory of money). The program will be inflationary.** The common sense assumption is that the costs of production (defining them in the way accountants define them not the way economists define them) are equal to A, and correspond to the flow of goods into consumption. So it would seem if you increase A *endogenously* in respect to the flow of goods, that is inflation in terms of prices charged and ultimately paid for the goods. Similarly, if you augment A *exogenously* by printing it and giving it directly to consumers or more typically, government spends it and covers that spending later from taxation or just spends it, that too would result in inflation, by increasing the quantity of money currently being paid for the goods that are being produced, except in this second case firms will record fictitious profits, in contrast to the first case where there are merely increasing costs offset proportionately by increasing sales. In this second case the economy is most unstable though brisk. (costs of production = A) is proportional to the flow of goods defines *zero* inflation; costs of production that are increasing in respect to the flow of goods defines inflation that is *positive*. and also: A that is augmented *exogenously* also defines inflation that is *positive*. ---but It is our contention that double entry accounting defines the costs of production as A + B; not merely A, such that the recorded costs of production and the flow of purchasing power to consumers have different determinants that do not automatically coincide. The validity of this contention stands or falls within the manifold of accounting, not pure economics. So, given the validity of that contention - we've gotten nowhere discussing it so for the moment I'll move on in the train of logic - what has to be coordinated is not only the flow of the costs of production with the flow of goods in order to have price stability, but also the flow of purchasing power to consumers. That is to say, there are two ratios, not only one that we must analyze to see the big picture. The ratio of costs to goods; and the ratio of costs to purchasing power flowing into final consumption. They do not automatically coincide. The ratio that Douglas was most concerned with is this: A + B/A with A in both numerator and denominator which defines the coincidence of production and consumption. If the ratio of B is increasing to A, as a matter of pure mathematics, A is falling *exponentially* in respect to the costs of production A + B. This is a conclusion exactly opposite to the common sense view that A must always remain proportional to the accounted for costs of production because they are the same thing. A + B may or may not be increasing proportionately to the flow of goods. That is an entirely different matter that was discussed in *Social Credit* part 2 chapter 2 published in 1924. If, as a matter of policy, the authorities control the situation such that A + B is increasing proportionately to the flow of goods, A must be falling in respect the flow of goods (assuming there is labor displacement changing the ratio of B to A with lengthening in the structure of production), preventing consumers from purchasing all of them. But there is zero inflation. All the goods being produced are being sold but at a financial loss to the producers, who respond by decreasing production or scaling back their prospects for future production, scrapping endeavors that do not appear to be profitable. That scaling back is the result of falling financial demand, not real demand. It is an artificial limit on the realization of productive capacity. A quasi-equilibrium may be reached that we might call the condition of the permanently under performing economy. If, however, A is forced up by pressure from organized labor, facilitated by a banker policy of easy money or whatever, the ratio A + B/A comes closer but never completely to unity (because A is in both numerator and denominator), closing the gap somewhat between prices and purchasing
RE: [SOCIAL CREDIT] Questions from Gunning
**One further question, Bill: Do you expect that the new money that is used to finance the national dividend or national credit office, or whatever, will cause an ultimate increase in consumer goods prices by raising consumer demand and costs of production? Have you neglected the time honored quantity theory of money which holds that, other things equal, an increase in the quantity of money tends to cause a nearly equivalent percent increase in consumer goods prices in the long run?** We specifically deny the quantity theory of money. It is meaningful only within the fungible commodity medium of exchange model where money is an independent variable. That money would be exogenous in Post Keynesian terminology. Modern economies are mostly creditary or contractual where prices are determined within the nexus of contracts where money is financially the dependent variable of those contracts. The process endogenously converts - meaning through market transactions - the individualized credit instruments of producers into credit instruments that are generally fungible - checking account money - which serve as the means of final settlement of contracts. Douglas used the ticket metaphor to describe the process. There is the flow of prices (A + B) to the point of retail in parallel to the flow of goods. Also in parallel is the flow of tickets (A) to consumers that allow them to claim those goods. The tickets are fungible, which means they are redeemable not only at the company store but any store, making the competitive mass production possible, enabling mass consumption. Most credit is therefore endogenous to the market and would remain so with social credit. The proposal is that a certain amount of credit be introduced exogenously (consumers' dividends and retail discounts that do not displace but supplement the endogenous credit) as an adjustment mechanism (control variable) to compensate for deficiencies in accounting. A + B is the analytical tool that explains the primary way those deficiencies come about. One of the consequences of those deficiencies is inflation, which is explained through the theorem. As paradoxical as it might seem, the dividend and discount are counter-inflationary if prudently implemented. ---original message--- Date: Wed, 05 Nov 2003 14:53:05 +0800 From: Pat Gunning [EMAIL PROTECTED] Subject: Re: [SOCIAL CREDIT] Questions from Gunning [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: **So the government will print more money (or create it in other ways) and give part of it to consumers hoping or expecting that the consumers will use it to pay their debts (national dividend).** --- It wouldn't be government as government but perhaps it would be an independent public agency. Ideally it would be the central bank. It is not inconceivable that the banking system would do it on its own initiative without government prodding, because it would be in their own best interest to do so. The idea is not for consumers to pay their debts although they may do so from their credits that are theirs to spend as they like on whatever they like. The idea is to equate the flow of prices (A + B) flowing to the point of retail with credit flowing in the direction opposite from sales into consumption, thereby proportionately offsetting the costs of production. You do that by augmenting consumer incomes and subsidizing prices. -- **The government would also give part of the new money to retailers in exchange for reducing their prices to consumers...** Again, not the government as such but the national credit account that would have to be affiliated in some way with the central bank. It is not in exchange for reducing their prices but would effectively lower prices in real terms. It is a fixed percentage of the individual retailer's gross sales. The percentage would be the same for all retailers. -- **it would lend part of the new money to businesses to finance new production.** No loans are contemplated from the national credit account for either production or consumption. It is not in the banking business. Its sole function is to prudently grant credits to consumers or to the benefit of consumers at the point of retail. -- **Would you also make a law against buying consumer goods on credit and/or against investors financing production by borrowing not new money but existing money?** Of course not in either case. Wally's answers in this regard reflect his fundamentalist Christian aversion to debt. Neither a lender nor a borrower be is how Benjamin Franklin put it. Western Canadian social credit had a strong connection to fundamentalist Christianity. The founder of the Alberta party was a prominent radio evangelist who served as Premier until his death in 1943. In Quebec the movement had a strong Roman
RE: [SOCIAL CREDIT] Labor displacement and A + B
PROF. GUNNING: I have inserted comments in the text below. Thank you for your communication. (Bill, if you have any comments, criticisms or additions to my observations please do not hesitate to offer your own.) I have a B.Ed., majoring in senior high school history and a B.A., majoring in political science and minoring in economics. My courses included general economics, comparative economic systems, money and banking, etc. I have done no graduate university work but was introduced to Social Credit in my teens and am now retired. Visibly upset, one of my professors advised me that he would not touch the financial system because he did not wish to jeopardize his position. My academic experiences at university and observations of conditions obtaining in the real world have only strengthened my belief in the validity of C. H. Douglas's ideas. Sincerely WALLY Pat Gunning wrote: Thanks, Wally, for the attempt to answer my question. Much of your answer deals with the theory. I will not discuss that since I am already doing that with Bill. I only note that if the argument is sound, the reference to God or Christians is irrelevant. The majority of the world's population is not Christian. And a very high percent do not believe in the same God that Christians do. Yet their economics surely must be the same as that of Christians. [WALLY COMMENTS]: Douglas said that society is primarily metaphysical and and must have regard to the organic relationships of its prototype. Every policy can be traced back to some philosophical origin. His chart What Is Social Credit? (1951) begins with the heading philosophy, from which derives policy, which latter branches into Economics and Administration. The heading Economics branches into Consumer Control of Production and Integral Accounting. The heading Administration branches into Hierarchy and Contracting-out Mechanisms. The overall objective is Social Stability by integration of mean and ends. Incompatibles are listed as Collectivism, Dialectic Materialism, Totalitarianism, etc. Ballot-box democracy embodies all of these. Douglas said that political democracy without ECONOMIC democracy is dynamite. The Social Credit measures are intended to effect genuine economic democracy by placing control of production policy, NOT administration, firmly in the hands of consumers. This is a policy of the distribution of power and stems from a very unique philosophical source. Social Credit is the science of discovering principles of association which maximize increments of association and minimize decrements of association. Civilization by discovering such principles comes to possess a great accumulation of increments of association embodied in a Cultural Heritage upon which we can all draw and build. We believe that all citizens by virtue of birth have a right to benefit from, and share in, this Cultural Heritage which has come about by the increasing role of physical and intellectual capital inherited from the past. Every citizen has a rightful and inaleinable inheritance in this communal capital. As capital or non-labour factors replace labor as factors of production, equity demands less and less that one should benefit only through his or her personal contribution to any given cycle of production. The productive capacity of society is increasingly due to that body of knowledge, know-how and capital that has been passed on as an Inheritance from the past foundations and discoveries of civilization--and increasingly less due to immediate direct human effort. The financial industrial accountancy system is man-made and does not derive from natural law. There is good reason to believe that it profoundly conflicts with natural law, and that, being man-made, it can be changed so as more to conform with natural law. The word religion derives, as you know, from the Latin religere which means to bind back. Thus man attempts to make sense of his world by fashioning various perspectives which attempt to bind back to reality and are known as religions. They are very different in nature and lead to disparate policies in the real world of social and economic dynamics. Some are more realistic than others. As I have said, Social Credit is distributive and dispersive with regard to physical wealth and individual power. This is directly related to the Christian view of the essential nature of man and his or her appropriate development and destiny--which view is uniquely and often drastically different from the concepts held by other religions. The present financial system is explicitly Antichristian in that it issues money, ultimately, only for production and never for consumption. Being founded upon the belief in the doctrine of Salvation through Works, existing financial policy therefore aims at full, or near full employment, a policy which is the cornerstone of communism, fascism,
Re: [SOCIAL CREDIT] Questions from Gunning
[EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: **So the government will print more money (or create it in other ways) and give part of it to consumers hoping or expecting that the consumers will use it to pay their debts (national dividend).** --- It wouldn't be government as government but perhaps it would be an independent public agency. Ideally it would be the central bank. It is not inconceivable that the banking system would do it on its own initiative without government prodding, because it would be in their own best interest to do so. The idea is not for consumers to pay their debts although they may do so from their credits that are theirs to spend as they like on whatever they like. The idea is to equate the flow of prices (A + B) flowing to the point of retail with credit flowing in the direction opposite from sales into consumption, thereby proportionately offsetting the costs of production. You do that by augmenting consumer incomes and subsidizing prices. -- **The government would also give part of the new money to retailers in exchange for reducing their prices to consumers...** Again, not the government as such but the national credit account that would have to be affiliated in some way with the central bank. It is not in exchange for reducing their prices but would effectively lower prices in real terms. It is a fixed percentage of the individual retailer's gross sales. The percentage would be the same for all retailers. -- **it would lend part of the new money to businesses to finance new production.** No loans are contemplated from the national credit account for either production or consumption. It is not in the banking business. Its sole function is to prudently grant credits to consumers or to the benefit of consumers at the point of retail. -- **Would you also make a law against buying consumer goods on credit and/or against investors financing production by borrowing not new money but existing money?** Of course not in either case. Wally's answers in this regard reflect his fundamentalist Christian aversion to debt. Neither a lender nor a borrower be is how Benjamin Franklin put it. Western Canadian social credit had a strong connection to fundamentalist Christianity. The founder of the Alberta party was a prominent radio evangelist who served as Premier until his death in 1943. In Quebec the movement had a strong Roman Catholic following that elected twenty or thirty federal parliamentarians. In England the movement had strong support from High Church Anglicans (those who like ornate vestments, chanting, incense who prefer to be called Anglo-Catholics), including for a time the Archbishop of Canterbury and also the Dean of Canterbury, who served as Treasurer of the Social Credit Secretariat until his defection to Stalinism, whence he became infamous in history as the Red Dean. He was an interesting but eccentric character who was the last known clergyman to routinely wear gaiters, the street attire of nineteenth century Anglican bishops. -- **if you were hired as an agent to implement the policy, how would you decide whether a firm should receive the new money or not?** Essentially, the program is limited to the point of retail. Except for some minor requirements for record keeping, etc., it is contemplated that all retailers would participate. -- **How would the agent decide how much to give to each firm (or consumer)** The dividend is equal to each resident, man, woman and child. The retail subsidy is a straight percentage of actual sales that would be the same to all retailers, much like a sales tax in reverse, except it isn't given as a tax credit but as a cash credit. There is no connection between the national credit account and the taxing authority. If costs flowing to the point of retail are running ahead of sales, the dividend and subsidy are increased. If sales are running ahead of costs, they are reduced. -- FREE ADHD DVD or CD-Rom (your choice) - click here! http://ad.doubleclick.net/clk;6413623;3807821;f?http://mocda2.com/1/c/563632/131726/311392/311392 AOL users go here: http://ad.doubleclick.net/clk;6413623;3807821;f?http://mocda2.com/1/c/563632/131726/311392/311392 This offer applies to U.S. Residents Only One further question, Bill: Do you expect that the new money that is used to finance the national dividend or national credit office, or whatever, will cause an ultimate increase in consumer goods prices by raising consumer demand and costs of production? Have you neglected the time honored quantity theory of money which holds that, other things equal, an increase in the quantity of money tends to cause a nearly equivalent percent increase in consumer goods prices in the long run? -- Pat
RE: [SOCIAL CREDIT] Labor displacement and A + B
To Prof. Pat Gunning, Bill Ryan--and/or other interested parties: Prof. Gunnning asks what remedial measures Social Credit proposes to deal with an alleged chronic, or inherent, disparity between financial costs and financial incomes. This is with regard to the existing system of industrial cost accountancy operating under the orthodox financial system wherein virtually all money comes into being via loans issued as debt by the banking industry. Briefly, that deficiency of purchasing power is at present met, inadequately and haphazardly by the banking system issuing new credit via loans to consumers, producers, government, and for exports. Consumers are the last stage in the economic process and are required to liquidate the full costs of all production, including capital, when they purchase final goods and services. Credit is debt in orthodox terminology. In Social Credit terminology, real credit is the ability to deliver goods and services as, when and where required, whereas financial credit is the ability to deliver money as when and where required. Note that credit in Social Credit terms is not defined as debt. Effective demand should be able to liquidate financial costs. Bank loans do not liquidate financial cost but merely pass them on as a charge against future cycles of production which have nothing to do with the production cycle in which these financial costs were incurred. Each cycle of production should be financially self-liquidating by means of consumer income received in each cycle. Social Credit claims that the purpose of production is consumption and that consumers as a whole should alway have sufficient effective demand capable of finally liquidating production costs to allow them, dynamically, to obtain the results flowing from the productive system at all times. Orthodox economics requires that further paid activity be engaged in before purchases can be made. (In this sense, orthodox economics is static.) Much of this additional required activity is useless, wasteful, forced and positively destructive (e.g., weaponry). But the false moral imperative by which current civilization operates is the so-called work ethic which implies, and even asserts, that it is wrong or shameful for consumer-citizens to receive anything for nothing. This is a denial of the Christian Doctrine of Salvation through Grace, and an elevation of the notion of Salvation through Works. Social Credit is the Policy of a Philosopy. This philosophy is that of Christian belief and thought, or metaphysics. Christian policy is by its essential nature distributive. Hence, in a nutshell, Social Credit proposes to substitute (but in a properly accounted and scientific manner) newly created money, WITHOUT DEBT, to the consumption side of the economy--in place of the money which is now issued under orthodox banking practice only as a debt repayable in the future and added, therefore, to the financial costs of future cycles of production. Money issued to liquidate costs would remove the built in inflationary bias of the existing debt system which burdens the economy with ever growing and massive accretions of unrepayable debt. The two main mechanisms for dispersing or distributing the new consumption credits are: A National (Consumer) Dividend and the Compensated Price which would be effected by directing a portion of the new consumption credits to retailers in order to bring about a general reduction in the price-level. The above measures involve setting up of a National Credit Account from which drafts would be made to finance the National Dividend and the Compensated Price (which together comprise what Douglas termed the Just Price, which has been described as a modern formulation of the Mediaeval jus pretium). Credits required to finance new production would not be provided by savings but would be issued via drafts on this National Credit Account. I would refer Prof. Gunning, among other works, to Prof. Gorham Munson's Aladdin's Lamp: The Wealth of the American People. (New York: Creative Age Press, 1945, 420 pages). Munson devotes considerable space to discussion of the A + B Theorem and criticisms of it. In final analysis, Munson says, of the critics, It is as though, in the field of vital statistics, they argued that since every person born also dies and since the number of births equals the number of deaths, the birth rate therefore equalled the death rate, and therefore the population is stationary. The A + B Theorem is no more mystifying than the observed fact that a population expands, remains stationary, or declines according to whether the birth rate exceeds, equals, or falls below the death rate. Or, as an early colleague of Douglas, Hugh Morton Murray, puts it, the critics' reasoning is as false as to say that, as everbody now alive was born, therefore everybody born is still alive! Prof. Gunning has asked
Re: [SOCIAL CREDIT] Labor displacement and A + B
Thanks, Wally, for the attempt to answer my question. Much of your
answer deals with the theory. I will not discuss that since I am
already doing that with Bill. I only note that if the argument is
sound, the reference to God or Christians is irrelevant. The majority
of the world's population is not Christian. And a very high percent do
not believe in the same God that Christians do. Yet their economics
surely must be the same as that of Christians.
Perhaps you could tell me whether my understanding is correct. You
believe that the governments should issue new paper money. You believe
that doing so would reduce inflation (an increase in the general level
of prices). This will occur because the money will be used to
"liquidate costs" and to finance new production. To "liquidate costs"
means to pay off consumer debt. So the government will print more money
(or create it in other ways) and give part of it to consumers hoping or
expecting that the consumers will use it to pay their debts ("national
dividend"). The government would also give part of the new money to
retailers in exchange for reducing their prices to consumers
("compensated price"). Finlay it would lend part of the new money to
businesses to finance new production.
You did not mention anything about future debt. Would you also make a
law against buying consumer goods on credit and/or against investors
financing production by borrowing not new money but existing money?
Thanks for the reference. I will not try to read it until I understand
a bit more about the reasoning from you or William.
After I understand the policies better and the reasoning behind them, I
will be able to comment on them.
Wallace M. Klinck wrote:
To Prof. Pat Gunning, Bill Ryan--and/or other interested parties:
Prof. Gunnning asks what remedial measures Social Credit proposes to
deal with an alleged chronic, or inherent, disparity between financial
costs and financial incomes. This is with regard to the existing system
of industrial cost accountancy operating under the orthodox financial
system wherein virtually all money comes into being via loans issued as
debt by the banking industry.
Briefly, that deficiency of purchasing power is at present met,
inadequately and haphazardly by the banking system issuing new credit
via loans to consumers, producers, government, and for exports.
Consumers are the last stage in the economic process and are required to
liquidate the full costs of all production, including capital, when they
purchase final goods and services.
Credit is debt in orthodox terminology. In Social Credit terminology,
real credit is the ability to deliver goods and services as, when and
where required, whereas financial credit is the ability to deliver money
as when and where required. Note that credit in Social Credit terms is
not defined as debt.
Effective demand should be able to liquidate financial costs. Bank
loans do not liquidate financial cost but merely pass them on as a
charge against future cycles of production which have nothing to do with
the production cycle in which these financial costs were incurred. Each
cycle of production should be financially self-liquidating by means of
consumer income received in each cycle.
Social Credit claims that the purpose of production is consumption and
that consumers as a whole should alway have sufficient effective demand
capable of finally liquidating production costs to allow them,
dynamically, to obtain the results flowing from the productive system at
all times. Orthodox economics requires that further paid activity be
engaged in before purchases can be made. (In this sense, orthodox
economics is static.) Much of this additional required activity is
useless, wasteful, forced and positively destructive (e.g., weaponry).
But the false moral imperative by which current civilization operates is
the so-called "work ethic" which implies, and even asserts, that it is
wrong or shameful for consumer-citizens to receive anything "for
nothing." This is a denial of the Christian Doctrine of Salvation
through Grace, and an elevation of the notion of Salvation through
Works." Social Credit is the Policy of a Philosopy. This philosophy is
that of Christian belief and thought, or metaphysics. Christian policy
is by its essential nature distributive.
Hence, in a nutshell, Social Credit proposes to substitute (but in a
properly accounted and scientific manner) newly created money, WITHOUT
DEBT, to the consumption side of the economy--in place of the money
which is now issued under orthodox banking practice only as a debt
repayable in the future and added, therefore, to the financial costs of
future cycles of production. Money issued to liquidate costs would
remove the built in inflationary bias of the existing debt system which
burdens the economy with ever growing and massive accretions of
unrepayable debt.
The two main mechanisms for dispersing
Re: [SOCIAL CREDIT] Challenge to Prof. Gunning
Thanks, William for getting at least partly back on track. [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: **Regarding crop rotation and the horse harness, if you wish to continue the dialog, you must keep the discussion in context. You wrote that social creditors argue that the gap between prices and purchasing power is due to labor displacement. You went on to equate this with the Austrian notion of a lengthening of the structure of production.** I apologize for not making myself clear. The concept of the lengthening of the structure of production is a useful concept. I did not intend to imply that I agree with the Austrian explanation for that lengthening. -- **In the Austrian literature, lengthening ordinarily results from an increase in saving relative to consumer spending -- a shift in time preference.** In the Austrian literature it does say that. We totally disagree with that explanation. The issue is not whether we disagree but whether you are playing a debating game. You have shifted from describing and defending social credit theory, which I still don't understand, to an attack on Austrian economics, which I did not try to defend. I will not bore your readers with a defense of Austrian economics here. If you wish to attack Austrian economics you can do so on the Yahoo Austrianschoolofeconomics list. I will deal with it there. **How would crop rotation cause labor displacement? And how would the substitution of horse plowing for oxen plowing cause it?** Three field as opposed to two field required the cultivation of a third less land to produce the same amount of food. The man behind the plow pulled by his horse could cultivate twice as much land per day than behind an ox. Regarding crop rotation, you are assuming all sorts of other things, including (a) that the innovation is not driven by the demand and (b) that the same amount of labor is need for all crops. Sound thinking and clear communication requires that you describe the model you are using in greater detail. If you do not consider these implicit assumptions, you can easily make the mistake of deducing labor displacement in your model even though no labor displacement would exist under real circumstances. Regarding land, you seem to be assuming that the amount of arable land is fixed. An alternative assumption is that horse plowing made it profitable to farm land that was previously not profitable to farm, thereby increasing the demand for work. And, of course, someone has to make horse harnesses and other equipment. The same kind of reasoning applies to crop rotation. One can plausibly argue that the introduction of crop rotation made more land farmable and, therefore, increased the demand for all labor. In addition to the possibility that more labor would demanded in farming; if labor is displaced in farming, it can adapt to other industries, as the modern rice farmers of Asia are learning. The additional labor available to other parts of the economy would likely make it economically feasible to produce other goods that were previously too expensive to produce. Of course, one can build a model in which labor displacement occurs for the economy as a whole. The question is whether such a model is realistic. To make a judgment about this, one must know the explicit and implicit assumptions. Your discussion disregards the possibility that your implicit assumptions are unrealistic because it disregards those assumptions. Note also that in building a model, one must use the isolating method, which you previously attacked. This is necessary because of the complexity of the phenomena and has nothing to do with whether one is interested in a dynamic process. -- **And what about the more normal state of affairs when no innovation occurs?** It is not the more normal state of affairs. It is the more normal state of affairs in the rest of the universe not impacted by the free will of man. I am not certain how many hundreds or thousands of years passed before crop rotation became a typical practice. The same is true of the horse harness. The technology burst that we now take for granted has not been the ordinary state of affairs in history. Moreover, if we shift to a discussion of the technology burst today, you would have to take a very different view of labor displacement. Two examples from thousands of years ago are not particularly helpful in making your labor displacement case. Regardless of all this, do you believe that your theory of labor displacement is a crucial part of social credit theory? -- Pat Gunning, Feng Chia University, Taiwan; Web pages on Praxeological Economics, Democracy, Taiwan, Ludwig von Mises, Austrian Economics, and my University Classes; http://www.constitution.org/pd/gunning/welcome.htm and http://knight.fcu.edu.tw/~gunning/welcome.htm
Re: [SOCIAL CREDIT] National dividend?
Bill, it seems to me that you are using your critical powers to dispute my claims while exempting Douglas from the same kind of criticism. My assessment is that Douglas tried to use the same method I used to comprehend the phenomena of the occasional boom-bust cycle. However, he chose a different starting point. I believe that that was a mistake. You seem to argue on the one hand that this method is incorrect yet that Douglas's A + B theorem is also correct. This seems a contradiction, even from your own perspective. Two minor points before continuing. I would not call Gary North a prominent Austrian economist. In any case, there is not much similarity between his work and my own. Also, your lumping neoclassical with Austrian economics would be very much disputed by today's American Austrians, although not by me. The American Austrians tend to equate neoclassical economics with the use of econometrics and mathematical modeling. Now on to the chase: In my earlier message, I wrote about the method used in economics to understand a phenomenon. This method consists of contrasting a situation in which an item is present with a situation in which it is absent. This is also the method economics uses to define phenomena. It has been called the isolating method and may have first been described in economics by the Austrian economist Frederick Weiser. (It is discussed in Mises's Human Action in chapter 14.) It was the centerpiece of Ludwig von Mises's praxeological economics. Bill claims this procedure disregards dynamics and that, as a result, it is not scientific. Regarding the latter, he writes: "The scientific approach is to relate the elements statistically against time, so that every observable process becomes the function of their singular commonality, time. Time is the one reality that ties everything in the ponderable world together, and makes them comprehensible." This is indeed what science appears to mean to the typical mainstream economist today. The fact that Clive Granger was a co-winner of this years Nobel prize in economics is a partial confirmation of this view. This does not make it right, however. I would make two points about this argument: 1. Up to now, I have not seen Bill refer to econometrics studies to confirm his hypothesis that the organization of society in which firms produce goods leads to a situation where consumers receive insufficient income to buy those goods. The question, then, is why he would introduce this point here. Perhaps I misunderstand. 2. The isolating method that I described does not inherently abstract from time. Quite the contrary. The method of isolating one element from the panoply of elements that influence the data in which one is interested is just as relevant to comprehending the "dynamic process" as it is to comprehending any other phenomena or process. It is more relevant to the task of comprehending economic elements or variables than for comprehending strictly physical elements. This is because of the variability of human action over time and because it is virtually impossible to carry out experiments that control for all of the variables that one would wish to control for. Nevertheless, the method is also used in physics, biology and other natural sciences. Specifically, it is used as a means (1) of thinking up experiments to do and (2) of comprehending phenomena when doing experiments is especially costly or impossible (as in astronomy and evolutionary biology). Consider what he writes: "It is not scientific to arbitrarily choose any single element from a dynamic process as a starting point, for that starting point becomes the axiom to the exclusion of everything else that determines the conclusion." I contend that it is meaningless to even speak of an "element" in a dynamic process until one has chosen to isolate that element mentally from the rest. Thus, in my view, Bill has already used the method to which I refer, albeit without realizing it. The issue is not whether the method "should" be used. In fact, it is used and must be used. The only question is whether it is used properly to deal with the questions or problems one faces. Of course, one should never forget that the elements of a process, are in fact not isolated. I wrote that I have no idea what Bill means by the banking sector or the consuming sector. My point is directly relevant to the point I made in the last paragraph. He wants to describe the dynamic process by dividing it into elements, which include the "banking sector" and the "consuming sector." Yet he did not tell us how he formed an image of these sectors. Part of my claim is that it is necessary to use the isolating method to do this. One cannot meaningfully use the term "banking sector" or "consuming sector" without conducting the mental experiment of isolating the element to which he wants such a term to refer. When I said that these terms had no meaning, I meant that Bill had not provided one. That is, he
Re: [SOCIAL CREDIT] National dividend?
First, many thanks to Professor Gunning for this interesting discussion. I hope he will indulge us for a bit longer, for I would like to clarify a few additional matters. For those who are interested, I've archived some background material at http://istorage.iomega.com/ Login: socialcredit Password: creditsocial I will leave this password current through Sunday. Open the folder gunningthread. There you will see the Northridge document, as well as some pages from a near contemporaneous Hayek paper that was included in his book, *Prices and Production*, and some pages from Gary North's 1993 anti-social credit polemic, *Salvation through Inflation*. North is a prominent Austrian with a Ph.D. in economics though he is in a non-academic position. -- Some of the professor's comments may seem bewildering to those of us more familiar with standard economic terminology. The bewildering aspect derives from the peculiar jargon of his Austrian background. However, it's mostly a difference in emphasis and language. All-in-all, it doesn't really differ too much from what we would call nineteenth century neo- classicism or marginalism. The Austrians are what the followers of Mises and Hayek call themselves. They call their method praxeology spelled with an e, not an i. -- This is a typical Austrian statement: **The proper starting point for considering the effects of a firm's existence is an imaginary economic equilibrium with no firm.** The fallacy here that underlies their entire methodology (as opposed to our methodology) is that it ignores the scientific concept of dynamic process. The question I should put to the generic praxeologist is this: Which came first, the chicken or the egg? The practitioner of the scientific method would answer, Neither, for life is a continuum that is an evolving dynamic process. Conceptually, a dynamic process has no beginning or end. It is continuous, though historically there may in fact have been a beginning and may well at some point end. God may well have said something like, Zap, here is an elephant and from then on there were elephants. That is purely a matter of fact from the historical past, not the logical past. There is no contradiction so long as we realize they both might be perspectives of the same reality--one poetic--one material. Both can be simultaneously true on their own terms. I am quite aware that praxeology rejects such positivism. It is not scientific to arbitrarily choose any single element from a dynamic process as a starting point, for that starting point becomes the axiom to the exclusion of everything else that determines the conclusion. You can come to an infinite number of conclusions by assuming an infinite number of starting points. The scientific approach is to relate the elements statistically against time, so that every observable process becomes the function of their singular commonality, time. Time is the one reality that ties everything in the ponderable world together, and makes them comprehensible. Therefore, there are no employment functions; there are no meaningful production functions. And there are no functions of functions, like the bastard Keynesian ISLM, that are meaningful in the scientific sense, because time is abstracted from their equation. -- The corollary to the above statement is this: **I have no idea what you mean by a consuming sector or a banking sector. There are consumers and there are bankers.** Translation: I have no idea what you mean by a forest. There are trees and there are bushes and there are weeds. Which ignores the reality there are also birds and insects and animals bordering the homes of human families--tens of thousands of them-- and fires that occur in devastating effect only in the reality we call forests, that can consume them all. -- Having made these general points, let me address more specifically some of the professor's earlier comments: **You seem to be saying that an increase in saving relative to consuming would cause a deepening of the structure of production.** That would assume that saving is a cause. It is true that there is saving, investment, development, production and consumption. They are elements of a continuous dynamic process that is creditary, not monetary. That is to say it is contractual in that it contemplates future performance. No one element can be considered to the cause of any other. Human beings may intervene at any point to achieve what they want to achieve. That intervention becomes the cause of the change. -- **More resources would be devoted to the production of capital goods and less to the production of consumer goods.** Implicit is the false assumption that there is no improvement to process, discovery or innovation and there is only a fixed quantity of resources available for exploitation. Let me give you a just two dramatic examples of
Re: [SOCIAL CREDIT] Permanently abundant resources?
***Does this mean that you do not regard public goods and inadequately defined property rights as important sources of market failure?*** Not necessarily, but the focus of our attention is the financial system. -- ***Does this mean that you advocate laws against the corporate form of enterprise -- i.e., what used to be called the joint stock company.*** I was not referring to corporate dividends but what social credit calls the national dividend. We are in favor of corporate dividends--the more the better. As to the corporate form of enterprise, it is one of the great innovations that arose in the seventeenth century, along with banking and insurance. In the final analysis, they are all variations upon the common theme--pooled resources and shared risk. Each contains in rudimentary form the essential elements of the others, so there is no fine dividing line between them. Having said that, the corporation is a human construct that may be adjusted and improved to serve our purposes. The founder of social credit, C. H. Douglas, said on more than one occasion that holding companies should be prohibited. By that he meant corporations that own corporations. In his time the most typical holding companies were banks. In the United States today that is prohibited, although it remains common practice in Germany and Japan, I believe. Now, there are corporations that own corporations that own corporations, Enron and Tyco being newsworthy recent examples. It becomes a question of accountability that is difficult if not impossible in such complex structures. Jeff Skilling, Enron's former CFO, in Congressional testimony described Enron's collapse as akin to a run on the bank. It was indeed. Unquestionably, there should be exceptions. When Douglas wrote eighty years ago there were no pension funds or beneficial insurance funds. Perhaps the matter of limiting liability should be revisited. The stockholders of the original joint- stock companies, some of which are still in business today, were personally liable for the firm's debts. Limiting liability might be more detrimental to free enterprise than beneficial. -- - Original Message - DATE: Mon, 27 Oct 2003 09:20:29 From: Pat Gunning [EMAIL PROTECTED] To: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Cc: [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: Yes, but the particular set of rules is a human construct. It is something other than a natural phenomenon, awaiting discovery. The market in which there is undeniably a hidden hand is the function of that human construct that we can improve by consciously changing the rules. Agreed. The focus of attention for social credit is the financial system, or more specifically the banking or monetary system. We attribute most market failure not to free enterprise per se, but the financial system under which free enterprise operates. So we generally support laissez-faire in markets but intervention in finance. Does this mean that you do not regard public goods and inadequately defined property rights as important sources of market failure? Unlike Keynesians or socialists, we advocate the payment of dividends directly to consumers and let them decide themselves how they will spend it. Does this mean that you advocate laws against the corporate form of enterprise -- i.e., what used to be called the joint stock company. We regard Say's Law to be invalid for anything other than a barter economy. -- Pat Gunning, Feng Chia University, Taiwan; Web pages on Praxeological Economics, Democracy, Taiwan, Ludwig von Mises, Austrian Economics, and my University Classes; http://www.constitution.org/pd/gunning/welcome.htm and http://knight.fcu.edu.tw/~gunning/welcome.htm Enter for a chance to win one year's supply of allergy relief! http://ad.doubleclick.net/clk;6413623;3807821;f?http://mocda3.com/1/c/563632/125699/307982/307982 This offer applies to U.S. Residents Only --^ This email was sent to: [EMAIL PROTECTED] EASY UNSUBSCRIBE click here: http://topica.com/u/?a84IaC.bcVIgP.YXJjaGl2 Or send an email to: [EMAIL PROTECTED] TOPICA - Start your own email discussion group. FREE! http://www.topica.com/partner/tag02/create/index2.html --^
Re: [SOCIAL CREDIT] Permanently abundant resources?
[EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: Yes, but the particular set of rules is a human construct. It is something other than a natural phenomenon, awaiting discovery. The market in which there is undeniably a hidden hand is the function of that human construct that we can improve by consciously changing the rules. Agreed. The focus of attention for social credit is the financial system, or more specifically the banking or monetary system. We attribute most market failure not to free enterprise per se, but the financial system under which free enterprise operates. So we generally support laissez-faire in markets but intervention in finance. Does this mean that you do not regard public goods and inadequately defined property rights as important sources of market failure? Unlike Keynesians or socialists, we advocate the payment of dividends directly to consumers and let them decide themselves how they will spend it. Does this mean that you advocate laws against the corporate form of enterprise -- i.e., what used to be called the joint stock company. We regard Say's Law to be invalid for anything other than a barter economy. -- Pat Gunning, Feng Chia University, Taiwan; Web pages on Praxeological Economics, Democracy, Taiwan, Ludwig von Mises, Austrian Economics, and my University Classes; http://www.constitution.org/pd/gunning/welcome.htm and http://knight.fcu.edu.tw/~gunning/welcome.htm --^ This email was sent to: [EMAIL PROTECTED] EASY UNSUBSCRIBE click here: http://topica.com/u/?a84IaC.bcVIgP.YXJjaGl2 Or send an email to: [EMAIL PROTECTED] TOPICA - Start your own email discussion group. FREE! http://www.topica.com/partner/tag02/create/index2.html --^
Re: [SOCIAL CREDIT] douglas audio recording: Wally answers
Bill, Many thanks for your previous comments and for your efforts with regard to preparing the Douglas file for downloading and playing in RealOne. I have downloaded and installed the program and downloaded the file. It sounds very good except where Douglas compares the making of money by banks to the making of bricks by brickmakers, etc. there are a couple of breaks or garbles which make it intelligible at this point about two-thirds of the way through the address. I have downloaded the file a second time with exactly the same results. So, I assume that the file must be damaged or corrupted from source. Would you like to try making another file for us to attempt to play? I notice that you dropped your earlier idea of making a slightly larger file compatible with Windows Media Player. My computer is really loaded with devices and programs and I am trying to minimize installation of additional programs. Is the file for Media Player not suitable for some reason at your end. Sincerely Wally - Original Message - From: [EMAIL PROTECTED] To: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Sent: Sunday, October 19, 2003 4:57 PM Subject: RE: [SOCIAL CREDIT] douglas audio recording Okay, that didn't work. Try this one. Launch this link by left clicking or copying into your browser address bar: http://www.sharemation.com/socredus/douglasaudio/ Then right-click the file link labeled douglas-1934.rmj Use the left button to choose Save Target As to the folder of your choice on your computer. It will take 15-20 minutes with a 56K modem. Then open with Real Player. _ Send instant messages to anyone on your contact list with MSN Messenger 6.0. Try it now FREE! http://msnmessenger-download.com --^ This email was sent to: [EMAIL PROTECTED] EASY UNSUBSCRIBE click here: http://topica.com/u/?a84IaC.bcPK30.d21rbGlu Or send an email to: [EMAIL PROTECTED] TOPICA - Start your own email discussion group. FREE! http://www.topica.com/partner/tag02/create/index2.html --^ --^ This email was sent to: [EMAIL PROTECTED] EASY UNSUBSCRIBE click here: http://topica.com/u/?a84IaC.bcVIgP.YXJjaGl2 Or send an email to: [EMAIL PROTECTED] TOPICA - Start your own email discussion group. FREE! http://www.topica.com/partner/tag02/create/index2.html --^
Re: [SOCIAL CREDIT] douglas audio recording: Wally answers
Thanks Joe, (and attention Bill) Inasmuch that you had difficulty but success through persevering, I will try again. I downloadedthe Media Player without difficulty and have played another file from a recent CBC broadcast (THIS IS ATTACHED FOR YOUR INTEREST)without any problems. I'm sure you will find this CBC item of interest and suggest that you attempt to present Social Credit to the author via his website. I have already sent a number of Social Credit documents to him in PDF format. I'll let you know if my next attempt to download the Douglas BBC talk is or is not successful. Wally - Original Message - From: [EMAIL PROTECTED] To: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Sent: Monday, October 20, 2003 9:44 PM Subject: Re: [SOCIAL CREDIT] douglas audio recording: Wally answers Hello Wally and Bill,I had trouble downloading the file last evening, the first time I tried, and again this morning. But my third attempt a little later went through fine. I didn't have any diffculty understanding Douglas in the section you mentioned, Wally. It wasn't garbled here. The audio quality of the whole speech was very good, and I'm grateful to you both for putting it on. Thanks again.Joe--^^--- This email was sent to: [EMAIL PROTECTED] EASY UNSUBSCRIBE click here: http://topica.com/u/?a84IaC.bcVIgP.YXJjaGl2 Or send an email to: [EMAIL PROTECTED] TOPICA - Start your own email discussion group. FREE! http://www.topica.com/partner/tag02/create/index2.html --^^--- 20030911THUR-COL.ram Description: PN Realaudio
RE: [SOCIAL CREDIT] Bitter comment (my ramblings)
Walter Hart wrote (on the federal-debts list): I read the Autobiography of Benjamin Franklin as a child many years ago. A penny saved is a penny earned. First, let me say that I believe it was Mr. Strong who 'voted' to keep this list mostly on S.S., as, in particular, he (and others) have appreciated the fine work by Mr. Davis -- a level of data and accuity that he valued. Second, in renaming this list, I only somewhat broadened its focus, to include matters of US obligations, including S.S. I particularly had in mind Mr. Catherwood, as he has a charge from his FEDERAL FISCAL POLICY FOUNDATION to address all manner of federal taxation, deficit, obligations and liabilities. S.S. is secure, only to the extent that it is either truly in a lock box or, if politicians continue to spend excess contributions, then S.S. is subject to all demands on the federal government. In that none of us know which, I hope that we can maintain discussions here that directly address S.S., and discussions that have implications for S.S. As all of you know, I have flung my doors open to looking at all debt (aka credit) and try to embrace federal, corporate, government (federal), government (other), and household, and matters that directly affect the magnitude of those, and matters that indirectly affec the magnitude of those. (It is either a blessing or a curse that I, myself, tend toward broader scopes.) So, with regard to my debt interests, I have curbed my broader interests to posts of my newsletter. *** Now, comes Mr. Hart. I have seen Mr. Hart ask very good questions to the Concord List (continued here). And, in his last posting, he says: I have this sense that we have lost the principles that kept us, as a nation, safe ... *** Indeed, as Mr. Krugman has a best seller partly on this topic, and as I have witnessed a wildness of spending and a lack of thrift, I quite agree, and I am afraid for this country. Is this general concern appropriate for this list? I would simply say, all things in moderation. I also wish to see messages that mainly address S.S. and whether S.S. can be protected, regardless of other forces. *** Mr. Hart asks, What do we do? 1. We need our knowledge and perspectives to inform the Concord Coalition. I have invited Mr. Zeeve, their primary analyst, to join this list. (We are also trying to resurrect more prior subscribers, but after hard nudging, the ball is back at Yahoo, and I will follow up on Monday.) I, in personal messages, have stated that I wish this list and the Concord Coalition not be a we vs. they. 2. What becomes of our hard work, here, otherwise? I know that we educate each other, at the very least. Does our collective wisdom reach further? This is very difficult to answer. To the extent discussion here, informs me, and, to the extent I embody that information in a newsletter, and disseminate that newsletter to a wider audience, there is that path. And, by the theory of 6 degrees of separation, there is the possibility, but certainly not the plausibility that our wisdom reaches everyone :) Can we do better at dissemination? Always. If you see a posting here that may either interest another list or someone in your addressbook, then, by all means send it along. 3. Now, specifically replying to Mr. Hart's question, there are two ways in which this nation is self-correcting. I. Top-down -- we elect presidents, senators, and representatives who listen to the issues we, the people, wish to be heard II. Bottom-up -- grassroots efforts have always been important in this country. So, write letters to local papers, find some aid associated with a local Rep., etc., and get his/her e-mail address or fax number. Be aware of what government committees either your State reps. or Federal reps. belong to. This reveals their interests and their influence Publish. Mr. Catherwood got an article into an accounting journal! I cite that in my debt summary. Mr. Catherwood does mailings. Identify someone who might be a patron to pay for press releases, expenses of writing, etc. I had a patron last year. It gave me the freedom to buy hundreds of books on money and finances. For $10/mo., you can go to the Foundation Grants web page and identify foundations in your geographic region that have funded, for example, economic development: http://www.fdncenter.org/ Perhaps one of you might step forward and pay for one or two months. The application can be in the name of Concerned Citizens for the Federal Debt, and we may then
RE: [SOCIAL CREDIT] swap
The correct citation for the Wired article on Julian Simon is at http://www.geocities.com/new_economics/malthusianism/doomslayer-simon.txt The NYT article on Lomborg is at http://www.geocities.com/new_economics/malthusianism/lomborg.txt Some parenthetical comments relating to these issues: The displacement of labor displaces the incomes that were formerly going to labor even if that labor is being displaced into alternative employment. That displaced income accrues to capital as increasing profits to the entrepreneurs who introduce the labor saving technology, but does not automatically translate into proportionally increasing income to the owners of capital. So the ownership solution is no solution at all. No fund exists from which full payout of earnings can be paid from profits inasmuch as profit accues to capital (or net worth) and does not exist in the form of money. A system with fully coopoerative ownership would require the social credit dividend as much as the present system to achieve technical efficiency in the financial sense inasmuch as the dividend is nothing an accounting adjustment to make everything mesh. The displacement of resources reduces the incomes of consumers exactly like the displacement of labor reduces the incomes of consumers in respect to the costs of production that are charged to consumers in retail prices, inasmuch as the displaced resources are owned by people who derive incomes through their ownership of the resources. Get advanced SPAM filtering on Webmail or POP Mail ... Get Lycos Mail! http://login.mail.lycos.com/r/referral?aid=27005 --^ This email was sent to: [EMAIL PROTECTED] EASY UNSUBSCRIBE click here: http://topica.com/u/?a84IaC.bcVIgP.YXJjaGl2 Or send an email to: [EMAIL PROTECTED] TOPICA - Start your own email discussion group. FREE! http://www.topica.com/partner/tag02/create/index2.html --^
Re: [SOCIAL CREDIT] Swap
Keith, I'm not particularly informed on Malthusianism pro or con, though I definitely have opinions on the subject. I was not even aware of the name Julain Simon when you accused me of being simonized. Abernethy was new to me. Some Internet searching found one or two of her essays, one of which mentioned one Julian Simon. Further searching found the Wired article on Simon which I've now copied to http://www.geocities.com/new_economics/malthusianism/doomslayer-simon . I've found that the Wired article inspired Bjorn Lomborg to study the subject, eventually resulting in his book, *The Skeptical Environmentalist*. A New York Times article on Dr. Lomberg is archived at http://www.geocities.com/new_economics/malthusianism/lomborg.txt It is easy to fall into the trap of thinking of social credit as unbridled consumerism. It isn't. The same process that is displacing labor is displacing every resource utilized in production, in terms of units being inputted in ratio to consumable production. That is demonstrable fact. Presently, much of what is produced is wasted because it doesn't get into the hands of consumers due to financial factors alone. So production has to be ramped up from what is should be to enable consumers to receive sufficient production useable to them in order to subsist. Ceteris paribus, with social credit, the waste due to financial factors is eliminated, enabling real production in principle to be less than it is today to maintain subsistence at the level it exists today. We would however expect to utilize the productive capacity freed by the elimination of waste to raise the real incomes of those presently in subsistence, and the incomes of the public in general. I cannot understand how even a reasonable Malthusian could oppose the elimination of waste. But the radical Malthusians say it is pointless because the world is already past the point of sustainability, and there's going be a massive reduction in the world's population no matter what we do. The only way the die-off could be avoided is through a planned but rapid reduction in the world's birth rate so that the population of the world is reduced to a third of what it now is. It is an extremely pessimistic perspective. I would prefer to look at the glass as being half-full rather than half-empty. -- As to the question regarding the banker's perception, it's not particularly rocket science or profound. Generally, in a competitive fractional reserve system, when a banker extends a loan, it results in a debit to his reserve (or clearing) bank account, because the recipient of the loan writes checks that are deposited in other banks. So he always has to attract depositors to his bank to enable him to make further loans. But those other banks are extending loans that result in deposits in his bank. It is this big picture that individual bankers can't see. The theorem that loans create deposits applies to the banking system as a whole, not any one individual bank. It is like a concert orchestra where the conductor is the central bank; the source of reserves is the central bank, which is the only bank in the system that writes checks for loans that clear back to itself. So the flow of loans-- with resultant deposits that function as money--is the flow of loans from the system as a whole, including the central bank. It is difficult for any one banker (including the central banker) to see that. Original Message Follows From: Keith Wilde [EMAIL PROTECTED] Reply-To: [EMAIL PROTECTED] To: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Subject: [SOCIAL CREDIT] Swap Date: Tue, 7 Oct 2003 09:15:46 -0700 My neglect of Bill Ryan's call for a contemporary review of Malthus' challenge to utopian schemers is not due to lack of interest. As signalled earlier, I have other tasks pressing on me at the moment, and I would like to clear the decks before taking on this important subject as it pertains to Social Credit. IN order to get there more quickly, I propose a swap of services: I need Bill's best exposition on how it is that the banking system collectively increases the money supply without the individual banker being aware that he has done so. There have been two or three of these over recent months, and I am asking Bill to just identify them for me by date so that I can go back to them. On my side, a couple of quick comments now, to suggest the orientation of my argument that Malthus' analysis has not been countered effectively by the passage of time--plus a partial report on my assignment re the Canadian money supply. The argument of Douglas against Malthus that we have seen in these exchanges has become known as the demographic transition among combattants over the population issue. Virginia Abernethy wrote a book in refutation of the demographic transition more than a dozen years ago, based on the years of research she had reviewed as editor of a journal on population. (It doesn't work inside the most wealthy
The BIG neutralizes the movement for reform - Re: [SOCIAL CREDIT] National Divid
the BIG effectively neutralizes the movement for reform. Dear Mr.Klink I read your e-mail couldn't agree more. The very SIZE of anything has a telling impact on its surroundings the environment. Social insitutions included. The great Leopold Kohr 'The Breakdown of Nations', Schumacher 'Small is Beautiful' John Papworth 'The 4th World Review URL: www.cesc.net all address the same vital point, that democracy to exist at all, has to be SMALL LOCAL in nature. And what's so good about democracy? Why it allows greater FREEDOM self-determination to all. Things are of course going in the wrong direction what with NAFTA, the E.U., and with the WTO/New recently envigorated NATO, all neeing more more money - from the citizen, who else? - to survive. Keep the warnings coming. Regards - Diamantis. PS Money too should be local too in the hands control of the people. Hence big centralised banks do a big DISservice for they distance they source from the user. LETS, time$'s, Ithaka Hours other 'communiy' currencies, do not indeed this accounts for their hue popularity, no? - - - Original Message - From: Wallace M. Klinck [EMAIL PROTECTED] To: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Sent: Friday, October 03, 2003 4:36 AM Subject: Re: [SOCIAL CREDIT] National Dividend Means Test?: Wally comments Thanks Jessop--I believe you do! Sincerely Wally - Original Message - From: [EMAIL PROTECTED] To: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Sent: Thursday, October 02, 2003 10:52 AM Subject: Re: [SOCIAL CREDIT] National Dividend Means Test?: Wally comments To all, but mainly to Bill and Wally Okay, chaps -- I hear you and will go straight for the main chance with no compromises. I mean it. :-) Jessop. - On Thursday 02 Oct 2003 9:54 am, you wrote: I agree essentially with Bill's comments below. Any attempt to institute a National Dividend on the basis of recovery involves taxation. Under a Social Credit dispensation, the Dividend is automatically cancelled when it passes back from the consumer to industry and the banks with adjustments in the National Credit Account. This idea of recovery is reminescent of William Aberhart's early misconception of Social Credit, later thankfully overcome. It resembles the disappearing money theories of the socialist economist Silvio Gesell. As H. E. Nicholls, as chief researcher for the Alberta Social Credit League (who was sequestered, and told what to do, in a back room in Social Credit League headquarters in Edmonton) once told me Douglas said that money already disappears too rapidly. Social Credit is not here to accomodate the orthodoxy (of the Left-Right nexus) because the latter is the problem, not the solution. Ours is a fresh new approach to hold up and stir the imagination--generate hope in a hopeless world. I believe there is an old saying that It takes a long spoon to sup with the Devil. This is the time in a country like South Africa (and yes, in the United States which faces a deepening financial abyss--as elsewhere) to be bold, clear and definintive--to inspire. When Social Credit attempts to accomodate orthodoxy the difference becomes blurred and Social Credit becomes absorbed and emasculated (remember the flirtation with the Labor Party in New Zealand). We stand for a NEW way--a NEW civilization. Alaska has no difficulty in paying all of its citizens a universal dividend (admittedly not a true Social Credit dividend)--indeed, I believe the program is immensely popular. Are South Aftricans really that different? Wally - Original Message - From: [EMAIL PROTECTED] To: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Sent: Thursday, October 02, 2003 12:03 AM Subject: Re: [SOCIAL CREDIT] National Dividend Means Test? ***| They are talking about a BIG paid from taxes. |*** Which is why it will never go anywhere or accomplish anything, because it would require either more taxes which are impossible to collect to fund the BIG, or the diversion of taxes already being collected from other programs that have entrenched constituencies that will not let them go. The BIG effectively neutralizes the movement for reform. ***| What I suggest is just a simpler way of allowing some to benefit from the dividend and others not. |*** The simplest way is to simply target the dividend in its initial implementation to those most in need--the first desideratum. Why make it so complicated? What pitiful excuses for revolutionaries are the present leaders of South Africa! And so unimaginative in a land that is inherently one of the richest in the world. This deplorable situation was recently reported in the New York Times
RE: [SOCIAL CREDIT] The Skewed US Income Distribution
To: A few who are friendly to, and the many who are stonewalling, my analysis of the structural reasons for the present condition of the US economy. Good day folks, I am much obliged to Ekky Irion for copying me on his Thu, 2 Oct 2003 post of a July 31 article by Stan Cox, AlterNet, on the skewed US income distribution. Stan Cox made an impressive presentation of the data by locating the median US income of $43,000/year in his home town of Salina, Kansas on US Interstate Route 70, and locating other data points at cities along route I-70 with a scale of $1,000/year per mile, as shown on Stan Cox's attached Incomemap.gif. For those of you who might want to make a different chart of the skewed US income distribution, the excerpts below include the major data points. While the high incomes receive most of the attention, I find the structural reasons, that allow the growing gap between rich and poor, as illustrated on attached Fig8.1.gif to be more interesting. Three of the most obvious reasons for the skewed US income distribution are pointed out in my comments below the excerpts from Stan Cox's article. ~~~ Begin excerpts ~~~ ~ Snip The median income was about $43,000 in 2002. the federal poverty level for a family of four in 2002 - about $18,000 - 95th percentile, 95 percent of households take in less than $150,000 a year. Ninety-nine percent of households make less than $374,000, Average income of the top 1% ($1,082,000) The George W. and Laura Bush family, reported a paltry $856,000 in 2002 income, The average income of major-corporation CEOs in 2002 was $7.4 million. The top 400 incomes (IRS year-2000 figures), averaged $174 million. ~~ Snip The distribution of wealth is even more wildly skewed than that of income; the 5% of households with the greatest net worth own almost 60% of the country's wealth. The income map doesn't have to be so distorted. This huge gulf between the rich and the rest of us is a recent phenomenon. From World War II up to 1979, incomes increased at about the same rate in all brackets. But from 1979 to 1997, the average annual income of the top 1% (after taxes) increased by 157%, or $414,000 in 1997 dollars. Over the same period, the income of the poorest 20% fell by $100. ~~~ Snip ~~ ~ Stan Cox is a plant breeder/geneticist and writer living in Salina, Kansas. ~ End excerpts from Stan Cox's article By happy coincidence, the right side of Fig8.1.gif covers the income range from $zero (at Wilson, KS) to almost $150,000/year, the 95 percentile of US households, (at Topeka, KS). If we consider expanding the chart of earned income by adding foldout pages, at $150,000/year/page, the 99 percentile ($374,000/year) would be on the left of page three. Notice that discretionary income on the chart is increasing rapidly after earned income exceeds the social security payroll cap at about $76,000/year. When household income reaches the 99 percentile the 13% SS payroll tax will be reduced to only 2.6% of earned income, and continues down for higher incomes. This is one reason for the growing gap between rich and poor. Notice also that the highest levels of debt service are paid by the large middle class (between Ellsworth, KS and Topeka, KS) and then declines rapidly at incomes above $150,000/year. The wealthy have less need to take on debt to pay for subsistence and higher education of dependents. The Washington Consensus pays only welfare and 1-12 education from the public revenue. I had the good fortune to complete my BS ME under the 1942 G. I. Bill which paid my tuition plus $65.00/month subsistence. So here is a second structural reason for the growing gap between rich and poor. Notice that a Basic Income Guarantee (BIG) in the amount of $5,000/year/dependent would open up the Discretionary Income of all households, by eliminating the expense of dependent subsistence shown by lines 1 to 6 on the chart. But notice also, that a children's allowance at $5,000/head, a much less expensive proposition, would expand household discretionary income down to the #1 line, which is the expense of supporting the worker him/herself. Why is 1-12 education paid from the public revenue at a rate of $6,500/year/head in the US, while child support at $5,000/year/head is charged to the parenting household budget in the US? Here then is the third structural reason why the rich get richer and the poor get poorer. There must be some powerful reason why Basic Income European Network (BIEN) and various US and Canadian activists have been promoting a Universal Basic Income (UBI) for the last twenty years, while Europe and Japan have used a dependant allowance since the 1940s to enable their economic miracles. But the reason why the above three reasons for the growing income
Re: [SOCIAL CREDIT] National Dividend Means Test?
***| They are talking about a BIG paid from taxes. |*** Which is why it will never go anywhere or accomplish anything, because it would require either more taxes which are impossible to collect to fund the BIG, or the diversion of taxes already being collected from other programs that have entrenched constituencies that will not let them go. The BIG effectively neutralizes the movement for reform. ***| What I suggest is just a simpler way of allowing some to benefit from the dividend and others not. |*** The simplest way is to simply target the dividend in its initial implementation to those most in need--the first desideratum. Why make it so complicated? What pitiful excuses for revolutionaries are the present leaders of South Africa! And so unimaginative in a land that is inherently one of the richest in the world. This deplorable situation was recently reported in the New York Times: Like most squatters, Thabang's mother, Mosele Malakoane, lives in a shack of caked mud, dung and rusty sheets of corrugated tin, its meager roof covered with black plastic weighted down by stones. Inside are a few sticks of wooden furniture, a shred of curtain hanging off a tiny window, a paraffin stove and the double bed she shared with her son. Thabang had two worn toys: a steam shovel and a small gray airplane. ***| I would be quite happy to give indiscriminately to all, but we will never achieve that. |*** Who says indiscriminate? And who says never? ***| In the South African political field we still have very strong feelings about the injustices of the past regime. There is still a strong desire for redress, which in effect means to withhold from the previously-privileged and give positions, status, services, social security, etc., to the previously disadvantaged. |*** And in doing so they have achieved a regime that in financial terms is substantially more orthodox than before. In this regard it is perhaps the most conservative regime in the world. In every statistical measure except for what we call in America call integration, the situation in South Africa is degrading. ***| We have an active Labour movement and a vibrant Communist Party whose constituencies are drawn from that previously-disadvantaged segment which constitutes about 90% of our population. |*** Not the ideologues and demagogues but the rank and file can be recruited to social credit, for it offers the real prospect of improving the situation. South Africa faces a fork in the road that will determine its destiny and perhaps the destiny of the world. One direction is increasing stagnation. One direction is increasing prosperity. It is up to us who see the truth to show the way because there's nobody else to do it. South Africa is at present in revolutionary ferment. It is a critical moment in history where bold leadership can make a real difference. ***| So they delisted. Their stated policy is that they are not out to make a profit, which is what shareholders would demand. |*** You still don't get it. The controlling block of shareholders names half the directors. The government probably ratifies their nominations for the other half. Original Message Follows From: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Reply-To: [EMAIL PROTECTED] To: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Subject: Re: [SOCIAL CREDIT] National Dividend Means Test? Date: Wed, 1 Oct 2003 15:56:41 +0200 A couple of points in response to Bill. [snipped] _ Share your photos without swamping your Inbox. Get Hotmail Extra Storage today! http://join.msn.com/?PAGE=features/es --^ This email was sent to: [EMAIL PROTECTED] EASY UNSUBSCRIBE click here: http://topica.com/u/?a84IaC.bcVIgP.YXJjaGl2 Or send an email to: [EMAIL PROTECTED] TOPICA - Start your own email discussion group. FREE! http://www.topica.com/partner/tag02/create/index2.html --^
Re: [SOCIAL CREDIT] National Dividend Means Test?: Wally comments
I agree essentially with Bill's comments below. Any attempt to institute a National Dividend on the basis of recovery involves taxation. Under a Social Credit dispensation, the Dividend is automatically cancelled when it passes back from the consumer to industry and the banks with adjustments in the National Credit Account. This idea of recovery is reminescent of William Aberhart's early misconception of Social Credit, later thankfully overcome. It resembles the disappearing money theories of the socialist economist Silvio Gesell. As H. E. Nicholls, as chief researcher for the Alberta Social Credit League (who was sequestered, and told what to do, in a back room in Social Credit League headquarters in Edmonton) once told me Douglas said that money already disappears too rapidly. Social Credit is not here to accomodate the orthodoxy (of the Left-Right nexus) because the latter is the problem, not the solution. Ours is a fresh new approach to hold up and stir the imagination--generate hope in a hopeless world. I believe there is an old saying that It takes a long spoon to sup with the Devil. This is the time in a country like South Africa (and yes, in the United States which faces a deepening financial abyss--as elsewhere) to be bold, clear and definintive--to inspire. When Social Credit attempts to accomodate orthodoxy the difference becomes blurred and Social Credit becomes absorbed and emasculated (remember the flirtation with the Labor Party in New Zealand). We stand for a NEW way--a NEW civilization. Alaska has no difficulty in paying all of its citizens a universal dividend (admittedly not a true Social Credit dividend)--indeed, I believe the program is immensely popular. Are South Aftricans really that different? Wally - Original Message - From: [EMAIL PROTECTED] To: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Sent: Thursday, October 02, 2003 12:03 AM Subject: Re: [SOCIAL CREDIT] National Dividend Means Test? ***| They are talking about a BIG paid from taxes. |*** Which is why it will never go anywhere or accomplish anything, because it would require either more taxes which are impossible to collect to fund the BIG, or the diversion of taxes already being collected from other programs that have entrenched constituencies that will not let them go. The BIG effectively neutralizes the movement for reform. ***| What I suggest is just a simpler way of allowing some to benefit from the dividend and others not. |*** The simplest way is to simply target the dividend in its initial implementation to those most in need--the first desideratum. Why make it so complicated? What pitiful excuses for revolutionaries are the present leaders of South Africa! And so unimaginative in a land that is inherently one of the richest in the world. This deplorable situation was recently reported in the New York Times: Like most squatters, Thabang's mother, Mosele Malakoane, lives in a shack of caked mud, dung and rusty sheets of corrugated tin, its meager roof covered with black plastic weighted down by stones. Inside are a few sticks of wooden furniture, a shred of curtain hanging off a tiny window, a paraffin stove and the double bed she shared with her son. Thabang had two worn toys: a steam shovel and a small gray airplane. ***| I would be quite happy to give indiscriminately to all, but we will never achieve that. |*** Who says indiscriminate? And who says never? ***| In the South African political field we still have very strong feelings about the injustices of the past regime. There is still a strong desire for redress, which in effect means to withhold from the previously-privileged and give positions, status, services, social security, etc., to the previously disadvantaged. |*** And in doing so they have achieved a regime that in financial terms is substantially more orthodox than before. In this regard it is perhaps the most conservative regime in the world. In every statistical measure except for what we call in America call integration, the situation in South Africa is degrading. ***| We have an active Labour movement and a vibrant Communist Party whose constituencies are drawn from that previously-disadvantaged segment which constitutes about 90% of our population. |*** Not the ideologues and demagogues but the rank and file can be recruited to social credit, for it offers the real prospect of improving the situation. South Africa faces a fork in the road that will determine its destiny and perhaps the destiny of the world. One direction is increasing stagnation. One direction is increasing prosperity. It is up to us who see the truth to show the way because there's nobody else to do it. South Africa is at present in revolutionary ferment. It is a critical moment in history where bold leadership can make a real difference. ***| So they delisted. Their stated policy is that they are not out to make a profit, which
Re: [SOCIAL CREDIT] National Dividend Means Test?: Wally comments
To all, but mainly to Bill and Wally Okay, chaps -- I hear you and will go straight for the main chance with no compromises. I mean it. :-) Jessop. - On Thursday 02 Oct 2003 9:54 am, you wrote: I agree essentially with Bill's comments below. Any attempt to institute a National Dividend on the basis of recovery involves taxation. Under a Social Credit dispensation, the Dividend is automatically cancelled when it passes back from the consumer to industry and the banks with adjustments in the National Credit Account. This idea of recovery is reminescent of William Aberhart's early misconception of Social Credit, later thankfully overcome. It resembles the disappearing money theories of the socialist economist Silvio Gesell. As H. E. Nicholls, as chief researcher for the Alberta Social Credit League (who was sequestered, and told what to do, in a back room in Social Credit League headquarters in Edmonton) once told me Douglas said that money already disappears too rapidly. Social Credit is not here to accomodate the orthodoxy (of the Left-Right nexus) because the latter is the problem, not the solution. Ours is a fresh new approach to hold up and stir the imagination--generate hope in a hopeless world. I believe there is an old saying that It takes a long spoon to sup with the Devil. This is the time in a country like South Africa (and yes, in the United States which faces a deepening financial abyss--as elsewhere) to be bold, clear and definintive--to inspire. When Social Credit attempts to accomodate orthodoxy the difference becomes blurred and Social Credit becomes absorbed and emasculated (remember the flirtation with the Labor Party in New Zealand). We stand for a NEW way--a NEW civilization. Alaska has no difficulty in paying all of its citizens a universal dividend (admittedly not a true Social Credit dividend)--indeed, I believe the program is immensely popular. Are South Aftricans really that different? Wally - Original Message - From: [EMAIL PROTECTED] To: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Sent: Thursday, October 02, 2003 12:03 AM Subject: Re: [SOCIAL CREDIT] National Dividend Means Test? ***| They are talking about a BIG paid from taxes. |*** Which is why it will never go anywhere or accomplish anything, because it would require either more taxes which are impossible to collect to fund the BIG, or the diversion of taxes already being collected from other programs that have entrenched constituencies that will not let them go. The BIG effectively neutralizes the movement for reform. ***| What I suggest is just a simpler way of allowing some to benefit from the dividend and others not. |*** The simplest way is to simply target the dividend in its initial implementation to those most in need--the first desideratum. Why make it so complicated? What pitiful excuses for revolutionaries are the present leaders of South Africa! And so unimaginative in a land that is inherently one of the richest in the world. This deplorable situation was recently reported in the New York Times: Like most squatters, Thabang's mother, Mosele Malakoane, lives in a shack of caked mud, dung and rusty sheets of corrugated tin, its meager roof covered with black plastic weighted down by stones. Inside are a few sticks of wooden furniture, a shred of curtain hanging off a tiny window, a paraffin stove and the double bed she shared with her son. Thabang had two worn toys: a steam shovel and a small gray airplane. ***| I would be quite happy to give indiscriminately to all, but we will never achieve that. |*** Who says indiscriminate? And who says never? ***| In the South African political field we still have very strong feelings about the injustices of the past regime. There is still a strong desire for redress, which in effect means to withhold from the previously-privileged and give positions, status, services, social security, etc., to the previously disadvantaged. |*** And in doing so they have achieved a regime that in financial terms is substantially more orthodox than before. In this regard it is perhaps the most conservative regime in the world. In every statistical measure except for what we call in America call integration, the situation in South Africa is degrading. ***| We have an active Labour movement and a vibrant Communist Party whose constituencies are drawn from that previously-disadvantaged segment which constitutes about 90% of our population. |*** Not the ideologues and demagogues but the rank and file can be recruited to social credit, for it offers the real prospect of improving the situation. South Africa faces a fork in the road that will determine its destiny and perhaps the destiny of the world. One direction is increasing stagnation. One direction is increasing prosperity. It is up to us
Re: [SOCIAL CREDIT] National Dividend Means Test?: Wally comments
Thanks Jessop--I believe you do! Sincerely Wally - Original Message - From: [EMAIL PROTECTED] To: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Sent: Thursday, October 02, 2003 10:52 AM Subject: Re: [SOCIAL CREDIT] National Dividend Means Test?: Wally comments To all, but mainly to Bill and Wally Okay, chaps -- I hear you and will go straight for the main chance with no compromises. I mean it. :-) Jessop. - On Thursday 02 Oct 2003 9:54 am, you wrote: I agree essentially with Bill's comments below. Any attempt to institute a National Dividend on the basis of recovery involves taxation. Under a Social Credit dispensation, the Dividend is automatically cancelled when it passes back from the consumer to industry and the banks with adjustments in the National Credit Account. This idea of recovery is reminescent of William Aberhart's early misconception of Social Credit, later thankfully overcome. It resembles the disappearing money theories of the socialist economist Silvio Gesell. As H. E. Nicholls, as chief researcher for the Alberta Social Credit League (who was sequestered, and told what to do, in a back room in Social Credit League headquarters in Edmonton) once told me Douglas said that money already disappears too rapidly. Social Credit is not here to accomodate the orthodoxy (of the Left-Right nexus) because the latter is the problem, not the solution. Ours is a fresh new approach to hold up and stir the imagination--generate hope in a hopeless world. I believe there is an old saying that It takes a long spoon to sup with the Devil. This is the time in a country like South Africa (and yes, in the United States which faces a deepening financial abyss--as elsewhere) to be bold, clear and definintive--to inspire. When Social Credit attempts to accomodate orthodoxy the difference becomes blurred and Social Credit becomes absorbed and emasculated (remember the flirtation with the Labor Party in New Zealand). We stand for a NEW way--a NEW civilization. Alaska has no difficulty in paying all of its citizens a universal dividend (admittedly not a true Social Credit dividend)--indeed, I believe the program is immensely popular. Are South Aftricans really that different? Wally - Original Message - From: [EMAIL PROTECTED] To: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Sent: Thursday, October 02, 2003 12:03 AM Subject: Re: [SOCIAL CREDIT] National Dividend Means Test? ***| They are talking about a BIG paid from taxes. |*** Which is why it will never go anywhere or accomplish anything, because it would require either more taxes which are impossible to collect to fund the BIG, or the diversion of taxes already being collected from other programs that have entrenched constituencies that will not let them go. The BIG effectively neutralizes the movement for reform. ***| What I suggest is just a simpler way of allowing some to benefit from the dividend and others not. |*** The simplest way is to simply target the dividend in its initial implementation to those most in need--the first desideratum. Why make it so complicated? What pitiful excuses for revolutionaries are the present leaders of South Africa! And so unimaginative in a land that is inherently one of the richest in the world. This deplorable situation was recently reported in the New York Times: Like most squatters, Thabang's mother, Mosele Malakoane, lives in a shack of caked mud, dung and rusty sheets of corrugated tin, its meager roof covered with black plastic weighted down by stones. Inside are a few sticks of wooden furniture, a shred of curtain hanging off a tiny window, a paraffin stove and the double bed she shared with her son. Thabang had two worn toys: a steam shovel and a small gray airplane. ***| I would be quite happy to give indiscriminately to all, but we will never achieve that. |*** Who says indiscriminate? And who says never? ***| In the South African political field we still have very strong feelings about the injustices of the past regime. There is still a strong desire for redress, which in effect means to withhold from the previously-privileged and give positions, status, services, social security, etc., to the previously disadvantaged. |*** And in doing so they have achieved a regime that in financial terms is substantially more orthodox than before. In this regard it is perhaps the most conservative regime in the world. In every statistical measure except for what we call in America call integration, the situation in South Africa is degrading. ***| We have an active Labour movement and a vibrant Communist Party whose constituencies are drawn from that previously-disadvantaged segment which constitutes about 90% of our population
RE: [SOCIAL CREDIT] Cartalism weak money and HPM
***/ I was referring to the situation which would exist if AMI proposals were adopted, not what happens now. \*** An important clarification. The greenbacks were indeed weak against bank credit and traded at a substantial discount in terms of specie. Banks would not accept them for deposit. Speculators purchased them with the expectation that they would eventually be redeemed with specie, which eventually did happen with the Specie Resumption Act of 1875. It was obvious who was boss from the git-go. They were declared to be legal tender for all debts except...interest on the public debt. -- ***/ Some extremists (greenbackers) envisage all gov expenditure being financed by unredeemable treasury notes. \*** It was not such an extremist position in the context of the times immediately following the Civil War. Government was a much smaller percentage of the total economy than it is now. It was thought that all money was government issued specie. There was little conception of the role of credit. Bank credit was thought to merely consist of banknotes backed one hundred percent by specie so it was thought to be merely proxy for specie, which of course we know it wasn't. The greenbacks could have substituted for specie if the banks had cooperated. What has happened within the division of labor of finance is that government has become excluded from that division--contrary to the assertions of the Moslerites. It didn't necessarily have to have happened that way. What we have now is central bank credit functioning as the monopoly source of quasi-specie within the division of labor of banking. It is what we call reserves which are required for inter-bank and inter-central bank account-settlement in the case of the U.S. dollar. It is spent into circulation by the central bank not for goods and services but for securities, therefore it does nothing to close the gap between prices and purchasing power resulting from the displacement of labor. There is no theoretical reason why government spending for goods and services needed by government could not serve the purpose of supplying reserves. It could not however be for all government spending; it would have to be limited to the amount needed for reserves. There is a third possibility: Instead of introducing reserves through the purchase of securities, the central bank could introduce reserves in the form of dividends directly to consumers. ***/ Whether as notes or deposits with the BofE, the (weak) money earns nothing. So everyone, including banks, tries to get rid of it by spending it. But it just bounces back, and inflation accelerates. \*** I disagree with this. It is the old velocity of circulation fallacy. The rate of inflation (ceteris paribus in the theoretically ideal economy) is directly proportional to the rate of injection of reserves in excess of the demand for reserves. There is no add-on effect whatever. There is no acceleration beyond the rate of injection. That is to say, the rate of inflation accelerates only if the rate of injection of reserves accelerates. Simply through the injection of reserves--through the right channels--you could engineer a constant inflation rate without fear of acceleration. Or, it could be zero inflation with full employment. There doesn't have to be a Phillips' Curve trade-off. Orthodox theory is that you have to err on the side of restraint--keeping the economy in the permanent state of underperformance--due to the fear that inflation would quickly accelerate out of control destroying the economy. There are more complete explanations for the historical examples of accelerating inflation. original message Date: Mon, 29 Sep 2003 08:35:29 +0100 From: Geoffrey Gardiner [EMAIL PROTECTED] Subject: Re: [gang8] Re: Cartalism weak money and HPM Chris, I was referring to the situation which would exist if AMI proposals were adopted, not what happens now. Some extremists (greenbackers) envisage all gov expenditure being financed by unredeemable treasury notes. Whether as notes or deposits with the BofE, the (weak) money earns nothing. So everyone, including banks, tries to get rid of it by spending it. But it just bounces back, and inflation accelerates. I said the notes would exist for ever because Zarlenga does not approve the mopping up with bond issues, the normal practice, though you will recall that in TTM I doubted if the sterilising effect was as strong as thought by monetarists I know this is standard Friedmanite doctrine, but not all monetarist theory is wrong. Geoff _ Get McAfee virus scanning and cleaning of incoming attachments. Get Hotmail Extra Storage! http://join.msn.com/?PAGE=features/es --^ This email was sent to: [EMAIL PROTECTED] EASY UNSUBSCRIBE click here: http://topica.com/u/?a84IaC.bcVIgP.YXJjaGl2 Or send an email to: [EMAIL PROTECTED] TOPICA -
Re: [SOCIAL CREDIT] National Dividend Means Test?
, of course, you persist in assuming that there are some fundamental laws of nature which show that man has to remain permanently uncomfortable to get his daily bread whether he can get it without being uncomfortable or not. (Laughter). *If you are going to have huge wealth producing organisations and you do not take the wealth away from these organisations, then that wealth is wasted and the whole machine is clogged and rots and you have the situation that you have at the present time. Broadly speaking, that is really all that is necessary to solve, the first beginning in order to end the present terrible situation.* *Do not let anyone suppose that I am saying that there will be no problems left in the world to solve when this problem is monetary depression is solved. Of course, there will; I have not the slightest doubt there will. What I do say without any fear of contradiction by anyone who will base their argument upon a knowledge of facts, is that until this problem is solved you have no hope whatever of solving any other. (Applause). *I endorse heartily the words of the writer of this article in the London Chamber of Commerce journal: All the efforts towards international goodwill and co-operation and so forth are just windy nonsense as long as you have a situation which makes it inevitable that in order to maintain the first law of life, which is self-preservation, you have to scramble among yourselves for a diminishing proportion of an insufficient number of tickets which are issued by an organisation which fundamentally has no right to the power.* *And you will have to solve that problem or without the slightest double it will solve you. (Continued applause). [A vote of thanks was moved by Miss M. H. M. King, M.A., and seconded by Rev. P. Paris.] -- Original Message Follows From: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Reply-To: [EMAIL PROTECTED] To: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Subject: Re: [SOCIAL CREDIT] National Dividend Means Test? Date: Sun, 28 Sep 2003 18:23:17 +0200 On Friday 26 Sep 2003 9:30 pm, Bill wrote: Okay, so in South Africa, unlike the United States, the first desideratum remains operative. Your job is to convince the authorities to give the social credit idea a chance Thanks, Bill -- this concession represents a breakthrough for all of us :-) By assessment you mean taxation, don't you? Yes -- you render your Return of Income and the Receiver works out what you owe him and then responds with the Tax Assessment, and you send him a cheque. But grab back is just redistribution through taxation which makes it something other than social credit. I can't be understanding you here. The National Dividend (or shall we call it the BIG?) is not included in your Income so is not subject to tax, but the ¨grab back¨ is added in to the Receiver´s calculation of the Tax you owe him. Once in his hands, the grab back amount is not fed into the general Revenue Account but goes once more into the Social Credit account to go out in further payments of National Dividends (BIG´s). We know more about working with and bringing pressure on the authorities. All we need is a demonstration project somewhere in the world to get the snowball rolling. This is what I´m after, but I don´t know ff I´m big enough to swing it. But I do keep plugging away at it. Jessop. _ Help protect your PC. Get a FREE computer virus scan online from McAfee. http://clinic.mcafee.com/clinic/ibuy/campaign.asp?cid=3963 --^ This email was sent to: [EMAIL PROTECTED] EASY UNSUBSCRIBE click here: http://topica.com/u/?a84IaC.bcVIgP.YXJjaGl2 Or send an email to: [EMAIL PROTECTED] TOPICA - Start your own email discussion group. FREE! http://www.topica.com/partner/tag02/create/index2.html --^
Re: [SOCIAL CREDIT] National Dividend Means Test?
On Wednesday 24 Sep 2003 8:02 pm, Bill wrote: I object to the very term means test as being exceptionally demeaning. I regret I introduced the term inadvisedly, more in amazement at Douglas implying it, than in approval: I also hold no brief for such a thing as a Means Test, even for a Social Pension. However, we have to confront actual situations, as Keith has wisely said: At some point, however, proponents for the mplementation of Social Credit via national policy changes will have to confront reality. I caused some consternation by saying: PS. I like the idea of either not paying to those who have no need, or grabbing it back via the tax system. I am talking from a real situation. Here in South Africa there is strong advocacy for a Basic Income Grant payable to all citizens (from taxes, of course.) For a BIG of a mere R100 per month, projections say it will cost R44-billion per annum out of a total Fiscal Budget of just over R300-billion, which seems unaffordable. But R25-billion of the payments could be grabbed back from all tax payers by a simple addition to their assessment, which brings the BIG almost within reach without increasing taxes. R100 is only about 15% of a bread-line income, but many, many people in rural areas make do with less even than R100 per month. Now, I would be naive to believe that we are going to change South Africa over to a Social Credit system overnight: in the meantime families are at near-starvation levels. The one major thing coming out of Douglas´ proposals is that value (SC) is available to be moneterized and paid out as debt-free purchasing power to every citizen. That could fund the BIG without requiring any major changes to current ´wisdom´, and the advocates of the ´grab-back´ policy could also be happy. I have read enough about Social Credit to believe that it offers a solution to many problems arising from the money system and the selfish thinking of those who control it, but I will be long-gone from this earth before it comes into play. Why not take one step at a time and allow one victory to open the way for the next one? Even God has to handle things in that way, so why not we? Jessop. --- On Wednesday 24 Sep 2003 8:02 pm, you wrote: Douglas never advocated a means test. The draft plan was an appendix to some editions of *Social Credit* first published in 1924, and should be interpreted in the context of the first desideratum as social credit is being introduced. See: http://www.geocities.com/socredus/compendium/money_and_the_price_system.txt The distribution by way of dividends of a certain amount of purchasing power, sufficient at any rate to attain a certain standard of self-respect, of health and of decency, is the first desideratum of the situation. The first desideratum is already addressed in the United States, if not in South Africa, which was most definitely not the case in the 1920 and early 1930s. I object to the very term means test as being exceptionally demeaning. It shouldn't be the responsibility of the recipient to prove he is qualified to receive it. His application should be taken to be prima facie evidence that he is. The burden should be on the bureaucrats to prove that he isn't. The dividend from its most rudimentary inception is a matter of right, not privilege. --^ This email was sent to: [EMAIL PROTECTED] EASY UNSUBSCRIBE click here: http://topica.com/u/?a84IaC.bcVIgP.YXJjaGl2 Or send an email to: [EMAIL PROTECTED] TOPICA - Start your own email discussion group. FREE! http://www.topica.com/partner/tag02/create/index2.html --^
Re: [SOCIAL CREDIT] National Dividend Means Test?
Jessop, I'm confused by this sentence of yours, ***] But R25-billion of the payments could be grabbed back from all taxpayers by a simple addition to their assessment, which brings the BIG almost within reach without increasing taxes. [*** By assessment you mean taxation, don't you? ***] Now, I would be naive to believe that we are going to change South Africa over to a Social Credit system overnight: in the meantime families are at near-starvation levels. [*** Okay, so in South Africa, unlike the United States, the first desideratum remains operative. Your job is to convince the authorities to give the social credit idea a chance, perhaps by organizing public opinion and bringing political pressure on the authorities. It is an emergency situation. They will say, okay, we will credit such and such an amount and see what happens if only to prove your harebrained ideas are wrong. So you will be operating under an effective budget restraint of that relatively small such and such amount that the authorities are willing to grant experimentally. So targeting the lower income levels with that such and such amount is not inappropriate in the beginning, and does not contradict the ultimate goal of equality. The point is to demonstrate that social credit is not inflationary and does not result in the doomsday scenario that the orthodox predict. You can start with a tiny little amount of social credit that targets those persons most in need, and gradually ratchet it up. As you ratchet it up you build constituencies for it that won't let it go, believe me. ***] The one major thing coming out of Douglas´ proposals is that value (SC) is available to be monetized and paid out as debt-free purchasing power to every citizen. That could fund the BIG without requiring any major changes to current ´wisdom´, and the advocates of the ´grab-back´ policy could also be happy. [*** But grab back is just redistribution through taxation which makes it something other than social credit. I can't be understanding you here. You seem to contradict yourself in conflating debt-free purchasing power with grab back. What am I missing? ***] but I will be long-gone from this earth before it comes into play [*** Well, it is true that any one of us could be dead before the day is out. But don't be so pessimistic, Jessop. I am convinced that a properly packaged social credit could spark public opinion quite rapidly. We know a lot more about public relations and organizing popular support than was available to Douglas in the 1930s. We know more about working with and bringing pressure on the authorities. All we need is a demonstration project somewhere in the world to get the snowball rolling. Original Message Follows From: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Reply-To: [EMAIL PROTECTED] To: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Subject: Re: [SOCIAL CREDIT] National Dividend Means Test? Date: Fri, 26 Sep 2003 10:11:30 +0200 On Wednesday 24 Sep 2003 8:02 pm, Bill wrote: I object to the very term means test as being exceptionally demeaning. I regret I introduced the term inadvisedly, more in amazement at Douglas implying it, than in approval: I also hold no brief for such a thing as a Means Test, even for a Social Pension. However, we have to confront actual situations, as Keith has wisely said: At some point, however, proponents for the mplementation of Social Credit via national policy changes will have to confront reality. I caused some consternation by saying: PS. I like the idea of either not paying to those who have no need, or grabbing it back via the tax system. I am talking from a real situation. Here in South Africa there is strong advocacy for a Basic Income Grant payable to all citizens (from taxes, of course.) For a BIG of a mere R100 per month, projections say it will cost R44-billion per annum out of a total Fiscal Budget of just over R300-billion, which seems unaffordable. But R25-billion of the payments could be grabbed back from all tax payers by a simple addition to their assessment, which brings the BIG almost within reach without increasing taxes. R100 is only about 15% of a bread-line income, but many, many people in rural areas make do with less even than R100 per month. Now, I would be naive to believe that we are going to change South Africa over to a Social Credit system overnight: in the meantime families are at near-starvation levels. The one major thing coming out of Douglas´ proposals is that value (SC) is available to be moneterized and paid out as debt-free purchasing power to every citizen. That could fund the BIG without requiring any major changes to current ´wisdom´, and the advocates of the ´grab-back´ policy could also be happy. I have read enough about Social Credit to believe that it offers a solution to many problems arising from the money system and the selfish thinking of those who control it, but I will be long-gone from this earth before it comes into play. Why not take one step
Re: [SOCIAL CREDIT] questions for Keith Wilde
I seem to have sent an arrow to the Achilles heel of Social Credit! It is a cornucopian scheme after all, based in armchair deduction of what could be and denying accumulating mountains of empirical measurement. At least as represented here by Bill, who appears to have been Simonized. From what I have learned so far of Social Credit I am prepared to believe that its implementation could go far to mitigating the unsustainable trajectory of the human juggernaut. That is a sufficient justification for continuing with my education in the subject. At some point, however, proponents for the mplementation of Social Credit via national policy changes will have to confront reality. I suggest that the best forum for doing that will be Don Roper's facility at Communications for a Sustainable Future. I'm not ready for that debate yet, however, for I am still laboring through an evaluation of The Lost Science of Money, which has taken me off on several interesting side tracks and into reading that I should have done many years ago. Malthus' dilemma is the quintessence of economic thought and the core of all the social sciences as well as biology and ethics. That was my conclusion after twenty years' study once I had switched from the surface problems of money income and property distribution and into the field of natural resources policy. I have offered to send you my exposition of the topic at that point, and have found my remaining copies of the journal. Give me a mailing address and I will post it off right way. - Original Message - From: [EMAIL PROTECTED] To: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Sent: Wednesday, September 24, 2003 10:22 PM Subject: Re: [SOCIAL CREDIT] questions for Keith Wilde ***] No, the Malthusian issue does not reduce to optimism vs. pessimism. I think you didn't read me carefully enough on the nature of the dilemma. [*** Yes it does. I say that it does. Malthusians are tunnel-vision pessimists. They are the people who Douglas was talking about who reach conclusions from false premises who never let the thought enter their minds that their premises might be invalid. ***] I picked up that notion from remarks of yours over past weeks. It relates to your comments below about establishing borders. Without closed borders ISTM that the social credit solutions would be defeated by leakage. The rest of the world operates today as a safety valve (mine and sink) for G7 countries. Why would that relationship not continue, to some degree, after social credit were implemented in G7? [*** I don't understand at all what you're saying here. The 'rest of the world' operates today as a 'safety valve' (mine and sink) for G7 countries. How? Why? I think I know what you mean by the terms. By mine you mean we take their resources and by sink we send them our waste. I think that's what you mean, at any rate. But how and why? It is not what defeats social credit. It is what social credit will defeat. ***] Of course we do: Pay bigger subsidies to American and French farmers so the food can be dumped in Amazonia. [*** This is getting more and more bizarre, Keith. American and French farmers do not slash and burn. With improving technology fewer and fewer resources are consumed with increasing output. Can't you see-- with tunnel vision you cannot--that agriculture by the methods used in France or America has far, far less negative impact on the environment per unit produced that does slash and burn anti-technology in Amazonia? ***] I have no doubt that vast improvement is possible, but that will not revoke the Malthusian principle. [*** The Malthusian principle is entirely fallacious. It does not exist to be revoked. It is merely an assertion to be refuted. ***] It's a situation that requires eternal vigilance and a lot of social discipline. [*** Social discipline. What do you want, Keith, a benevolent Hitler with his euthanasia of useless eaters and life that is unworthy of life with the recycling of hair from the cadavers like good little tree huggers that are so, so concerned about waste? ***] That latter part my not be compatible with social credit political philosophy? [*** It is not. ***] If you are relying on this statement as empirical fact, you have some surprises coming from more recent research in the United States. (Virginia Abernethy at Vanderbilt University). [*** I just read Dunhedin in the last couple of days, Keith. It was entirely new to me. The argument regarding Malthus isn't novel but possibly was somewhat so sixty-nine years ago as an answer to Malthusianism. I'm sure it wasn't original to Douglas but remains a standard argument against Malthusianism today. I indeed would like to see empirical evidence to the contrary. I will indeed look up Abernathy at Vanderbilt. ***] Maybe you have forgotten that war and pestilence are the other two positive checks. AIDS is your ally, not to mention
Re: [SOCIAL CREDIT] questions for Keith Wilde
to be passed about as a form of money, and that is the direct ancestor of the modern bank note, and the modern bank note takes it value from the signature of the cashier, who is the descendant of the goldsmith, and the signature is, as it was before, in the bottom right hand corner of the note, which is just a receipt. Now you will notice that at that point the creation of money passed from the owner of the wealth to the custodian of the wealth, but it still remained the convention that every receipt represented some piece of wealth which had been deposited with the goldsmith, or the banker as we will now call him. However, the goldsmith found--the banker found--that these receipts remained out a long time, and very often were changed from hand to hand, and were never used to draw out the plate at all, so he got the bright idea of issuing two or three receipts for one piece of gold, and those receipts passed from hand to hand and worked perfectly quite satisfactorily, as lone as three owners of one receipt did not present them at once for one piece of plate--if they did the banker went into liquidation. (Laughter). That was the existing convention of the banking system until, say, time of the Great War. It was assumed, and it was stated, for instance, on a bank note, that so far as the Bank of England notes were concerned, they contained the statement--I quote from memory--I promise to pay on demand the sum of five pounds in gold, and anybody who had a £5 note, could go to the Bank of England and get five golden sovereigns at any time--you cannot do that now--and the convention was that these were nothing but receipts, and that if a man had a cheque book on which he could draw those deposits, that those deposits were some way or other represented by something which was called tangible wealth, and he could draw it out if he wanted to. Well, at the end of July, just before the outbreak of the Great War, a bank rush was started. It was not doubt done from what we call enemy sources and everybody rushed to the banks in order to exchange their cheques or their notes for gold. They did not know what they were going to do with the gold when they got it, but for some mysterious reason they thought they would be better off it they got the gold for themselves. They all went at once, and there was what was called a run on the banks, and every bank in Britain was bankrupt within twenty-four hours, including the Bank of England. [through first paragraph page nine original pdf document] Original Message Follows From: Keith Wilde [EMAIL PROTECTED] Reply-To: [EMAIL PROTECTED] To: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Subject: Re: [SOCIAL CREDIT] questions for Keith Wilde Date: Thu, 25 Sep 2003 10:22:12 -0700 I seem to have sent an arrow to the Achilles heel of Social Credit! It is a cornucopian scheme after all, based in armchair deduction of what could be and denying accumulating mountains of empirical measurement. At least as represented here by Bill, who appears to have been Simonized. From what I have learned so far of Social Credit I am prepared to believe that its implementation could go far to mitigating the unsustainable trajectory of the human juggernaut. That is a sufficient justification for continuing with my education in the subject. At some point, however, proponents for the mplementation of Social Credit via national policy changes will have to confront reality. I suggest that the best forum for doing that will be Don Roper's facility at Communications for a Sustainable Future. I'm not ready for that debate yet, however, for I am still laboring through an evaluation of The Lost Science of Money, which has taken me off on several interesting side tracks and into reading that I should have done many years ago. Malthus' dilemma is the quintessence of economic thought and the core of all the social sciences as well as biology and ethics. That was my conclusion after twenty years' study once I had switched from the surface problems of money income and property distribution and into the field of natural resources policy. I have offered to send you my exposition of the topic at that point, and have found my remaining copies of the journal. Give me a mailing address and I will post it off right way. _ Frustrated with dial-up? Get high-speed for as low as $29.95/month (depending on the local service providers in your area). https://broadband.msn.com --^ This email was sent to: [EMAIL PROTECTED] EASY UNSUBSCRIBE click here: http://topica.com/u/?a84IaC.bcVIgP.YXJjaGl2 Or send an email to: [EMAIL PROTECTED] TOPICA - Start your own email discussion group. FREE! http://www.topica.com/partner/tag02/create/index2.html --^
Re: [SOCIAL CREDIT] questions for Keith Wilde
of wealth which is created and kept full and increasing by a decreasing number of operators who are working upon something that we call the heritage of civilisation--they are working on machines and by the use of power and things of that kind, of process and organisation, which are the accumulated results of the inventions and the administration and the organisation of large numbers of people, many or most of whom are now dead. You have here a sort of idea which we recognise in our patent laws when we allow a many to say, This idea is mine--and for 14 years, during which he has to pay a tax on it even to call it his--but after 14 years it is common property; and these things which produce the best part of this enormous production of wealth in the modern world, are a cultural inheritance which is the property of all of us. Take such a very simple case--you might say, such an unsuitable subject--as wheat. Now I dare say a number of you know that the extent of the wheat- growing capacity of Canada has been enormously increased by the production of things like chemical fertilizers--wheat which can be grown so quickly that the short six weeks' summer of the extreme high latitudes enables that wheat to ripen. That is an excellent factor by which we increase the wheat producing capacity of the world. [through second to last paragraph page 6 of pdf document] Original Message Follows From: Keith Wilde [EMAIL PROTECTED] Reply-To: [EMAIL PROTECTED] To: [EMAIL PROTECTED] CC: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Subject: Re: [SOCIAL CREDIT] questions for Keith Wilde Date: Tue, 23 Sep 2003 14:19:34 -0700 I knew this would happen, so my comments were cryptic and partial, as is this reply--for the same reason - Original Message - From: [EMAIL PROTECTED] To: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Sent: Tuesday, September 23, 2003 9:06 AM Subject: [SOCIAL CREDIT] questions for Keith Wilde ***] A weakness in his approach to this subject is reflected here in his comments about induction, deduction and Malthus [*** Keith, will you please expand on this. You can't just leave us hanging like this. Well, you can, but I hope you don't. I am an unrepentant malthusian, having found all counter arguments to be trivial, wishful thinking in comparison to the profound observations that inspired Charles Darwin as well as much economistic thinking. My best effort on this was published quite a long time ago, but send me your mailing address and I will try to find a copy among the boxes I have been trying to organize in spurts of activitiy from time to time over recent months. (And then keep bugging me.) ***Michael Lane has gone far to correcting the careless comments (in this speech) about induction and deduction [*** What does he (or you) mean by careless comments? Every time I have encountered someone who claimed to be a thorough-going inductivist I have found him sneaking in assusmptions, hunches, hoary dogmas that were at some time the product of armchair deduction. Douglas does not appear to be an exception. I had an exchange with Michael over this topic some time ago, and I think it was in this public place. He affirmed that my preferred way of describing the process (following Popper) is actually almost identical to what Francis Bacon himself said when describing the inductive method and claiming its superiority. Douglas may well have done a better job on this subject in other places, but in this cases his characterization seems extreme. ***] and Michael's effort to focus on a small scale application of the social credit solution does address what I regard as Douglas' malthusian error. [*** What is his malthusian error? Douglas appears to have addressed his message to industrialized, democratic societies of western Europe, the United States and English speaking Dominions of the then British Empire. His insistence on actual abundance based on cultural inheritance seems to apply mainly to them, with the rest of the world ignored and operating mainly (but implicitly) as a safety valve. Post-World War II experience and the current context of globalization does not permit this implicit safety valve, and the pressure of people on resources, environments, immune systems and even cultural inheritances is manifested daily. I do agree that th eimplementation of Douglas solutions could mitigate these pressures, by reducing the policy reliance on jobs, jobs, jobs, but I have no iea of how to properly quantify the effect on overall consumption of biospheric resources. And since it now seems impossible to implement a social credit solution in a borderless world, Michael's effort to experiment on a small scale seems like an inevitable step--although my knowledge of the general social credit idea is stil too weak to venture a forecast on the prospects. _ Instant message during games with MSN Messenger 6.0. Download it now FREE! http://msnmessenger-download.com
Re: [SOCIAL CREDIT] National Dividend Means Test?
Douglas never advocated a means test. The draft plan was an appendix to some editions of *Social Credit* first published in 1924, and should be interpreted in the context of the first desideratum as social credit is being introduced. See: http://www.geocities.com/socredus/compendium/money_and_the_price_system.txt The distribution by way of dividends of a certain amount of purchasing power, sufficient at any rate to attain a certain standard of self-respect, of health and of decency, is the first desideratum of the situation. The first desideratum is already addressed in the United States, if not in South Africa, which was most definitely not the case in the 1920 and early 1930s. I object to the very term means test as being exceptionally demeaning. It shouldn't be the responsibility of the recipient to prove he is qualified to receive it. His application should be taken to be prima facie evidence that he is. The burden should be on the bureaucrats to prove that he isn't. The dividend from its most rudimentary inception is a matter of right, not privilege. Original Message Follows From: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Reply-To: [EMAIL PROTECTED] To: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Subject: Re: [SOCIAL CREDIT] National Dividend Means Test? Date: Tue, 23 Sep 2003 09:35:52 +0200 On Monday 22 Sep 2003 7:31 pm, Bill wrote: ***] I like the idea of either not paying to those who have no need [*** Why? ***] or grabbing it back via the tax system. [*** Why? It´s a long story and I will come back on it later. My P.S. ties in with something else Douglas says, along with something being advocated in this country. But at this stage I´m afraid the P.S. has become a bit of a redherring. What I really am interested in is Douglas´ statement that ¨No payments of the national dividend will be made except to individuals, and such payments will not be made where the net income of the individual for personal use, from other sources, is more than four times that receivable in respect of the national dividend.¨ Did Major Douglas continue to advocate what is essentially a Means Test for receiving the National Dividend, or did this Proposal for Scotland represent a side-track? Jessop. -- Original Message Follows From: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Reply-To: [EMAIL PROTECTED] To: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Subject: [SOCIAL CREDIT] National Dividend Means Test? Date: Mon, 22 Sep 2003 16:55:55 +0200 I find this paragraph from * Social Credit, Part III: The Design of Economic Freedom APPENDIX* rather interesting. Any comment? * * * ** * * DRAFT SOCIAL CREDIT SCHEME FOR SCOTLAND Any administrative change in the organisation of the Post Office should specifically exclude transfer of the money and postal order department and the savings bank. No payments of the national dividend will be made except to individuals, and such payments will not be made where the net income of the individual for personal use, from other sources, is more than four times that receivable in respect of the national dividend. The national dividend will be tax-free in perpetuity, and will not be taken into consideration in making any returns for taxation purposes, should such be required. Except as herein specified this dividend will be inalienable. * * * * * * Seems to contradict some thinking expressed on this list. Did Douglas recant at some later stage? Jessop. PS. I like the idea of either not paying to those who have no need, or grabbing it back via the tax system. _ Share your photos without swamping your Inbox. Get Hotmail Extra Storage today! http://join.msn.com/?PAGE=features/es --^ This email was sent to: [EMAIL PROTECTED] EASY UNSUBSCRIBE click here: http://topica.com/u/?a84IaC.bcVIgP.YXJjaGl2 Or send an email to: [EMAIL PROTECTED] TOPICA - Start your own email discussion group. FREE! http://www.topica.com/partner/tag02/create/index2.html --^
Re: [SOCIAL CREDIT] questions for Keith Wilde
- Original Message - From: [EMAIL PROTECTED] To: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Sent: Wednesday, September 24, 2003 10:19 AM Subject: Re: [SOCIAL CREDIT] questions for Keith Wilde Suffice it to say that Douglas was an unrepentantanti-Malthusian as am I. At the same time I am aconservationist. It is not a contradiction in termsbut the difference in perspective between pessimismand optimism. No, the Malthusian issue does not reduce tooptimism vs. pessimism. I think you didn't read me carefully enough on the nature of the dilemma. Look at the rain forest of Amazoniathat is being slashed and burned. The people who areslashing and burning are using a grossly inefficientagricultural technique that predates civilization.They are doing it to survive in a system in a worldthat has displaced them from the industrial system inwhich they are no longer needed. Not sure what you are driving at here, but I have a hunch, which can wait until further down. No. We are not talking about "deduction" versus"induction" but the *inductive method* which is tochallenge and test not only your deductions from yourpremises, but the very premises themselves. Thatmeans that you do indeed "sneak" in "assumptions,hunches" and "hoary dogmas" that are the product of"armchair deduction." The less pessimisticcharacterization of that is inspiration. Withoutthat there is no innovation and we remain stuck inthe past. OK ***] His insistence on actual abundance based oncultural inheritance seems to apply mainly to them,with the rest of the world ignored and operatingmainly (but implicitly) as a safetyvalve. [***I must insist that you explain what you mean by"safety valve" in this context. I picked up that notion from remarks of yours over past weeks. It relates to your comments below about establishing borders. Without closed borders ISTM thatthe social credit solutions would be defeated by leakage.The "rest of the world" operates today as a "safety valve" (mine and sink) forG7 countries. Why would that relationship not continue, to some degree,after socialcredit were implemented in G7? The culturalinheritance is a resource available to anyone andeveryone in the world. Surely we know how to routeefficiently produced food to the people who areslashing and burning and destroying Amazonia, so theydon't have to slash and burn. Of course we do: Pay bigger subsidies to American and French farmers so the food can be dumped in Amazonia. The abundance is bothactual and realizable. It is not only labor butnatural resources that are being displaced from theproductive process--ever greater output in terms ofinput. I'd like to see your figures to demonstrate lessened impact on resource supplies and biospheric sinks. I have no doubt that vast improvement is possible, but that will not revoke the Malthusian principle. And just because the principle prevails doesn't mean that life and work cannot go on pleasantly in spite of it.It's a situation that requires "eternal vigilance" and a lot of socialdiscipline. That latter part my not be compatible with socialcredit political philosophy? That process is being impeded by negative, ifI might say, Malthusian, attitudes, particularly inregard to the financial system that could make whatis physically possible financially possible for thepeople of the whole world. Show me how a Malthusian attitude guides or motivates the intransigent guardians of the financial system. (Show me yours, and I might tell you about mine.) ***] since it now seems impossible to implement asocial credit solution in a borderless world [***In a borderless world, yes, which is why we areagainst "globalization." We want sovereign nationsto act like sovereign nations. We want borders thatare borders. By awakening and smelling the coffee,nations like, say, Ecuador, could take charge of thesituation and rectify matters within their ownborders--which doesn't fix things in the rest of theworld, but does set the example for the rest of theworld. If that is the agenda, then my reservations are substantially mitigated. I have copied the paragraph immediatley below from the Douglas speech you have reproduced here. If you are relying on this statement as empirical fact, you have some surprises coming from more recent research in the United States. (Virginia Abernethy at Vanderbilt University). But it is not raw numbers that count so much as impact per capita, and that is rising everywhere. I do believe the raw numbers problem is easing off, but that does not modify the Malthusian principle. Maybe you have forgotten that war and pestilence are the other two positive checks. AIDS is your ally, not to mention the occasional despotic terminator. The thing began, of course, some time ago, with thetheories of a gentleman by the name of Malthus, whohad a theory that the
Re: [SOCIAL CREDIT] questions for Keith Wilde
. That does mean you do have to have sufficient resources within your borders to pull it off. That does mean that small states must amalgamate and consolidate to become truly sovereign in a more perfect and sustainable whole. The ideal model is the United States of America, which provided for the admission of new territories and states. The Constitution prohibited tariffs on exports, but permitted tariffs on imports. For the first century most federal revenues would derive from tariffs. There would be free trade between the states, with shared values and law between them. Manifest Destiny to the Pacific would go through the Southwest or the Northwest. A continental nation with free trade internally, behind a wall of tariffs. Abundant resources within its borders to accomplish anything that needed to be accomplished. Original Message Follows From: Keith Wilde [EMAIL PROTECTED] Reply-To: [EMAIL PROTECTED] To: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Subject: Re: [SOCIAL CREDIT] questions for Keith Wilde Date: Wed, 24 Sep 2003 22:42:41 -0700 - Original Message - From: [EMAIL PROTECTED] To: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Sent: Wednesday, September 24, 2003 10:19 AM Subject: Re: [SOCIAL CREDIT] questions for Keith Wilde Suffice it to say that Douglas was an unrepentant anti-Malthusian as am I. At the same time I am a conservationist. It is not a contradiction in terms but the difference in perspective between pessimism and optimism. No, the Malthusian issue does not reduce to optimism vs. pessimism. I think you didn't read me carefully enough on the nature of the dilemma. Look at the rain forest of Amazonia that is being slashed and burned. The people who are slashing and burning are using a grossly inefficient agricultural technique that predates civilization. They are doing it to survive in a system in a world that has displaced them from the industrial system in which they are no longer needed. Not sure what you are driving at here, but I have a hunch, which can wait until further down. No. We are not talking about deduction versus induction but the *inductive method* which is to challenge and test not only your deductions from your premises, but the very premises themselves. That means that you do indeed sneak in assumptions, hunches and hoary dogmas that are the product of armchair deduction. The less pessimistic characterization of that is inspiration. Without that there is no innovation and we remain stuck in the past. OK ***] His insistence on actual abundance based on cultural inheritance seems to apply mainly to them, with the rest of the world ignored and operating mainly (but implicitly) as a safety valve. [*** I must insist that you explain what you mean by safety valve in this context. I picked up that notion from remarks of yours over past weeks. It relates to your comments below about establishing borders. Without closed borders ISTM that the social credit solutions would be defeated by leakage. The rest of the world operates today as a safety valve (mine and sink) for G7 countries. Why would that relationship not continue, to some degree, after social credit were implemented in G7? The cultural inheritance is a resource available to anyone and everyone in the world. Surely we know how to route efficiently produced food to the people who are slashing and burning and destroying Amazonia, so they don't have to slash and burn. Of course we do: Pay bigger subsidies to American and French farmers so the food can be dumped in Amazonia. The abundance is both actual and realizable. It is not only labor but natural resources that are being displaced from the productive process--ever greater output in terms of input. I'd like to see your figures to demonstrate lessened impact on resource supplies and biospheric sinks. I have no doubt that vast improvement is possible, but that will not revoke the Malthusian principle. And just because the principle prevails doesn't mean that life and work cannot go on pleasantly in spite of it. It's a situation that requires eternal vigilance and a lot of social discipline. That latter part my not be compatible with social credit political philosophy? That process is being impeded by negative, if I might say, Malthusian, attitudes, particularly in regard to the financial system that could make what is physically possible financially possible for the people of the whole world. Show me how a Malthusian attitude guides or motivates the intransigent guardians of the financial system. (Show me yours, and I might tell you about mine.) ***] since it now seems impossible to implement a social credit solution in a borderless world [*** In a borderless world, yes, which is why we are against globalization. We want sovereign nations to act like sovereign nations. We want borders that are borders. By awakening and smelling the coffee, nations like, say, Ecuador, could take charge of the situation and rectify matters within their own borders--which doesn't fix
Re: [SOCIAL CREDIT] National Dividend Means Test? Ultimately, absolutely not!
Attention: Jessop (and Others) The National Dividend is an unconditional inheritance due to each citizen. It is to be paid to everyone regardless of age, sex, economic circumstances or any other consideration--to millionaires and paupers, who have a right to dispose of it as they see fit. Social Credit presupposes Abundance wherein there is sufficiency for all in an environment that accommodates diversity of individuals and individual fortunes. Social Credit does not stand for equality but rather quality--except for equality before the law and for the DIVIDEND ITSELF. Equality of incomes would only occur if labor ceased in any way to be a factor and cost of production. Until that theoretical condition transpires, total incomes would in principle be earned variably and supplemented by increasing universal and equal Dividends. Douglas made a couple of early interim proposals which allowed for a brief transitionary period regarding the introduction of Social Credit policy in order, as I understand it, to avoid short term negative human responses resulting from conditioning by the old dispensation. He deals with the Dividend in The Monopoly of Credit (first published in 1931 and revised or reissued on later occasions): See Chapter 9, DIVIDENDS FOR ALL--not for SOME. How do you tell someone what is their inheritance? An inheritance is not negotiated or dictated by a third party. The Dividend emanates from the increments of free association functioning according to natural (or Divine) law. It comes from God and/or nature. It is not determined or dictated by authoritarian political decisions to be imposed upon individuals. To make selective dividends is a socialist policy--not a Social Credit policy. It assumes that the state has the right of dictatorial policy in this matter. IT HAS NO SUCH RIGHT AT ALL! The Dividend is to make the individual independent to the extent of the Dividend (working with the Compensated Price)--in other words to effect the Just Price as a modern application of the medaieval concept of the jus pretium. Perhaps the most important forms of independence is to be free from threat of disinheritance and abuse by the State itself--so that every man (or woman) shall sit under their own fig tree and none shall make them afraid. So the State disapproves of your political views--religious views? Or decides by some politically or allegedly morally motivated factors that your otherwise impartial and statistically determined Dividend should be altered to serve some sectional interest. Does it then have the right to deprive you of your dividend, in part or in whole? Talk about the thin edge of the wedge! The Dividend should be constitutionally guaranteed and anyone who attempts to interfere with this absolute right should be subject to severe penalties and any attempt to deny any citizen of this natural and constitutional right should be resisted with our very lives. We cannot allow the State to appropriate the National Dividend to build monuments of glory to itself--an almost inevitable consequence of the political process unmoderated by genuine economic democracy, which it is the purpose of the Dividend and Compensated Price to effect. Any policy designed to issue selective National Dividends is based upon the old dispensation of scarcity economics--not the economics of Christian Abundance. Sorry Jessop--but no fiddling with the National Dividend! Think about the nature of the Dividend. It is something received by RIGHT and not as a matter of privilege. If someone wishes to donate their National Dividend to some cause of choice AFTER RECEIVING IT, that is of course their own business. Sincerely Wally - Original Message - From: [EMAIL PROTECTED] To: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Sent: Monday, September 22, 2003 8:55 AM Subject: [SOCIAL CREDIT] National Dividend Means Test? I find this paragraph from * Social Credit, Part III: The Design of Economic Freedom APPENDIX* rather interesting. Any comment? * * * ** * * DRAFT SOCIAL CREDIT SCHEME FOR SCOTLAND Any administrative change in the organisation of the Post Office should specifically exclude transfer of the money and postal order department and the savings bank. No payments of the national dividend will be made except to individuals, and such payments will not be made where the net income of the individual for personal use, from other sources, is more than four times that receivable in respect of the national dividend. The national dividend will be tax-free in perpetuity, and will not be taken into consideration in making any returns for taxation purposes, should such be required. Except as herein specified this dividend will be inalienable. * * * * * * Seems to contradict some thinking expressed on this list. Did Douglas recant at some later stage? Jessop. PS. I like the idea of either not paying to those who have no need, or grabbing it back via the tax system.
Re: [SOCIAL CREDIT] addendum: george and the greenbackers
Catching up on my reading: While following your exchange with Ed Dodson I read the final section of George's posthumously published magnum opus, The Science of Political Economy (dedicated, incidentally, to its sponsor, Tom L. Johnson). The manuscript ended with Book V on money still not fully finished, but before he died the author was able to affirm that except for refinements on Wages, Interest and Rents, the subjects had been mainly covered as planned. (Says the editor, H.G. Jr.) I can't remember reading a more satisfying explanation of the nature, functions and likely evolution of the instruments of money and credit (which, George explained, almost certainly preceded money itself). it would not be appropriate from this single text (49 pp) to label George as a greenbacker. On the other hand, some of the rationale he provides could certainly be quoted to support government as a critical actor in giving value to money. And it is obvious that other sections of this book are strongly reflected in The Lost Science of Money. One example is George's disdain for the approach of the Austrian school. On the other hand, his exposition often seems on the verge of endorsing the position of Bohm-Bawerk that interest is the reward of waiting, in a way that almost over-rides Aristotle and his scholastic heirs on the issue of usury as the unnatural breeding of money. (This would not be supportive of Zarlenga's position.) - Original Message - From: William B. Ryan [EMAIL PROTECTED] To: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Sent: Tuesday, September 16, 2003 1:15 PM Subject: [SOCIAL CREDIT] addendum: george and the greenbackers For the moment I'll retract somewhat from my statement that the Georgists didn't endorse Bryan, and reserve my opinion on the relationship between George and the greenbackers for the moment pending further research. Virtually every claim that George was a greenbacker I have found sources back to Zarlenga, but that doesn't mean he wasn't a greenbacker ipso facto. George did refer sometimes to greenbackers in his addresses to drive home certain points about the single tax having a higher priority than financial reform, that I know, which would seem to infer he was something other than a greenbacker. I have found two or three sources that say that George did endorse Bryan that have no obvious link to Zerlenga. One example: ***] Bryan moved to bring other silverites into his coalition: fusion of radicals Populist Party (Tom Watson as VP) National Silver Party Single Taxers of Henry George Rev. W. D. P. Bliss's Christian Socialists Broad gauge Prohibitionists [*** Here, the single-taxers are classified by the writer among the other silverites. No mention here that among the fusion were the various greenbacker parties that endorsed Bryan and were prominently and officially in the fusion which is a significant omission, to my mind, that calls into question the degree of scholarship displayed. It is news to me that the Georgists were considered to be silverites. Even Zarlenga describes George as being a greenbacker which is a whole 'nother animal from the populists though they were kindred in spirit. As I have said, I think calling George a greenbacker is a stretch. I think it is true that radicals in general were invited to join the fusion coalition and that many did so officially. Note: the correct spelling of granger is without the i. _ Compare Cable, DSL or Satellite plans: As low as $29.95. https://broadband.msn.com --^ This email was sent to: [EMAIL PROTECTED] EASY UNSUBSCRIBE click here: http://topica.com/u/?a84IaC.bcVIgP.YXJjaGl2 Or send an email to: [EMAIL PROTECTED] TOPICA - Start your own email discussion group. FREE! http://www.topica.com/partner/tag02/create/index2.html --^
Re: [SOCIAL CREDIT] newspeak and the South African Reserve Bank
Bill Yes, I have been there and have read the document. I can´t disagree with you. What comes to mind is something Douglas said somewhere that Democracy does no constitute rule by the people because the Delegates themselves are not experts and are entirely in the hands of the Departmental bureaucrats. You said in your email: Since its establishment, the Bank has always been privately owned and today has some 650 shareholders. There is something about the shareholding that I do not understand. In private hands, there are (only) 2million issued shares (prescribed by law), with a One Rand face value, and with a maximum annual dividend of ten cents per share. The issued shareholding is therefore only R2million --- a tiny fraction of what would be the full Market Capitalization of the Bank. No individual person may hold more than ten thousnad shares. I don´t know what would be the full Authorised Share Capital, but if the voting at the Annual General Meeting is weighted according to shareholdings, even if all the private shareholders were in agreement, they could not carry an opposed motion in normal circumstances. Now this is where you can perhaps enlighten me. At the last AGM, a shareholder proposed that 10% of net profits be paid as dividend to the shareholders. On this years results, the dividend per One Rand share would jump to R9.39, and the shareprice would immediately jump in sympathy to about R100. The motion was carried by the meeting, but it would have to be ratified by Parliament. As a citizen (I am not a shareholder), I object and wrote to the Minister of Finance as follows:- Dear Mr Manuel, In a report in Finance Week of 13 August 2003, I read of the intention of [a shareholder] to propose to the board of the South African Reserve Bank that 10% of the profits be distributed to shareholders instead of to the Bank´s Statutory Reserves. This would apparently require Parliamentary approval. Mr Manuel, please do not allow this to happen. It is hard to understand why the Reserve Bank should have private shareholders in the first place, except perhaps to provide a body to elect the seven of the directors not appointed by the Government. Apart from this, the participation in the Bank´s affairs of private shareholders and their capital cannot add any value to the Bank. The defined annual dividend of not more than 10 cents a share to the holders of the 2million shares is already suficient to satisfy the need to have that body of private shareholders. That these shareholders should now receive dividends amounting to 10% of profits is completely unreasonable. It is purely opportunistic. The Reserve Bank belongs to all of us in South Africa; not to a priveleged few. Mr Manuel, you have the interests of all South Africans at heart. Please do not allow this travesty of simple justice in our country. Sincerely, H J Sutton * * * * * * * * * * * * My letter has been acknowledged and a reply promised, but I presume it will take a while. If an amending Bill is published for public comment, I will respond. Jessop. --- --^ This email was sent to: [EMAIL PROTECTED] EASY UNSUBSCRIBE click here: http://topica.com/u/?a84IaC.bcVIgP.YXJjaGl2 Or send an email to: [EMAIL PROTECTED] TOPICA - Start your own email discussion group. FREE! http://www.topica.com/partner/tag02/create/index2.html --^
Re: [SOCIAL CREDIT] newspeak and the South African Reserve Bank
You might remember that in making a point, Douglas said the one thing he didn't object to with banks was their dividends, for they are purchasing power. As a general matter we want all citizens to effectively become equal shareholders of the Reserve Bank who receive dividends in supplement to their incomes. In the United States, the Fed's shares are not traded but held by member banks, which are automatically shareholders. Now, the member banks have shareholders so the beneficial ownership is evidently more indirect in the US than SA. This from the Reserve Bank's site http://www.reservebank.co.za/ : ***] As a result of the delisting of the South African Reserve Bank (the Bank) from the list of the JSE Securities Exchange South Africa (the JSE) on 2 May 2002, the Bank deemed it necessary to make the undermentioned documentation available to the general public and its shareholders in order to be of assistance when using the Over-the-Counter Share Transfer Facility (OTCSTF), which provides for a facility to trade in the Bank's shares and which was implemented on 3 June 2002. Messrs A Jooste (+ 27 12 313 3350 ) or E Brand (+ 27 12 313 3061) may be contacted should further information be required in this regard. [*** Jessop, I have an assignment for you. Please ring these fellows up and ask if Reserve Bank stock is available for purchase, and at what price. Original Message Follows From: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Reply-To: [EMAIL PROTECTED] To: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Subject: Re: [SOCIAL CREDIT] newspeak and the South African Reserve Bank Date: Sat, 20 Sep 2003 14:29:12 +0200 Bill Yes, I have been there and have read the document. [snipped] _ Get a FREE computer virus scan online from McAfee. http://clinic.mcafee.com/clinic/ibuy/campaign.asp?cid=3963 --^ This email was sent to: [EMAIL PROTECTED] EASY UNSUBSCRIBE click here: http://topica.com/u/?a84IaC.bcVIgP.YXJjaGl2 Or send an email to: [EMAIL PROTECTED] TOPICA - Start your own email discussion group. FREE! http://www.topica.com/partner/tag02/create/index2.html --^
Re: [SOCIAL CREDIT] Major Douglas on the Land Question: Wally
***] How can Douglas, being so competent on one of the two fundamental natural monopolies, be so wrong about the second? It sounds like a bicycle mechanic, expert on back wheels, describing a square wheel for the front. [*** That is an excellent metaphor. As a bicycle mechanic, Douglas was aware of the front and didn't ignore it. As a bicycle mechanic, Henry George and his followers, with a very few exceptions like Stephen Zarlenga, are completely oblivious to the back. Original Message Follows From: Janos Abel [EMAIL PROTECTED] [snipped] _ Get MSN 8 Dial-up Internet Service FREE for one month. Limited time offer-- sign up now! http://join.msn.com/?page=dept/dialup --^ This email was sent to: [EMAIL PROTECTED] EASY UNSUBSCRIBE click here: http://topica.com/u/?a84IaC.bcVIgP.YXJjaGl2 Or send an email to: [EMAIL PROTECTED] TOPICA - Start your own email discussion group. FREE! http://www.topica.com/partner/tag02/create/index2.html --^
