Bill Ryan's arguments in his discussion with Joe Thomson suggest that that first trench can be ignored. He suggests that free will implies an openness to rational persuasion. A utopian sentiment if I ever heard one! And I know very well that Bill has sufficient experience to understand that boneheads also have free will.
Unfortunately, that first trench is not only wide but also deep. And unless I have missed something very big, the remnants of Douglas followers have not taken up the torch in a reputably persuasive fashion.
Hello Keith,
There would be no one more happy than I if that 'first trench' didn't have to be taken. That someone with a far greater knowledge of economics than most of us will ever possess, Bill Ryan himself perhaps, could convince the powers-that-be that there was merit in the Social Credit economic ideas, and the philosophy behind them. And that they should be given an honest, objective, and thorough study, and even possibly a trial somewhere. But I think a study of the experience in Alberta and elsewhere indicates this isn't going to happen. Social Credit is highly unlikely to come to pass this way, largely for the same reasons it wasn't allowed to be tried there then.
Douglas himself made a very rational case of persuasion in the 1920's and early '30's. No one, to my knowledge, could prove positively that his concepts wouldn't work, or wouldn't be beneficial to most people. But his opponents did try, and they're still occasionally trying. (Gary North's self-described 'scholarly study' Salvation Through Inflation was a recent attempt. Though 'pulp-fiction' would be a more apt description of that effort , in my opinion!). So we keep coming back to that 'first trench'. And in regards to the 'anti-semitism' allegation as the reason for failure, we are looking at that with a rather more enlightened viewpoint now than was prevalent generally in Douglas's time. When there was a widespread, officially sanctioned prejudice against Jews in many places. So I don't personally think that would have been much of a factor in those years prior to the war.
As for the second part of your comments above, it is true that Social Crediters haven't made great headway. And there are a great many reasons for that, but I would say one of the primary ones in Canada was the attempt to compromise the basic Douglas concepts when it was thought the 'political party' route was the quickest way to success. Once that path was started down, it was increasingly difficult to avoid more and more 'compromise', until Social Credit in the Party form often bore scant resemblence to anything put forth by C H Douglas. This is still a problem, though it may become less so in the future.
Joe
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