| Subject: | [socialcredit] Dividend in Social Credit and Geonomy | | Date: | Wednesday, March 15, 2006 16:45:33 (EST) | | From: | Triumphofthepast <Triumphofthepast @...com>
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Money is a vote. Since he who pays the piper calls the tune, we can say that the consumer/citizen has a RIGHT to pay the piper - to liquidate all costs as costs of living. The social credit National Dividend takes its justification from the difference in increase between unpaid costs of living on the one hand and money in our pockets on the other. For example, from 1998 to 2001 in my country, unpaid costs of living increased by 875 billion, money our pockets by 678.1 billion.* (We also have an idea what causes this.) To exercise our proper vote would have required an increase of money in our pockets by 29% over the three-year period, or 9.7% per year. That is the justification of a National Dividend.
I argued in a previous e-mail that this Dividend INCLUDES the dividend (fruits of the land) that would be owing due to land (Nature) as a factor in production because it is based on counting ALL the fruits derived from ALL factors of production. It isn't just land alone in which we have by right a beneficiary interest (a money vote).
It isn't necessary to ask how the Dividend will be "funded." (How is the political right-to-vote "funded"?) The National Dividend transfers consumer goods and services from producer-organizations (which can't use them) to consumer-individuals (who can). Such a transfer is not called a tax or dues or anything like that by the producer: it is called a SALE and is a measure of SUCCESS of the producer-organization. Its success is to be CHOSEN by the money-vote. It would be the same for producer-organizations that administer land (Nature). Give the consumer-citizen his full franchise (vote), and his choosing of the fruits will put the land (Nature) in the best hands. That is the social credit way.
Jeff Smith, on the Geonomics website, states: "More efficient than trying to capture wealth downstream, after the elite has accumulated it, is to capture wealth upstream, preventing an elite from forming. . . . Land dues . . . capture rent upstream, preventing the concentration of wealth. . . . It'd be more practical to not give milk to the [lion] cub in the first place." In other words, it is a pre-emptive action designed to discourage concentrated ownership.
This resembles Belloc's distributist proposal. (Belloc proposed to curb monopolies by taxing big companies to subsidize small ones.) While it is one step above trying to redress inequities in income after the fact, it is still a direct, crude, ham-fisted approach to the problem.
It is also a fact that the dues proposed would be a cost of production, which would have to be recovered in prices. You can say that the consumer-citizens got the benefit of the dues and so can pay the prices, but then it is not obvious what the point of it all was. It certainly won't make everyone richer.
Douglas's indirect solution is superior. It is indirect in that doesn't act on elites/producer-organizations directly but believes that free consumer choice of the fruits of production, brought about by giving consumer-citizens their full money-vote-franchise will automatically organize production (including administration of land-Nature) into the right-size units. In other words, God may have made lions for a reason.
*For the source of these statistics, see Triumph of the Past, May 2005
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Dividend in Social
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