| Subject: | [socialcredit] Martin Hattersley | | Date: | Saturday, July 1, 2006 13:37:37 (-0700) | | From: | William B. Ryan <w_b_ryan @.....com>
|
| In reply to: | Message 4222 (written by Martin Hattersley) |
For those new subscribers who are unfamiliar with the
name, "Hattersley," I've appended below an article
Martin published a decade ago, with important insights
into the history of Social Credit and the Canadian
Province of Alberta. Fair use is claimed. Martin has
had a distinguished career in the law, and also in his
"second" career as clergyman in the Anglican Church,
which is associated historically with the Church of
England. We are honored that Martin participates in
our discussions.
I will have only a very brief comment in point of
clarification regarding today's posting:
"If this capital investment were financed by
shareholder savings, then shareholders would
temporarily abstain from consumption, for the sake of
big returns on capital when the plant goes into
production. However, today's big developments are
financed by bank lending."
----------------------------------------------------
The Douglas theory does not contemplate the
elimination of bank credit, which it regards as
necessary, but rather its moderation through
appropriate oversight, coupled with the dividend and
retail discount in supplement.
From an address from the early 1920s, published in
Warning Democracy in 1931:
"If I have an income of £500 per annum and I save, as
the phrase goes, £100 per annum of this sum, either by
the simple process of putting it in a bank, or by the
investment of it in an insurance policy, I decrease my
expenditure by 20 per cent., and I certainly provide
myself with money for use at some future time. But
there is no physical saving corresponding to this
money saving. In fact, owing to the interconnection
of the financial system with the producing system,
there is probably an actual destruction of wealth due
to the fact that I do not spend the whole of my
income. More goods would have been drawn from the
shops, more orders would have been given to the
manufacturers to replace those goods, and consequently
a real ability to produce more goods per unit of time
would have been created, probably by an extension of
manufacturing facilities, had I spent my income. But
if I save my money, only one of two things can
possibly happen in the world of actualities: either
goods which have been produced will not be bought and
will therefore be wasted, or in anticipation of the
fact that I should not buy them they will never have
been produced..."
C. H. Douglas, *Warning Democracy: Addresses and
Articles, 1920-1931*, (London: C. M. Grieve, 1931),
pp. 56-57
--- Martin Hattersley <hattersleyjm@interbaun.com>
wrote:
Keith -
The problem that Social Credit endeavours to tackle is
that one identified by Douglas in the first place -
that in a society that progressively uses more and
more capital in its productive system, the time is
progressively lengthened between when effort is put in
(to create the capital and infrastructure) and when
the product is made available and sold on the market.
Recently, for instance, I read a news story of an
Oilsands development in Northern Alberta, that would
employ around 500 workers for about 5 years to set up
a plant, which thereafter would produce oil for at
least ten years with a staff of only 22 persons.
If this capital investment were financed by
shareholder savings, then shareholders would
temporarily abstain from consumption, for the sake of
big returns on capital when the plant goes into
production. However, today's big developments are
financed by bank lending. This means an enormous
inflation of spending power (and therefore price
inflation) when new bank credit is used to pay the
salaries of workers on capital projects, and an
enormous deficiency of purchasing power when
construction workers have been laid off, and the cost
of the capital plant has to be repaid to the bank
through depreciation.
In Alberta today, the situation has become almost
unreal, with over full employment, rapidly rising
prices, and frantic economic activity, financed by
borrowing and debt (including consumer debt).
Today's economic orthodoxy, as it seems to me, is to
do a kind of tightrope act:
1. We rely on "full employment" to distribute
incomes.
2. Therefore, we need a sufficient amount of
capital development that does not place goods
immediately on the market to keep everyone working and
therefore provided with an income. (Armaments and wars
will do, financed by National Debt, for want of
alternatives).
3. We regulate the amount of such development by
controlling the rate of interest. A higher rate will
choke off the amount of capital formation; a lower one
will encourage it - particularly the bank mortgage
financed housing industry.
4. The result is a desperate economic need for ever
increasing expansion, currently running slap bang into
the limitaions of a finite terrestrial ecology.
5. It also results to a "weakest to the wall"
economy, where so much employment is expended on
production that does not immediately provide wealth,
that the rich keep getting richer, and the poor
continue as poor as ever.
6. Finally, this system can only survive by
continual inflation and loss in the value of the
monetary unit.
Douglas's proposal (which I believe did not
particularly propose modification of the existing
banking system), was
1. To provide incomes to all, without the necessity
of employment, through a supplementary income from a
National Dividend.
2. To balance the imbalance between effort put in
(and wages distributed) and prices of goods and
services reaching the market for sale, through a Just
Price system (visualized as a kind of sales Tax in
reverse).
3. To put the process of creation of credit, and so
the balance between production cost and consumer
ability to buy, on a scientific and statistical basis,
through a National Credit Office.
It's not rocket science, just common sense!
Martin Hattersley
1970-10123-99 St.,
EDMONTON AB CANADA
Phone (780)423-4081;Fax(780)425-5247
e-mail: hattersleyjm@interbaun.com
----------------------------------------------
Our Late Premier
by Martin Hattersley
(c) April 1996 J.M.Hattersley
-----------------
It is said that the Greek philosopher, Diogenes,
wandered about the earth carrying a candle, looking to
find an honest man.
I wonder whether, in Ernest C. Manning, late Premier
of Alberta, whose funeral took place last month, he
might have found one.
My first meeting with Manning was also my first
introduction to Alberta - and my first acquaintance
with below zero (Fahrenheit) temperatures. A twenty
year old University student, I had flown twenty eight
hours from England in a piston-engined North Star, via
Shannon, Goose Bay, Montreal, Toronto, Thunder Bay,
Winnipeg, Regina and Calgary, finally to arrive in the
wooden terminal of the old Municipal Airport, with
ringing ears and unsteady step, after an incredibly
bumpy ride northward from Calgary in a Trans Canada
Airlines DC-3. Now, I was attending the funeral of my
father, and one of the persons at that bitingly cold
graveside, as the final prayers were said, was this
tall, rather reserved figure in a long black overcoat,
the Premier, E.C.Manning.
Our family's interest in Alberta was understandable.
My father, C. Marshall Hattersley, had been introduced
to Social Credit ideas by an accountant working at his
law office just after the end of World War I, soon
after the first writings of Major Douglas appeared.
Fascinated by the concept of this radical solution to
problems of poverty, debt and unemployment in a world
of potential plenty, he had himself authored three
major books as well as numerous pamphlets and articles
on Social Credit theory, as well as being the leading
light of the English "Social Credit Co-ordinating
Centre".
The election of a Social Credit government in Alberta
in 1935 was of supreme interest to him - Albertans
likely never realized how their experiment in
"Economic Democracy" was closely watched in many other
parts of the world. From being the bankrupt Cinderella
province of Canada, Alberta had, even by the 1950's,
significantly paid down its debt, developed its human
and physical resources with remarkable success and
wisdom, and before long was going to be paying an "Oil
and Gas Royalty Dividend" to every citizen - shadow of
the twenty five dollars per month that Aberhart had
once promised to the electorate. Add to this the
unusual sight of a party led by a politician of
extraordinary honesty, who every Sunday morning went
on the air with his wife to broadcast "Canada's
National Back to the Bible Hour", and it was plain
that Alberta had something different in the way of
government that was well worth looking into.
So in 1952, World War II being over, the Hattersley
family sold its possessions and moved out to this land
of promise: my father's aim being to write a book
outlining his experiences of this new country, I, in
the mean time staying in England to complete my
University education. A sudden heart attack, however,
at Christmas 1952, put an end to this ambition and his
life.
After coming myself as an emigrant to Canada in 1956,
my contacts with Manning were regular - but somewhat
distant. As President of the Alberta Young Social
Crediters, I invited him to speak at our convention.
As personal secretary to Robert Thompson, the federal
leader, I found Manning to be a major factor in the
background - doing much to encourage financial
support, until the indiscipline of the Quebec wing of
the party led to its breakup. Later, as Leader of the
Social Credit Party of Canada, I found Senator Manning
a difficult figure either to get hold of or cooperate
with. A quiet figure at the back of provincial Social
Credit conventions, I remember how he only needed to
drop the slightest hint of the way he was thinking,
for the whole convention to vote in agreement. A
master of the concealed political pre-emptive strike,
I often watched with admiration how he undermined
opposition efforts to get off the ground in the heyday
of his power, and certainly prevented any success in
the Federal Social Credit movement once he had decided
it was doomed. As Gladstone is reported to have said -
"A good Prime Minister has to be a good butcher".
For the difficulty of the Social Credit movement was
that the analysis and proposals of Major Douglas,
though close to the target, were not completely
correct, but Douglas would never acknowledge this. His
attitude towards Social Credit as a political movement
was thoroughly negative, and in fact had made Aberhart
and Manning's task in the difficult early days
extremely hard. Besides that, it was actually the
Germans and the Japanese, in the years before World
War II, who had made the most effective use of
Douglas's concepts to finance rearmament, employment
and world trade domination - hardly a commendation to
those who had to wage war against the Axis powers. As
a result, Social Credit supporters ranged from
anti-Semitic believers in the International
Conspiracy, represented by types such as Jim Keegstra,
to Baptist supporters of his radio ministry, to very
orthodox conservative free-enterprisers, with whom
Manning allied himself more and more as time went on.
Their successors are the Reform Party of today. After
all, it was hard to make the "Poverty amidst Plenty"
propaganda of 1930's Social Credit seem credible in
the heady oil boom atmosphere of post war Alberta. It
might be much easier to do so in the world of the
'nineties!
So goodbye, Ernest Manning! I have admired you - I
have sworn at you. What you made of this Province is a
marvellous achievement: what could have been done is
perhaps even more. It will be many years before we see
your like again.
-
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Martin Hattersley
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