| Subject: | Re: [socialcredit] The Monopoly of Credit | | Date: | Tuesday, September 19, 2006 19:43:17 (+1200) | | From: | Peter Haines <cymric @.......nz>
|
| In reply to: | Message 4275 (written by Martin Hattersley) |
If your comments Martin were in response to what I said, then what I was
meaning was I am no better off hearing everyones opinion regardless of how
well informed they are. If someone asks me what the storey is quoting what
one person thinks and then another doesnt do anything for the enquirer. I
was inviting responses direct from Douglas. Once I know what Douglas said
then I am interested in views by others as I have the 'control sample'. In
the past it often become a kind of 'pin the tail on a donkey', even though
it was educational.
I know Douglas showed it was meaningless to nationalise the banks and that
the issue of usury was the same as 'profit' and didnt do anything for the
basic discrepincy between the rate of prices as opposed to the rate of
purchasing power. The issue of the 'community credit' creation is another
matter and may in fact have nothing to do with arithmetic.
Can you explain why capital works creates inflation when capital production
( non-consumer goods) doesnt? And why these wont get back to the bank
quickly and be cancelled as the dividend/ just-price supposedly would? In
the absense of the dividend etc, why doesnt the money from capital works pay
off debt? ( Keynes answer to Douglas?).
Peter
----- Original Message -----
From: "Martin Hattersley" <hattersleyjm@interbaun.com>
To: <socialcredit@elistas.com>
Sent: Tuesday, September 19, 2006 1:00 PM
Subject: Re: [socialcredit] The Monopoly of Credit
> Could I just make a note that these extremely important extracts from
> Douglas do emphasise that the reform he was looking for was not the
> abolition of usury or the nationalization of the banking system, but a
> correction of a flaw in our credit system.
>
> When capital works are financed by bank credit, a situation is created
> whereby the community first pays from these works through inflation, and
> then is expected to pay a second time when repayment of the bank financing
> is incorporated into prices (which is impossible).
>
> Money issued as a Just Price Discount would reduce consumer prices to a
> manageable level, and that, or a National Dividend, would not necessarily
> be inflationary, because it would very quickly go back to the banking
> system in repayment of loans, and so be cancelled.
>
> Martin Hattersley
> 5929 - 189 St.,
> EDMONTON AB CANADA T6M 2J1
> Phone (780)483-5442.
> jmartinh@shaw.ca
> e-mail: hattersleyjm@interbaun.com
> ----- Original Message -----
> From: "MODERATOR" <socredus@yahoo.com>
> To: <socialcredit@elistas.com>
> Sent: Monday, September 18, 2006 10:45 AM
> Subject: [socialcredit] The Monopoly of Credit
>
>
>> The following, courtesy of Wally Klinck, is excerpted
>> from *The Monopoly of Credit.* The text in this
>> excerpt appears identical to the earliest edition
>> printed some two decades earlier.
>>
>> Inasmuch as international copyright law was amended to
>> protect the Disney and Microsoft franchises, posting
>> it in this extended form might well be interpreted as
>> being in violation of the Douglas copyrights, which a
>> former listmember claims to "own" through gift of some
>> sort from Douglas's widow.
>>
>> Be that as it may, works published originally before
>> 1922 are unquestionably in the public domain, which
>> includes the entirety of *The New Age* under Orage,
>> now made available to the entire world via the
>> Internet by the Modernist Journals Project.
>>
>> This body of work includes the entire text of
>> *Economic Democracy* and *Credit-Power and Democracy.*
>> -
>>
>> [BEGINNING]
>>
>> CHAPTER IV
>>
>> THE GAP BETWEEN PRICES AND PURCHASING POWER
>>
>> It may reasonably be asked why a system which, on the
>> face of it, does not appear to have undergone
>> important modifications during the past hundred years
>> or so, has become so powerful and so oppressive. A
>> correct answer to this question is probably of more
>> importance than the solution of any other problem
>> before the world at the present time.
>>
>> A student of the preceding pages will have grasped the
>> important fact that money is not made by industry.
>> Neither is it made by agriculture, or by any
>> manufacturing progress. The farmer who grows a ton of
>> potatoes does not grow the money whereby the ton of
>> potatoes may be bought, and if he is fortunate enough
>> to sell them, he merely gets money which someone else
>> had previously.
>>
>> Purchasing power, therefore, is not, as might be
>> gathered from the current discussions on the subject,
>> an emanation from the production of real commodities
>> or services much like the scent from a rose, but on
>> the contrary, is produced by an entirely distinct
>> process, that is to. say, the banking system. Bearing
>> this in mind, we can understand that it is impossible
>> for a closed community to operate continuously on the
>> profit system, if the amount of money inside this
>> community is not increased, even though the amount of
>> goods and services available are not increased. This
>> obvious but commonly overlooked fact forms the
>> justification, if any, for the idea on which Socialist
>> policy for the past hundred years has been based--that
>> the poor are poor because the rich are rich. If a
>> number of persons continue to sell articles at a
>> greater price than that paid for them, they must
>> eventually come into possession of all the money in
>> the community, and the only flaw in such a state of
>> affairs would be that it would be self-destructive,
>> since in a comparatively short period of time a small
>> section of the community would own all the money, and
>> therefore the remainder of the community would be
>> unable to pay, and production and sale would stop.
>> This process probably contributed largely to the rapid
>> accumulation of wealth in the hands of the
>> entrepreneur at the beginning of the nineteenth
>> century, and the limited extent to which the benefits
>> of industrial progress were passed on to the general
>> population; but the profit-making system is certainly
>> not to any great extent responsible for the present
>> situation, since profits have ceased to form an
>> outstanding feature of business. It is an
>> extraordinary feature of the controversy that they are
>> attacked as immoral as well as undesirable. It has
>> never been clear to me why any man in any position of
>> life should be expected to perform any action whatever
>> which was not in some sense of the word profitable to
>> him, and there is more than a suspicion that the
>> attack upon profits can ultimately be traced to a fear
>> of the economic security offered by this type of
>> remuneration, as compared with that of the wage and
>> salary.
>>
>> The factor which is probably at the root of the
>> problem is at once more complex and more subtle, and
>> has during the past few years been a matter of
>> acrimonious controversy. On its physical or realistic
>> side it is intimately connected with the replacement
>> of human labour by machine labour.
>>
>> The physical effects of this replacement are not
>> difficult to apprehend. If one unit of human labour
>> with the aid of mechanical power and machinery will
>> produce ten times as much as the same unit working
>> without such aids, it is obvious that there will
>> either be ten times as much production or only
>> one-tenth the amount of labour will be required.
>>
>> The productivity of a unit of human labour has
>> increased somewhat irregularly over the whole field of
>> production. In some cases the increase in a hundred
>> years has amounted to thousands per cent, in some
>> cases the increase of output per unit has been much
>> less. It is, however, broadly true to say that general
>> economic production, which may be defined as the
>> conversion of existing materials into a form suitable
>> for human use, is proportional to the rate at which
>> energy of any description is used in the process, and
>> this line of attack is probably closer to reality than
>> any method in which financial units are employed.
>>
>> On this basis it is safe to say that one unit of human
>> labour can on the average produce at least forty times
>> as much as was the case up to the beginning of the
>> nineteenth century. The following examples are some
>> indication of the progress made in the past few years
>> alone.
>>
>> The rate of production of pig-iron is three times as
>> great per man employed as it was in 1914. A workman
>> using automatic machines can make 4,000 glass bottles
>> as quickly as he could have made 100 by hand
>> twenty-five years ago. In 1919 the index of factory
>> output (based upon 1914 as
>> 100) was 146, and the index of factory employment was
>> 129. By 1927 output had risen to 170, but employment
>> had sunk to 115. In 1928 American farmers were using
>> 45,000 harvesting and threshing machines, and with
>> them had displaced
>> 130,000 farm hands. In automobiles, output per man has
>> increased to 310 per cent, an increase of 210 per
>> cent.
>>
>> When we approach the question of distribution,
>> however, we find a remarkable discrepancy. Professor
>> Paul H. Douglas states in his examination of the
>> problem that, in the first quarter of the twentieth
>> century, real wages increased 30 per cent,
>> productivity per employee increased by
>> 54 per cent. In 1923 production increased 38 per cent,
>> but consumption by wage-earners 32 per cent. In 1925
>> production increased 54 per cent, but consumption only
>> 30 per cent. These latter figures compare with 1913 as
>> a basis.
>>
>> Eliminating the pseudo-moral complications commonly
>> introduced into this aspect of the subject, it is
>> clear that certain consequences were bound to ensue.
>> Either the requirements of the population must
>> increase at the rate at which the capacity for
>> production increases, and at the same time the
>> financial mechanism must be adjusted to provide for
>> the distribution of the production, or a decreasing
>> number of persons would be required in production.
>> Unless the wages of this decreasing number of
>> individuals collectively rises to the amount which,
>> previously distributed to a larger number of workers,
>> would buy the still greater production, either costs
>> and prices must fall, or an increasing proportion of
>> the goods must be unsold to the persons who produced
>> them. Certain consequences, readily understood if it
>> be remembered that wages, costs, and purchasing power
>> are only different aspects of the same thing,
>> accompany a continuous fall in costs under the
>> existing financial system, and a fall of prices, while
>> off-setting these consequences to some extent,
>> involves the entrepreneur in a loss on the whole of
>> his stocks, a loss which he is not usually willing, or
>> indeed able, to take.
>>
>> The first aspect of this complex situation which
>> demands attention is the financing of capital
>> production by means of the reinvestment of savings,
>> which, it should be noticed, is the method commonly
>> stated to be the proper method. It is doubtful whether
>> more than an insignificant proportion of financing is
>> done in this way, the greater part coming from new
>> credits supplied by banks and insurance companies in
>> return for debentures, but it forms the smoke-screen
>> which conceals the fact that public issues are in the
>> main acquired by financial institutions through the
>> medium of drafts upon themselves. The growth of
>> insurance has no doubt been a considerable factor in
>> accelerating the process. If we consider the case of a
>> workman earning, let us say, £5 per week, who saves £1
>> of this and at the end of a hundred weeks subscribes
>> for shares in a new manufacturing company, the effect
>> is not hard to trace. The original £5 per week was
>> wages paid to the workman, and these wages were, by
>> the orthodox costing system, debited to the cost of
>> the articles produced by his employer. Eventually, due
>> to his saving, these articles cannot be sold, as a
>> simple arithmetical proposition shows, since he has
>> taken 20 per cent of the necessary purchasing power
>> off the market. His investment of this 20 per cent we
>> may assume results in the manufacture of machinery in
>> which his £100 again appears as wages. Assuming that
>> no physical deterioration has taken place, or that the
>> goods have not been exported, the 20 per cent
>> deficiency in the first cycle of production has now
>> been restored, and the original goods could be bought.
>> But the machinery which has been made in the second
>> cycle of production is now a charge on further
>> production for which no purchasing power whatever
>> exists. This proposition may be generalised as
>> follows:
>>
>> Where any payment in money appears twice or more in
>> series production) then the ultimate price of the
>> product is increased by the amount of that payment
>> multiplied by the number of times of its appearance)
>> without any equivalent increase of purchasing power.
>>
>> With this fundamental proposition in mind we are in a
>> position to take a more generalised view of the defect
>> in the price system which is concerned with the double
>> circuit of money in industry, and which has become
>> known as the A plus B theorem. The statement of this
>> is as follows: In any manufacturing undertaking the
>> payments made may be divided into two groups: Group A:
>> Payments made to individuals as wages, salaries, and
>> dividends; Group B: Payments made to other
>> organisations for raw materials, bank charges, and
>> other external costs. The rate of distribution of
>> purchasing power to individuals is represented by A,
>> but since all payments go into prices, the rate of
>> generation of prices cannot be less than A plus B.
>> Since A will not purchase A plus B, a proportion of
>> the product at least equivalent to B must be
>> distributed by a form of purchasing power which is not
>> comprised in the description grouped under A.
>>
>> Now the first objection which is commonly raised to
>> this statement is that the payments in wages which are
>> made to the public for intermediate products which the
>> public does not want to buy and could not use, when
>> added together, make up the necessary sum to balance
>> the B payments, so that the population can buy all the
>> consumable products. But an examination of the diagram
>> on page 37 will show that this is not a satisfactory
>> explanation. If we imagine consumable products to be
>> produced in five stages, each stage taking one month,
>> a product begun in January will be finished in May. We
>> can regard the first four stages as capital
>> production. It is irrelevant that in the modern world
>> all of these five processes are taking place
>> simultaneously and that the product may be found in
>> any of the five stages at any moment. It is still true
>> that you cannot bake bread with corn which you are
>> simultaneously grinding.
>>
>> Consider the nature of these B payments. They are
>> repayments collected from the public of purchasing
>> power in respect of production not yet delivered to
>> the public. If the wage-earners in process "I" use
>> their current month's, i.e. May's, wages to buy their
>> share of one current month's production of consumable
>> goods, they are using money distributed in respect of
>> production which will not appear as consumable goods
>> till October. They are in fact involuntarily
>> reinvesting their money in industry, with the result
>> previously explained. When we consider the increasing
>> sub-division of process-and in "process" we may
>> include the using of machine-tools, buildings, and the
>> general plant of the country-it will readily be
>> understood that this period shown as five months in
>> the diagram may easily cover many years.
>>
>> As the economic system may be said to depend upon this
>> matter, it is essential that a clear understanding of
>> it should be obtained.
>>
>> Let us imagine a capitalist to own a certain piece of
>> land, on which is a house, and a building containing
>> the necessary machinery for preparing, spinning, and
>> weaving linen, and that the land is capable of
>> growing, in addition to flax, all the food necessary
>> to maintain a man. Let us further imagine that the
>> capitalist in the first place allows a man to live
>> free of all payment in the house and to have the use
>> of all the foodstuffs that he grows on condition that
>> he also grows, spins, and weaves a certain amount of
>> linen for the capitalist. Let us further imagine that
>> after a time this arrangement is altered by the
>> payment to the man of £1 a week for the work on the
>> linen business, but that this £1 is taken back each
>> week as rent for the house and payment for the
>> foodstuffs.
>>
>> Let us now imagine that from the time the flax is
>> picked to the time that the linen is delivered to the
>> capitalist, a period of six weeks elapses. Obviously
>> the cost of the linen must be £6, and this will be the
>> price, plus profit, which the capitalist would place
>> upon it. Quite obviously only one-sixth of the
>> purchasing power necessary to buy the linen is now
>> available, although "at some time or other" all the £6
>> has been distributed. It should also be noticed that
>> the arrangement is a perfectly equitable arrangement.
>> The employee obtains definite return for his services
>> in the form of bed, board, and clothes, which quite
>> probably he might not have been able to obtain had not
>> the knowledge and organisation of the capitalist
>> brought together housing, flax, food, and machinery.
>> In other words, the problem disclosed is not a moral
>> problem, it is an arithmetical problem.
>>
>> Let us now imagine that half of the employee's time is
>> devoted to making a machine which will do all the work
>> of preparing and manufacturing linen, and that the
>> manufacture of this machine takes twelve weeks. We may
>> therefore say that the machine costs £6, the total
>> value of the production of machine and flax being
>> still £I per week. At the end of this period the
>> machine is substituted for the man, the machine being
>> driven, we suppose, by the burning of the food which
>> was previously consumed by the man, and the machine
>> being housed in the house previously occupied by the
>> man, and being automatic. The capitalist will be
>> justified in saying that the cost of the operation of
>> the machine is £1 per week as before, and if there is
>> any wear, he will also be justified in allocating the
>> cost of this wear to the cost of the linen. It should
>> be noticed, however, that he will now not distribute
>> any money at all, since it is obviously no use
>> offering a £I note a week to a machine. He will merely
>> allocate this cost, and once again the allocation will
>> be perfectly fair and proper, but no one will be able
>> to pay the price, because no one has received any
>> money.
>>
>> In the modern industrial system, this process can be
>> identified easily in the form of machine charges. For
>> instance, a modern stamping plant may require to add
>> 600 per cent to its labour charges to cover its
>> machine charges, this sum not being in any true sense
>> profit. In such a case, for every £1 expended in a
>> given period in wages, £6, making £7 in all, would be
>> carried forward into prices. Although this is an
>> extreme case, the constant, and in one sense
>> desirable, tendency is for direct charges to decrease
>> and for indirect charges to increase as a result of
>> the replacement of human labour by machinery. There is
>> no difference between a plant charge of this nature
>> and a similar sum repaid as a " B" payment. The
>> essential point is that when a given sum of money
>> leaves the consumer on its journey back to the point
>> of origin in the bank it is on its way to extinction.
>> If that extinction takes place before the extinction
>> of the price value created during its journey from the
>> bank, then each such operation produces a
>> corresponding disequilibrium between money and prices.
>> For these causes and others of a similar character, it
>> seems to me quite beyond argument that the production
>> of such a quantity of intermediate products, including
>> plant, machinery, buildings, and so forth, as is
>> physically necessary to maintain a given quantity of
>> consumable products, will not provide a distribution
>> of purchasing power sufficient to buy these consumable
>> products. This would be true even if prices and costs
>> were identical. But since prices can and do rise much
>> above costs, additional purchasing power from
>> intermediate production is rapidly absorbed.
>>
>> To say that at some time or other the money has been
>> distributed is in the nature of a general assertion
>> which does not bear upon the specific fact. The mill
>> will never grind with the water that has passed, and
>> unless it can be shown, as it certainly cannot be
>> shown, that all these sums distributed in respect of
>> the production of intermediate products are actually
>> saved up, not in the form of securities, but in the
>> form of actual purchasing power, we are obliged to
>> assume what I believe to be true, that the rate of
>> flow of purchasing power derived from the normal and
>> theoretical operation of the existing price system is
>> always less than that of the generation of prices
>> within the same period of time.
>>
>> There is another method of regarding this matter which
>> is helpful to the grasp of an admittedly difficult
>> subject. Suppose that the wages, salaries, and
>> dividends distributed were exactly sufficient to buy
>> the new production on sale at any moment and did so
>> buy it, i.e. let us suppose that the financial system
>> worked as it is supposed to work. Obviously numbers of
>> things would be bought, such as houses, furniture,
>> etc., which would have a considerable life. But ex
>> hypothesi the sale between consumers
>> (as distinguished from sales from producer to
>> consumer) of these would be impossible-they would have
>> no money, since at the moment of transfer of the goods
>> from the producing to the consuming system their money
>> value would have disappeared on its journey back to
>> the bank, to finance a fresh cycle of production.
>>
>> Sales between consumers are an important though
>> frequently overlooked factor in distribution, and
>> require that the money value of "second-hand" goods
>> shall be in existence until the goods have physically
>> disappeared.
>>
>> It may, with reason, be asked how, if this be so, is
>> it that in fact consumable products are sold at all?
>> The answer to this is again complex, but the main
>> forms in which assistance is given to the defective
>> purchasing power of the population (although that
>> assistance is much less than is required to enable the
>> production system fully to be drawn upon) are the
>> redistribution of money through the social services
>> such as the so-called dole, the use of money received
>> from the sale of exports, from foreign investments and
>> from invisible exports such as shipping, redistributed
>> through the medium of taxation, the distribution of
>> bank loans (advanced on mortgage, debentures, ete.) in
>> wages for excessive capital production, and the
>> selling of goods below cost through the agency of
>> bankruptcies, forced sales, and actual destruction.
>> These latter three are a direct discouragement to
>> production, and in fact represent a subsidy in aid of
>> prices from private sources, a conception which it is
>> desirable to bear in mind in considering remedies, in
>> view of the fact that, so far from this subsidy
>> raising prices, it comes into operation only by the
>> lowering of prices.
>>
>> It is also clear that the longer the average period
>> over which money is collected in respect of the
>> creation and destruction of a capital asset (which
>> corresponds to the "life" of an asset), and the
>> shorter the average period over which money is
>> collected for day-to-day living on the part of the
>> community (which corresponds to the "life" of
>> consumable goods), the greater will be the discrepancy
>> between purchasing power and prices.
>>
>> [END OF EXCERPT]
>>
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