| Subject: | Re: [socialcredit] C-P& D Chapter X | | Date: | Monday, February 26, 2007 09:27:44 (-0800) | | From: | william_b_ryan <william_b_ryan @.....com>
|
| In reply to: | Message 4499 (written by Joe Thomson) |
Well, this was written in 1919 or 1920. He is
challenging the validity of statistics contained in
such things as "Blue" books as not actually reflecting
the numbers contained in "bills of lading." He is
effectively asserting that the statistical numbers are
reflecting the ideology or prejudice of their makers,
rather than the real facts on the ground, which he
ridicules in the piano metaphor.
There is actually an important historical example that
was very familiar to Douglas, in which Britain
embarked on a policy similar to that ridiculed in the
metaphor, Britain's opium trade via India to China.
The First Opium War was closer in time to when Douglas
wrote those words than they are to our own time, some
87 years later.
Opium in China became "a necessary of life" through
deliberately planned addiction. The British were
thereby able to solve their "balance of trade"
problems, or so they thought, with China.
From Internet sources:
"During the eighteenth century, the market in Europe
and America for tea, a new drink in the West, expanded
greatly. Additionally, there was a continuing demand
for Chinese silk and porcelain. But China, still in
its preindustrial stage, wanted little that the West
had to offer, causing the Westerners, mostly British,
to incur an unfavorable balance of trade. To remedy
the situation, the foreigners developed a third-party
trade, exchanging their merchandise in India and
Southeast Asia for raw materials and semiprocessed
goods, which found a ready market in Guangzhou. By the
early nineteenth century, raw cotton and opium from
India had become the staple British imports into
China, in spite of the fact that opium was prohibited
entry by imperial decree. The opium traffic was made
possible through the connivance of profit-seeking
merchants and a corrupt bureaucracy."
-
"By the 1830's, the English had become the major
drug-trafficking criminal organization in the world;
very few drug cartels of the twentieth century can
even touch the England of the early nineteenth century
in sheer size of criminality. Growing opium in India,
the East India Company shipped tons of opium into
Canton which it traded for Chinese manufactured goods
and for tea. This trade had produced, quite literally,
a country filled with drug addicts, as opium parlors
proliferated all throughout China in the early part of
the nineteenth century."
-
"A reference to the war of aggression waged against
China by colonialist Britain from 1840 to 1842.
Beginning at the end of the 18th century, Britain
smuggled great quantities of opium into China. This
traffic not only subjected the Chinese people to drug
addiction but also represented a massive drain on the
country's silver reserves."
-
--- Joe Thomson <thomsonhiyu@shaw.ca> wrote:
(Bill Ryan wrote:-) > The entire chapter is very
important, including the piano metaphor. I had in
mind the chapter's theory of value, which runs through
the chapter, where effective demand is the independent
variable.
(Joe asks:-) I follow what he's saying about the
shell factory, and what you're saying about 'effective
demand' being the independent variable. But the part
that I'm not quite sure I understand about that is in
the 'piano metaphor'. The part I've reproduced below,
where he said:-
"When a Blue book, or other mine of statistical and
generally perverted information, asserts that the
imports and exports of a country are thus and such, it
intends to convey the impression that the aggregate
price-values, as shown on bills of lading, reach the
figures given. That is to say, the 'balance of trade'
of any country, either as reflected in its exchange or
by any other _*commercial*_test, is simply a matter of
sales-management--you have only to make grand-pianos a
necessary of life, corner grand-pianos, restrict the
sale, and, presto! half a dozen grand-pianos will
balance the import of all the wheat and wool that
Australia and the Argentine can send us."
Could you please elaborate on that, Bill, so that we
get the correct connection to 'effective demand'?
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