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Hi John,
You wrote:- "If the five to one ratio is accepted, we must also acept that
four fifths of goods either remain unsold or are sold by mortgaging future
earnings."
I may be wrong, but I think that
Douglas might not have been talking specifically about such a
huge 'discount' rate in actuality. But rather trying
to make the point that there is presently far too much 'waste' and 'sabotage'
that are now included in final prices that the Consumer is being forced to
pay. He lists many of these things in several of the early books.
They would encompass everything from
'planned obsolescence', to tradesmen and workers 'stretching the job out'
longer than it really should take, to all the 'marketing ploys' of modern advertising. Like
putting a small product in an oversized box, for instance. And a whole
host of other similar things. All of these add to the cost and the price
of the product without really adding anything useful to the overall wealth of
the world.
Included in that would be some of
what Bill Ryan's told us previously about the pre-mature scrapping of still
perfectly good industrial plant, and its subsequent replacement, largely
because of the differing way accounting treats 'operating' and 'capital'
costs in determining profit.
I think it was to the overall extent
of these things on which Douglas was making "tedious
investigations". Not the establishment of the figures for a National
'capital account', since he tells us elsewhere such figures already largely
exist. And it hardly seems likely there would be too much 'tedium' needed
to gather them together.
Many of the current incentives to
this type of 'waste' and 'sabotage' might disappear under a Social Credit system, since we
would then not have to continuously 'make work' in the manner we presently do in
order to try to get sufficient 'effective demand' to fully pay for what we've
already done. And if many of these 'costs' could be
removed from prices, they may indeed be a fraction of what they currently
are.
I think we have to remember, too,
the times in which Douglas was writing this. Advertising in those
days was a relatively new development in the science of "marketing"
sense. So was the development of the 'mass-produced' product, which
often didn't approximate the previous 'quality' of long-lasting
craftsmanship. And Douglas's ideas themselves were in competition with
Marxism as a proposed solution to post WW I's 'economic'
problems.
Regards,
Joe
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