"All that is necessary for the triumph of evil is that good men do nothing"
Edmund Burke
| 1 February 2013 Thought for the Week: Economic Democracy was written long before the depression; nevertheless, to anyone who could grasp its thesis it
provided an instant understanding of the depression. That
was of considerable interest and importance, no doubt, but
it was not what made the impact on my mind. So it has proved. History appears to the Social Crediter as crystalised politics, as Douglas put it, and no longer as a string of disconnected and unrelated episodes. - - Dr. Bryan Monahan, “Why I Am a Social Crediter”, 1947 |
FURTHER LEAGUE INITIATIVES IN ORDER TO SERVE THE PEOPLEVisitors to the League website will now have access to three more historical and political resources: On the Mayo MP3 the late Jeremy Lee asks: “How Can the Whole World Be In Debt?” Labor, of course, once saw itself as the defender of the rights and conditions of the working class (I doubt if many of the present incumbents of the Labor hierarchy have ever soiled their hands) and of course Liberals/Nationals presented themselves as defenders of the rights of the conservative businessman and farmer. One wonders how many of the present Liberal/ National politicians have actually conducted an independent business or worked a farm and truly understand the stresses and strains these people now come under. The December 1999 edition carried these words: |
WHAT IN THE REAL WORLD IS ‘UNSUSTAINABLE’?by Betty Luks He writes: “The unsustainability to which I refer is that brought about by our government and the entitlement mentality that has been encouraged through policy positions. Put simply, we are living beyond our means economically and eventually we will have to confront the consequences of that position. Actually, we might not personally have to but at some point in the future one generation of Australians will. For too long we have been taking from tomorrow so we can ease the problems of today. The senator is quite right, there are matters of concern that we must deal with but I want to look at these ‘matters of concern’ from another angle. Is he writing about the real world in which we live? The Free Online Dictionary tells me: “Thomas Robert Malthus was a British economist who wrote An Essay on the Principle of Population (1798), arguing that population tends to increase faster than the food supply”. Well we know Mr. Malthus didn’t get that part right because the world’s population has increased enormously since 1798, but we need to define our terms if we are to get somewhere in this public discussion. Don’t confuse the terms please Senator. An Economic System is NOT the same thing as a Financial System. Therefore, I understand when you write of ‘us all living beyond our means’ you are referring to us living beyond our financial means; i.e., governments, individuals, families, businesses, and industries, are living beyond their financial means. Please Senator Bernardi, clear your mind of such confusion Wealth defined. Sources of wealth (natural; no other sources demonstrable…): I put it to you Senator Cori Bernardi, the realistic situation is that governments would rather serve Mammon than serve their people and the present financial debt structure IS leading to the destruction of the economic systems of the world. |
IS THE SOIL OUR ‘FINANCIAL’ INSTITUTION?Instead of the above heading, I would have asked the question: Is the Soil our Store of Real Wealth? “Soil, Our Financial Institution,” by Craig Mackintosh PRI Editor August 7, 2008 Throughout history, the story has repeated itself Ancient Greece suffered a similar fate Many experts also blame the collapse of the great Mayan civilization and the peaceful Harappan society of the Indus valley on soil exhaustion and erosion, resulting from agricultural practices and clear-cutting of forests. Concerned that Craig was confusing the terms in his own mind I wrote him and he responded: |
WHY SOME INSTITUTIONS SHOULD BE CLOSED DOWNJames Reed is not the only one who writes that certain institutions do more harm than good. The following is an extract from John Papworth’s book, “Why Schools of Economics and Political Science Should be Closed Down”, taken from The Social Crediter, Winter 2012. “... One of the most widely taught and accepted economic suppositions is that the factors of production consist of land, labour and capital. Indeed this is probably the first statement many students hear when they begin their studies. It is a statement which may appear to be nothing more than a formulation of the obvious, yet its mere enunciation marks out the entire subject as the most iniquitous exercise of human faculties it is possible to imagine. But consider what is being said: we are being urged to accept without question that ‘labour’ by which is meant individual human beings, made if you will in the image of God, are of no more or less account than a share certificate or a cabbage patch… In making it [this supposition] we are denying, of course, the unique significance of the human personality and its attributes, we are denying the capacity of human creativity, and, no less important, its capacity for moral judgement and moral distinctions. Not least of the tragedies from the enunciation and practice of this grotesque formula has been its effect on human labour, on work itself. It was Freud who asserted, ‘Work is man’s chief contact with reality,’ and in doing so he was pointing to quite unique aspects of both man and work. All life is born to create in the mundane sense of propagating its kind. Man is unique in also possessing the priceless attribute of imagination; it is one which plays an enormous part in human sexual activity, but more significantly, it also transcends it, providing the thrust for creative art of every kind. Indeed, it is evident that the creative play of the imagination is an integral condition of freedom — it is a factor so implicit in the character of the human psyche that without its exercise an individual is inevitably of diminished human stature. This is one of the major enormities of market forces treating man as a ‘factor of production’, for by allotting labour a role inferior to the play and power of those forces, they have succeeded in deadening the power of the creative imagination for all but a tiny minority, and even that minority has been decisively marginalised within the general social framework. Hence today we tend to think of ‘art’ as something separate from the general business of life, as the icing on the cake rather than the cake itself. In so doing we overlook how before the dominance of the market and its mass production machines art was a central factor of nearly all types of work done by the generality of the people. If this view appears extreme it is only because it is extreme in today’s conditions. Most farming operations — the hand-scything of grass for winter fodder, the building of haystacks, the milking of cows, the baking of bread, to name but a few — involved much arduous physical labour, but also involved the creative capacities of the artisans. Haystacks differed significantly in their pattern and structure from village to village, but they were generally works of art and of distinctive appeal to the eye; cows were known by name and had preferences for whom would milk them, so that there was a relationship between the milker and the beast which had to be respected and cultivated; bread-making was a high art form undertaken by ‘master’ bakers; and so on. All that hard, exacting labour yielded fruits which in most modern ‘jobs’ are conspicuously absent. It had its own innate status and dignity, as well as a sense of achievement and fulfilment which gave meaning and purpose to life, qualities a modern nine-to-five commuter may well find incomprehensible as he winds through the treadmill of a daily routine which may well furnish him with creature comforts of exceptional degrees of opulence but which have their own poisonous thrust of pointlessness because they deny the validity of those questions relating to the meaning of his existence. One may follow the theme through the entire spectrum of trades that provided for human needs, through tailoring, shoemaking, carpentry, building, and so on. In every case the creative instinct was being exercised and being served. It was at work in the construction of an African thatched mud hut as much as in the ethereal glories of the stately homes of England, homes which needed the services of a wide range of highly skilled creative artisans for the fashioning of graceful edifices in stone and their multifarious furnishing. And all this creativity spilled over into other aspects of people’s lives, their dress, customs, folk art and music. In times of prosperity the world was awash with the cultural riches which were thus enabled to proliferate. Today, work has become a ‘job’. Where labour is required at all it is on terms awesomely demeaning to human stature: standardised; uniform; repetitive; and essentially insulting. Machines made to lighten human labour and to serve human needs, under the genius of theories propagated by established schools of economics, have transposed human roles so that man (labour!), instead of expressing the creative interplay of the human spirit with the material world in terms of master-ship, is now subordinated to serving the needs of machines. Our theorists will no doubt point to the fruits of their teaching, as seen in what they believe are higher living standards for millions in terms of cars, aeroplane journeys, centrally heated homes, TV, radio, cheap food, foreign holidays, and the rest of the package. As usual they are confusing terms and the evidence abounds that higher consumption levels are not remotely synonymous with higher standards of living and are only too often in conflict with them…” (emphasis added...ed) |
ECONOMISTS’ QUOTES FROM THE POST-AUTISTIC ECONOMICS WEBSITE“[T]he close to monopoly position of neoclassical economics is not compatible with normal ideas about democracy. Economics is science in some senses, but is at the [same] time ideology. Limiting economics to the neoclassical paradigm means imposing a serious ideological limitation. Departments of economics become political propaganda centres . . .” “Economics students . . . graduate from Masters and PhD programs with an effectively vacuous understanding of economics, no appreciation of the intellectual history of their discipline, and an approach to mathematics that hobbles both their critical understanding of economics and their ability to appreciate the latest advances in mathematics and other sciences. A minority of these ill-informed students themselves go on to be academic economists, and they repeat the process. Ignorance is perpetuated” “All of these textbooks fail to explain how prices are determined in ‘markets’’ and thus
how markets work. Where do prices come from? Who determines them? How do they fluctuate? These questions are never addressed, even though it is through the price mechanism that the ‘invisible hand’ is supposed to operate.” “[M]ainstream economists seek knowledge through numbers to stop the messy reality of people, processes and politics dirtying their invisible hands.” “[T]he economist must engage him or herself as a citizen with convictions regarding the
public good and ways of treating it, rather than as the holder of universal truth that he or she
substitutes for discussion in order to impose it on us all.” “The Taliban, and its variety of fundamentalist thinking, has been the most controlling and
oppressive regime with regard to women in contemporary times. Contemporary academic
economics, and contemporary global economic policies, are gripped by other rigidities of
thinking – what George Soros has dubbed ‘market fundamentalism’. Fantasies of control
are operative in both phenomena, and gender is far from irrelevant to understanding their power, and their solution.” |
THE SATANIC MILLS OF INDUSTRIALISATIONby James Reed: That was fifty years ago. Douglas would be astonished to see the runaway industrialism of, say, China. A new book which I will review shortly, “Death By China” (Pearson Education, 2011) by Peter Navarro and Greg Autry gives a frightening story of China’s grab for power and the ill-effects this is having on the environment and people. This, however, is only part of the problem which stretches now to include all aspects of our lives including medicine. It has led to people becoming so machine dependent that if there was a massive electromagnetic pulse from the sun, frying Earth’s electronics, most people would simply die. Man has become not a slave to the Machine but a part of it. |
MY, HOW THE OLD SOCIALISTS HAVE FLOURISHEDby Brian Simpson Malcolm Muggeridge had a lot to say about the early Fabian-Socialists to a group of college students at Hillsdale, Michigan in April 1979. But let New Zealander Bill Daly tell it in his words: “Muggeridge's well-intentioned father was a Fabian Socialist, and as a little boy he often got to sit in on the high-minded discussions his father had with his Fabian friends. Later Muggeridge married a niece of leading Fabians Sydney and Beatrice Webb who were upheld as heros by the Soviet dictators in Moscow. When Muggeridge was later (in the 1930s) a foreign correspondent in Moscow for the Manchester Guardian he was stunned at the blindness of elitist intellectuals who would visit their hero Communist state and report lavishly on its numerous benefits. So engrossed were they in their misconceptions, aided no doubt in a few cases by the love of centralised power, that they were unable to see even what their own eyes told them of the appalling conditions and disgusting abuses by the Communist masters. To quote Muggeridge: "The thing that impressed me, the thing that touched off my awareness of the great liberal death wish, my sense that Western Man was, as it were, sleep-walking into his own ruin, was the extraordinary performance of the liberal intelligentsia, who, in those days, flocked to Moscow like pilgrims to Mecca. And they were one and all utterly delighted and excited by what they saw there. Clergymen walked serenely and happily through the anti-God museums, politicians claimed that no system of society could possibly be more equitable and just, lawyers admired Soviet justice, and economists praised the Soviet economy. They all wrote articles in this sense which we resident journalists knew were completely nonsensical". Muggeridge was at pains to say he put the source of the liberal disease at the elevation of man to the centre of the universe: “The efforts that men make to bring about their own happiness, their own ease of life, their own self-indulgence, will in due course produce the opposite, leading me to the absolutely inescapable conclusion that human beings cannot live and operate in this world without some concept of a being greater than themselves, and of a purpose which transcends their own egotistic or greedy desires. |
LABOUR DECLARED SOCIAL CREDIT NOT COMPATIBLE WITH SOCIALISMby Wallace Klinck, Canada Social Credit perceives society as an open, dynamic and informal co-operative of individuals and aggregations of individuals combining by free will to seek given objectives. Douglas's formulations were designed to facilitate the smooth and dynamic functioning of the social organism according to sound principles of association. Relationship of the Individual to the Group Consumers must set production policy by their acceptance or rejection of the product. |
SOCIAL CREDIT OF THE LEFTAmerican writer Michael Lane researched the background of the very early Social Credit movement. Before 1922, the Left still had room for a Morrisian vision of economics, in which "the ordinary things men made ought to be so made as to be a `joy to the maker and the user'." In “The Political Economy of Social Credit and Guild Socialism”, Frances Hutchinson and Brian Burkitt adopt the definition of Henry Smith: When it rejected social credit, the Labour party rejected true socialism.1 In calling attention to the origins of social credit in the trades union movement, Hutchinson and Burkitt bring a new dimension to the subject. In 1907, A. R. Orage and Holbrook Jackson formed the Fabian Arts Group as a wing of the Fabian Society and purchased a bankrupt magazine, the New Age. |
THE GREAT FEMALE GENITAL SURGERY DEBATEby Mrs Vera West This struck me as puzzling. As I understand it what is called “FGM” may involve either partial or full removal of the female external genitalia or the narrowing of the vaginal opening through cutting and stitching the labia, usually fusing the labia. The latter can lead to a wide range of health issues including frequent urinary tract infections. Obviously enough, these are not Western medical practices because they have ill health effects. As for cosmetic genital surgery’s merits, this is part of a larger debate about the merits of cosmetic surgery. It may have psychological benefits to women. Surgical repairs to the vagina following birth also has a sound basis, and is not discriminatory. What women are not saying in this debate is that practices such as labia fusion do not benefit women’s health and are solely for male benefit. The requests for these types of surgeries, both cosmetic for Western women and other genital surgeries primarily for migrant women, come from women who are vulnerable and who need substantial emotional and professional support. These are the sorts of issues that feminists should be helping out with, but they are too busy writing books on oppression to help women in need. |
THE JEWISH LOBBY AND THE WAGES OF IMMIGRATIONby Peter Ewer This seems inevitable because “non-discriminatory” (meaning “discriminatory against Traditional sources”) immigration is the sacred cow. But having a sacred cow can have undesirable effects, especially when one has fine china all over the place! |