The American obsession with work for its own sake by Wallace Klinck

C. H. Douglas stressed the importance of understanding a policy by tracing its pedigree. The present financial system is predicated upon a materialist philosophy known as do ut des, meaning “this for that”–essentially “nothing comes from nothing.” It is based soundly on the rigid doctrine of “Salvation through Works”. Hence, the existing financial system issues money only for production and never for consumption, except as debt which must be settled by future work. This policy of issuing money only for work might have had some basis in equity in the primitive economy where production was primarily due to human effort. It makes no rational or moral sense whatever in the modern highly technological economy where non-human factors of production predominate and human intervention is becoming increasingly little more that a catalyst.

Social Credit rests on a philosophy of Salvation through Unearned Grace–Grace being an outright gift from God. Spiritual Grace has, or should have, a physical counterpart in the economic or material realm. Thus from a philosophical standpoint access to consumer goods and services should increasingly be justified not by work alone but evermore by a share in an inalienable inheritance in the accumulated communal capital which has developed over the ages as a result of the historic Cultural Heritage which has provided a means of producing with decreasing need for human effort. In Christian philosophy it is a major sin to make an end of a means. The rational purpose and end of production is consumption and not to create work. An economic system should provide goods and services for mankind as efficiently as possible with minimal trouble and effort for all concerned.

Life is more than bread alone and man must be released from unnecessary material concerns to make time for matters of the Mind and Spirit. Jesus was quite explicit in counselling us to “toil not”–that God who provides for the fish and birds and the beasts knows our needs and will provide for us even more. This is why we have been given secrets to natural laws which have provided an endless extension of “mechanical advantage”–which Social Crediters call the Unearned Increment of Association from which has emerged our amazing modern technology with its outflow of Abundance. By learning to associate properly, we can accomplish vastly more than we can as isolated individuals.

Social Credit has been called “practical Christianity”. Douglas did not set out to design it as such and made his discovery about the non- self -liquidating nature of the existing price-system through purely inductive investigation of the accounts at the Royal Aircraft Works in Farnborough, England, and subsequent analyses of the accounts of numerous other British firms. Continuing study of Social Credit, however, has revealed it to be consonant with Christian principles.

One might ask how it is possible for a nation such as the United States of America, professedly predicated upon Christian principles to base its entire economy and social structure upon a financial system which is a total inversion of those principles. A clue to this strange contradiction may be found in Douglas’s observation that Finance and the Established Media are concentric. Society, he said, is hypnotized and only a drastic de-hypnotization can save it.