THE FINE WORDS ARE NOT
ENOUGH A Response to "The
Common Good" by Anthony
Cooney in "The Social Crediter" May-June
1997Social Credit - The power of human
beings in association to produce the result intended, measured in terms of human
satisfaction: The Common Good
- a statement drawn up by a working party for the Catholic Bishops' Conference
of England and Wales, has been adopted and endorsed. The document is now presented
for discussion and responses. This response trusts the Bishops will address themselves
to the absence in The Common Good of any consideration of the key role of the
monetary system in our present discontents. C.H.
Douglas defined Social Credit as "The Policy of a Philosophy" and amplified this
by saying that the Philosophy was Christianity, and Social Credit "Applied Christianity."
In this regard the section Morality in the Market Place (paras. 76-80) presents
fairly the theory laissez-faire: namely, that where a demand exists, someone will
work to supply it, so that if these two forces are allowed free interplay and
competition, then all demands will be satisfied at the lowest possible (and therefore
economically efficient) price. The Common
Good acknowledges, as Douglas pointed out, that no central plan can even know,
let alone take account of, all the myriad day to day interactions of supply and
demand, and the attempt to do so in socialist countries has been catastrophic
in its results.
Nevertheless a valid criticism of laissez-faire does exist,
and the docunment puts its finger squarely upon it: namely that to regard the
theory as "a God-given natural law, is a view which can amount to idolatry or
a form of economic superstition." A problem
facing the critic of laissez-faire is that its theory is presented as "scientific"
and disallows any refutation not couched in its own terms - "Do not," it commands
at the outset of the debate, "bring into this matter questions of morality, religion
or sentiment, for they have no more part in it than questions of beauty or ugliness."
Ruskin demolished the "scientific pretensions" of "Your common Political Economist.
(1) The Common Good
makes a fair fist of its criticism by insisting, like Ruskin, that, on the contrary,
the question of morality is primary and the "technical economic method" is not
only secondary, but must be measured against the "world view" of Christianity.
As Douglas put it, "Society is primarily metaphysical." The
next section, Option Against the Poor (paras. 8 1-98) gives no consideration
to the monetary system. Is it not just possible, one must ask the authors, that
the key to the operations of a monetary economy might be its monetary system?
Paragraph 84 for example argues that "The search for profit must not be allowed
to override all other moral considerations. For instance the creation and stimulation
of markets by advertising... ." Is it not possible that both are a necessity of
a monetary system which makes 'growth' mandatory?
Paragraph 85 argues
that "the idea that the individual is primarily to be considered as a consumer"
is contrary to the Gospel; further (a pragmatic touch here) "It gravely disadvantages
those who do not have wealth to spend." Ah,
but they do! They have the common inheritance of wealth to spend. What they do
not have is MONEY to spend. Whilst we agree that the individual is not merely
a "consumer", that is not to say that the individual, in his function as consumer,
should not be sovereign. Douglas once illustrated this point with a play on the
word 'sovereign'. I paraphrase, since the passage is uncollected -
"When a
man went into a shop and proffered a sovereign to justify his demand for an article
on the shelf, he issued a chain of orders. For him ships sailed, farmers farmed,
carriers carried, machinists machined, all to replace the article on the shelf."
There is no need to assume, as the authors
of The Common Good sometimes seem to assume, that this work is done miserably
and grudgingly, simply because it is paid for by some fraction of the 'sovereign'
which set in motion the chain of commands. Might not some at least of those who
worked to fill the demand have taken moral pleasure in doing so because they were
"governed by moral considerations, not least the demands of justice"? To deny
this possibility seems to me to concede absolutely the laissez-faire case.
Douglas
ends his illustration however with this observation - "The defect of laissez-faire
was that not enough people had a 'sovereign' to make their demand for goods and
services effective." It is clearly not beyond
the remit of The Common Good to consider the possibility that the monetary
system is working unjustly nor to ask if it might have some bearing upon the working
of the production/consunmption cycle. Is it claimed that whereas the Free Market
System is not "God-given natural law" the monetary system is, and must not be
questioned nor examined by impious minds? Let
us suppose that Douglas was right when he stated that production generates prices
at a faster rate than it distributes income to meet those prices.(2)
It will follow that some people (e.g. the unemployable) will have insufficient
money to buy their needs and that, although surrounded not merely by sufficiency,
but by an abundance of goods, they will sink into that "underclass", The
Common Good rightly warns against and deplores.
It will also follow that
manufacturers will not recover their costs, unless they maintain 'growth' paid
for by bank debt and by unceasing effort to create an artificial demand for that
growth.
It will also follow that that 'growth' will necessitate the stripping
of our land (and many other lands) of grass and grain and covering it with steel
and concrete.
Finally it will follow that total indebtedness will always increase,
not only in the home markets, but in the Third World to which the debt is transferred
by means of export "drives." It is not merely
that the questions of money and credit, their origin and ownership, cannot be
avoided but that they are equally and pressingly relevant to the problems of Third
World destitution and environmental destruction. Yet The Common Good, discusses
The Global Common Good (paras. 102-105) with only one reference to the
debt burden and The Environmental Common Good (paras 106-108) without any
reference to it at all. No one can reasonably
deny that the conditions described above are now extant, yet the section The
World of Work (paras. 90-98) is weakened by the absence of any consideration
of how a JUST WAGE may be paid if the monetary system does not in fact reflect
theTRUE COST of production, namely all consumption during the same period.
For
example paragraphs 90-93 examine the nature of human work in terms which call
to mind Ruskin's observation that the reward of work is not in being paid, but
in being chosen.
Nevertheless all work of a kind must be paid at the same
rate - the just rate - for only under that condition will the good worker be chosen
-
"Friend, I do thee no wrong. Didst thou not agree with me for a penny?
Take that thine is, and go thy way, I will give unto this last even as unto thee."
In Economic Democracy Douglas
draws a comparison between the enthusiasm and energy which may be put into a game
and that which is put into "work". The reason for the dichotomy is that men are
most usually obliged by economic necessity to do work they dislike. How then can
men be set free to do the right work and paid a just wage? Paragraph 98 rightly
says that State welfare is not a desirable substitute for the just wage.
However,
such an objection does not apply to a Dividend. Douglas has argued
that a percentage of production is attributable to "The Cultural Heritage" - the
legacy of knowledge from the past, and that this is common property. However
no monetary equivalent of this wealth exists anywhere. If this percentage
were "monetised" by the state, all individuals, as heirs, would be entitled to
a share of it.
In short, the work a man does entitles him to a wage; the
work his forefathers have done entitles him also to a Social dividend,
irrespective of whether he is industrious or idle, a good worker or a poor one.
It needs something of a leap of faith to accept the idea of all families having
a private income. Social Crediters have made that leap. Can the authors of The
Common Good? With the final sections Ownership
and Property (paras. 109-112) and Crisis in the Social Dimension (paras.
113-120) no Social Crediter would disagree.
Ownership and Property
welcomes the spread of ownership in capital assets rather than in land, workshops
and homes, but again shows no sign of recognising that if the monetary system
is flawed then ownership of capital assets is particularly precarious.
Further,
well distributed property cannot long be maintained in a system of monetary creation
as debt which is responsible for the concentration of ownership in the first place.
These weaknesses in this section arise directly from the failure to critically
examine the monetary system in the first place. However,
much in these sections reads like Douglas.
For example compare "The economy
exists for the human person, not the other way round" with Douglas: "Society exists
for the individual, not the individual for society."
Or contrast "The British
have always had afeeling for 'the common good' even if they have not expressed
it in those terms. They are no longer sure that that principle can be relied upon
. . . . the loss of confidence in the concept of the common good is one of the
primary factors behind the national mood of pessimism." with Douglas: "The root
problem of civilisation - not the only problem, but that which has to be disposed
of before any other -is the problem of the provision of bed, board and clothes,
and this affects the ordinary man in terms of effort. If he has to work hard and
long hours to obtain a precarious existence, then for him civilisation fails."
(C.H. Douglas, "The Control and Distribution of Production") Both
passages are concerned with the loss of confidence (Credit) in Society - the negation
of the Social Credit. The authors supply, as an appendix, some extracts from Papal
encyclicals. For reasons not apparent (surely not fear) they quote only a truncated
version of one of the most powerful condemnations of the money system, made by
a Pope.
The full quotation is:
"In the first place, then, it
is patent that in our days not wealth alone is accumulated, but immense power
and despotic economic domination are concentrated in the hands of a few, who for
the most part are not the owners, but only trustees and directors of invested
funds, which they administer at their own good pleasure.
This domination is
most powerfully exercised by those who, because they hold and control money, also
govern credit and determine its allotment, for that reason supplying, so to speak,
the life-blood, and grasping in their hands, as it were the very soul of production,
so that no one can breathe against their will." (Quadragesimo Anno, paras.
105/106 C.T.S. London 1960). Finally, a word
on paragraphs 62-65, grouped under the heading SPECIFIC ISSUES IN A GENERAL ELECTION.
The content is largely the conventional wisdom of the party system. The authors
indeed seem to accept the party system, unlike laissez-faire, is part of
a God-given natural order. It is this section to which most objection has been
made, not least among Catholics active in the political field.
Two
faults among a tangle of many:
A party 'platform' is deternmined by a
small caucus, of policies acting as a package to be accepted in full, however
unacceptable individual items therein might be to the individual. Thus good policies
'carry' bad, the latter often taking over in the end. Douglas is relevant here
- "Freedom is the ability to choose or refuse one thing at a time."
Secondly,
in a General Election few seats may change hands. Even if representatives change,
most MP's are NOT democratically elected by voters forced to select the choice
of a caucus or pressure group. In such circumnstances, only a candidate binding
him/her self to find and pursue the policy of the constituency at large can be
justified. Currently this would be "a single issue" candidate - one eminently
necessary if the electorate rather than a party hierarchy is to win the election.
As it stands, a few minds mould the mass and party loyalty is placed above conscience
and constituency concerns. Seeking this single issue, The Common Good would
thus have been more correctly named. We still await sighting of the Kingdom of
God within.
Anthony Cooney. Notes:
I. cf. UNTO THIS LAST: The Roots of Honour.
2. Douglas' major books are all relevant but
attention is drawn to RECONSTRUCTION. |
