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Wednesday, 22 April 2009

Is Social Credit dead and gone?


While we might be hearing a lot about economists John Maynard Keynes and Irving Fisher, what of C.H. Douglas of Social Credit fame?

A couple of posts here have touched on the subject of Social Credit but very few have bothered to make any comment. One comment that was made... "Maybe that is true about only being a provincial government (Albert, Canada) but the trouble with Social Credit theory is... "on one side of their A+B equation they count an item only once, on the other side they unknowingly count the same item several times over." To quote author Henry Hazlitt in his book 'Economics in one lesson'." but it failed to even a response.

I would have expected a comment like that to have been jumped upon by devout Social Credit supporters, but perhaps they have had their day and disappeared into the past? What of their past Leaders here in New Zealand? Matthews, Cracknell, O'Brien, Bruce Beetham and Neil Morrison have passed away, Gary Knapp, Grant Dillon, John Wright have disappeared never to be heard of again (Party high flyer Alasdair Thompson is now Chief Executive of the EMA.) The party is now led by little known Stephnie de Ruyter from Christchurch.

John Pemberton, Deputy Leader for the Party has written an interesting post on here in the past link text asking the question 'Is it possible to realise “Economic Democracy”?' but it would appear there is little support for such ideas in this modern era of economics turmoil given the lack of comments to his post.

So I guess that begs the question... is Social Credit dead and gone? Or is Social Credit philosophy and policies for monetary reform likely to rise again from the ashes like the Phoenix?

4 comments:

Rusty Kane said...

Maybe it's time we got the hint, and let Social Credit(RIP)along with it's philosophy's.... Although the US is now starting to print new money like theres no tomorrow.. for a new tomorrow that will never be like yesturday... When money had value.

Anonymous said...

This illustrates the problem faced by social credit in promoting reform of the 300 year-old debt as money mechanism. Fortunately the myths around money are slowly being consigned to the rubbish bin of history, although 'experts' such as Alan Bollard still promote the falsehood that banks onlend the 'money' customers deposit in their savings accounts. Yesterday on Mid-day Business he described NZ Banking as 'Vanilla' and perpetuated the myth that banks lend 'money' rather than create debt. The biggest barrier to progress, paece and prosperity is ignorance and as long as people are too damn lazy to look at the debt driver behind the issues our elected representatives spent most of their time and a whole pile of our money fruitlessy debating, then nothing will change. The only reason we still don't exist in caves is because someone decided to look outside and apply some commonsense solutions to the adverse environment they saw there.
As long as the historic mechanism of debt as money is used as the foundation of virtually all economic activity, locally and globally, the periodic financial crisis of the past three centuries will continue. The truth is that social credit has never advocated the printing of new money as a solution to anything. What has been proposed is the use of a credit mechanism to provide funding for specific areas of state spending as an alternative to borrowing and taxation. It should be obvious that if infrastructure is built through the use of a mechanism that does not involve interest bearing debt then the costs involved will be considerably reduced and therefore less inflationary. Surely it is time the concept of 'money' is dragged into the 21st century instead of blindly accepting something that predates the industrial and technological revolutions that promised humanity so much but instead continues to delivered destruction, distruption and exclusion to billions of people. (Edited by Steve Baron -BDNZ)

paulinem said...

Social Credit is in demise as in today's world you need money lots of it to promote the cause with out it you are literally pushing the shit up hill. Social credit never attracted big money we were the poor persons party :)

SC was promoted by mainly the baby boomer generation and war babies generation. We were confronted with dramatic changes technology such as TVs computers etc ..we also saw via these mediums the fall out of conflicts such as Vietnam...it was us that walked the streets for Democratic reform we compromised for MMP election system as we were persuaded anything was better than FPP election system.

We were persuaded to join the Alliance party..together you conquer alone you full by the wayside .. this included all parties of influence together for NZ ( this included Anderton and Peters) unfortunately ambition egos and greed got in the road.

Now we are tired many of us have died we are heading for retirement the future of this country is not really our problem its the next generations problem

What of these generation ..the X generation considered by commentators the most selfish ..life is all about what is in it for me

The Y generation the cop out generation they do not listen to news on radio or watch on TV or read about it on there computers ..they prefer instead to play space games, read the entertainment news about there idols watch sport maybe but mostly listen to their ipods or watch their entertainment idols do their thing on TV

What for our economic and democratic future ...the price of democracy is ever vigilance

On one end of the scale we have people who HATE CHANGE..better the devil you know philosophy..on the other end go with the flow man go with the flow ..they wouldn't even know who or what they are voting for..

The future God knows !!

Steve Baron said...

In retrospect the timing of the Social Credit Party and their rising succes at the time was not very good. By the time MMP came around they were on they way down the political spiral. This was a shame because if it wasn't for this party we would most likely never got MMP. This party was indeed the true batlers of NZ politics who had to do it tooth and nail to achieve what they did. 20% of the vote but only two MP's. One could argue that their election strategy was wrong at the time but the party did kind of self destruct to.