Fw: (SOCIAL CREDIT) servant, not master

Hi Folks,

The two messages below merit a wider audience 
because they indicate the coming convergence 
of diverse schools of thought on reforming the US 
public policy to make it sustainable.  We did not get 
to be the world's first superpower by being wrong 
all of the time.  We have had only one significant 
systemic defect in our public policy, which remains 
uncorrected since the 1890s, and is clearly visible in 
the my ten year old Fig10b.gif and more recent data from 
Bronson Capital Markets Research in Fig10d.gif

On list <FixGov@yahoogroups.com> Tony 
Troughton-Smith compliments Paul Hellyer on his 
"Economics For Boomers" as being "clear and 
understandable without need for a single diagram 
or "Fig4.3.gif"  Yeeaaarrgghhhh!   Thanks Tony.  

The top view of Fig4 is all you need to understand 
as a necessary introduction to the Macro-Model 
Fig7-9d.gif and Fig8.1.gif where the root cause of 
the US systemic defect of omission in public policy 
is clearly illustrated by both the regressive SS payroll 
tax, capped at $76,000/year, and the incomplete 
capitalization of the expense of developing our 
future workforce.   Australian data on this defect is 
not very well publicized on list ERANet@yahoogroups.

But, Tony, I need the rest of Fig4 for serious students 
like L. Urban Kohler and Bill Ryan who want to rationalize 
 Douglas' A + B Theorem.

Best Wishes,

Wes Burt

--------- Forwarded message ----------
From: william_b_ryan@lycos.com
To: socialcredit@topica.com, pkt@csf.colorado.edu
Date: Wed, 28 Jan 2004 10:02:11 -0800
Subject: [SOCIAL CREDIT] servant, not master

Though the Greenbackers and Populists united in 1896 
behind the "fusion" candidate William Jennings Bryan, 
they derived from quite different schools of thought 
regarding monetary reform.

The Greenbackers wanted government to print money and 
spend it.  The Populists were for free coinage, which 
took government out of the picture except for 
supplying the services of the mint.

Some two decades later a third alternative entered 
the fray, taking the best from the essence of the 
Greenbacker and Populist proposals.

A Social Credit government would print money and pay 
it out as dividends.  The problem of concentrating 
power in government through unlimited spending power 
is thereby avoided.  Also avoided is the 
irrationality of free coinage in satisfying the needs 
of trade and commerce in a closed system of finance.

As to the fourth branch of government, the Federal 
Reserve is already effectively that in the American 
system.  Bringing it formally as such into the 
Constitution would be a step forward, as business 
unfinished from the Revolution.

The central bank would then be "government" to the 
financial sector, as the Supreme Court is 
"government" to the legal sector; the executive is 
"government" to the government, and the legislative 
expressing the will of the people with oversight over 
the other branches.

It would be recognition by all parties concerned 
that finance is servant, not master.



----original message----
Date:  Wed, 28 Jan 2004 08:38:09 -0800
From:  Keith Wilde <keithwilde@sympatico.ca>
Subject:  [SOCIAL CREDIT] Social credit in "Lost 
Science of Money"?

Topics raised here over the past couple of days 
engage themes treated in the book by Stephen Zarlenga 
of the American Monetary Institute (AMI).  The 
"review" of mine that Bill Ryan posted a few days ago 
is really a summary of the main arguments of the book 
with very little evaluative content.  It is also too 
long for most "review" purposes, but at 15 pages it 
is a lot less reading than the 750 pp of the book!  I 
hope this will be helpful to people who wish to 
comment on the AMI  policy position without having to 
read the whole book. 
 
To put it even more succinctly, AMI favors a complete 
fusion of central bank powers with those of 
government--management of the nation's money should 
be a fourth fundamental branch of government.  This 
proposal includes government issuance of paper 
currency as a money that is "good as gold".  This is 
combined with a requirement that banks hold 100% 
reserves of this government money for all loans they 
make.  The system would be initiated by printing 
enough currency to liquidate all outstanding bank 
loans; additions to money supply would henceforth be 
made via direct government spending to fund its own 
activities. 
 
This location of monetary control would obviously 
accommodate the social credit technique of 
distributing a "dividend" directly to consumers.
 
Another element in Zarlenga's argument is intimately 
related to the theme of some reformers that banks 
create money "out of thin air".   The way he treats 
it has a flavor that reminds me of a major premise in 
Social Credit.  That is, when banks issue credit, the 
"thin air" they rely on is very similar to the 
"cultural heritage" appealed to by SoCrediters.  The 
way Zarlenga treats it sounds to me more like the 
idea of "public goods" that used to be a familiar 
topic in standard political economy.  He charges that 
banks are appropriating the "public good" and getting 
rich from compound interest on something that was 
never and ought not to be their own property.  
 
Two questions for our Social Credit experts, 
therefore:
 
(1)  How does "cultural heritage" relate to "public 
goods" and the AMI proposition that it be taken over 
by government for distribution to individuals and 
industrial firms as well as to banks?
 
(2)  What is your reaction to the idea of government 
as issuer of money and therefore of dividends as an 
incidental part of its management of money and the 
government budget?
 
For more complete explanation of how these questions 
arise, see my "book review". 
 
Keith Wilde
--