(An article of Louis Even, first published in the January, 1970 issue of the Vers Demain Journal.)

Governmental powers

Textbooks generally distinguish three powers belonging to the Government: the legislative, the executive, and the judiciary.

The legitimate and sovereign government of any free country must possess the power to make laws to regulate relationships between citizens and established bodies, without having to ask permission from a foreign authority. This is the exercise of the legislative power.

Likewise, the government of a sovereign country must be able to administer the nation in conformity with its laws and its constitution, without having to submit its actions to a foreign government for approval. This is the exercise of the executive power.

Finally, the government of a sovereign country must possess the right to enforce the laws of the country, to prosecute and condemn those who transgress them, to pass judgment on the litigation's between citizens throughout that country, without having to request the authority to do so from a foreign government. This is the exercise of the judiciary power.

The superpower

If these three powers — the legislative, the executive, and the judiciary — are the great constituted powers of any sovereign government, there is another power, not labelled as such, but which exceeds these three powers, and which dominates governments themselves.

This superpower, which did not receive authority from any constitution, and which does not worry about it, any more than would a thief in the exercise of his function, is the monetary power.

The monetary power is not the money that you may have in your wallet. It is not the stocks nor the bonds that you may have in your portfolio. It is not the taxes that the governments of the three levels — local, provincial, federal — take from you, without ever being satisfied. It is not the pay raises, for which the trade unions yell, and over which they declare strikes. It is not even the industrial dividends that some Socialists would like to take away from capitalists and to see distributed to wage-earners, without having calculated the insignificant drop that each one would get from them. The monetary power is not what some governments call inflation, and what some employees call a rise in the standard of living, while governments and trade unions contribute to inflation as much as they can, the former by their ever-increasing taxes, the latter by their demands for wage or salary increases.

No, all this is small stuff compared to the stature and the power of the superpower that we are denouncing, this power that can make our lives “hard, cruel, and relentless”, in the words of Pope Pius XI in his Encyclical Letter Quadragesimo Anno. It can even make life almost impossible, as Pius XI expressed it so well in this same encyclical:

“This power becomes particularly irresistible when exercised by those who, because they hold and control money, are able also to govern credit and determine its allotment, for that reason supplying, so to speak, the lifeblood to the entire economic body, and grasping, as it were, in their hands the very soul of production, so that no one dare breathe against their will.”

These strong words may look immoderate to those who are unaware, on the one hand, of the role of money and credit in economic life, and on the other hand, of the control to which money and credit are subjected. But the Pope did not exaggerate at all.

The blood of economic life

Let us recall immediately, without explaining it here, that financial credit has the same virtue as cash in economic life. One buys materials, services, work, products, as much with cheques — which simply transfer figures from one account to another in bank ledgers — as with coins or paper money, which go from a client to the local retailer at the corner store. It is the money of figures (cheques) that activates the more economic life, being responsible for more than 80 percent of the total financial operations of our nation's commerce and industry. The generic term “money” can therefore refer to both forms of means of payment.

Having said this, let us see if money has such a considerable role in economic life, and if its control has really the superpower that the Pope attributes to it.

Whatever may have been the conditions of economic life in past centuries, it is undeniable that today money (or credit) is indispensable in maintaining a multiple-source production in activity called for by the private or public needs of the population. It is indispensable also to allow this production to reach the needs that it must satisfy.

Without money to pay for materials and labour, the best entrepreneur must stop producing, and the supplier of materials will have to reduce his own production accordingly. The employees of the one and the other will suffer from it, remaining with their needs and leaving other producers with unsold products. And the chain goes on. It is a well-known fact that entire populations have suffered from it.

The same applies to public bodies. The public needs can be pressing, very much felt, well expressed and very well understood by public administrations. But if these public administrations are without money, or lack sufficient money, their undertakings must be set aside.

What is lacking in such a state of affairs? Materials? Manpower? Competence? Nothing of this sort. The only thing lacking is money, financial credit, the “lifeblood of the economic body”. Let the blood flow, and the economic body will function once again. If it is a long time in coming, businessmen will lose their concerns, owners their properties, families their daily bread, health or even the lives of children, and often peace in their homes.

But what can one do? Is this not an inevitable situation that one must fatally endure? — Not at all. If blood is lacking in the economic body, it is because it was removed. And if it comes back, it is because it was re-injected.

Extraction and injection of blood are not spontaneous operations. It is the controllers of money and credit who can “determine its allotment... thus supplying the lifeblood to the entire economic body”. One needs their consent to live; Pius XI was right.

In his Encyclical Letter, the Pope did not explain the mechanism of the extraction and injection of blood, nor did he define concrete ways to remove the economic body from the control of these malicious surgeons. This was not his role. His role was to denounce and condemn a dictatorship, the source of incalculable woes for society, for families, for the people, not only in a material sense, but by creating unwarranted difficulties for each soul in the pursuit of a destiny which must be his own for all eternity. And the Pope spoke out and said what he had to say. Alas! too few heeded his words, and the denounced dictatorship has since consolidated its position more and more. The alleviation that the Pope's words may have allowed was allowed only to maintain a power, of which the effects had become so obvious that they were hard to conceal.

In fact, the sudden return of a blood flow in an economic body, which had been entirely deprived of it for many years, could not but impress even those who knew nothing about its mechanism. This bolt of lightning occurred in September of 1939. The day before, a bloodless economic body paralyzed developed countries. The declaration of war, in which these same countries were to participate, suddenly brought back all the blood, all the money, all the financial credit, which these nations would need during the six-year war. It called into play all of their human and material resources.

Above governments

Monetary power is the power of issuing the nation's money and credit; the power of conditioning the putting of money and credit into circulation; the power of determining the length of time of circulation of this financial credit; the power of demanding the return of money at a term fixed beforehand, on pain of confiscation of goods, which are the fruit of the labour of those being subjected to confiscation; the power of bringing governments into subjection, of fixing for them also the conditions of its release and of its return, of demanding as a guarantee the power that all governments have of taxing their citizens.

Now, this financial credit, this money, is the permission to make use of the production capacity, not of the controllers, but of the country's population. The controllers of money and credit do not cause a single stalk of wheat to grow, do not produce one pair of shoes, do not manufacture one sole brick, do not dig into a mine shaft, do not pave one square inch of road. It is the country's population that carries out these projects. It is therefore its own real credit. But to be able to use it, one needs the approval of the controllers of money, of the financial credit, which is nothing more than the registering of figures in the banks' ledgers, representing the value of the nation's real credit.

The banker's pen which consents or refuses to give to individuals, to corporations, to governments, the right to mobilize the skills of professionals, the nation's natural resources, that pen commands; it grants or refuses; it sets conditions on the financial permits that it gives; it puts into debt those individuals or governments to whom it grants permits. The banker's pen has the power of a scepter in the hands of a superpower — the monetary power.

We endured ten years of economic paralysis. Not one government thought it had the power to put an end to it. A declaration of war came, and the financial permits to produce, to draft, to destroy and to kill, suddenly appeared overnight.

Ten parliamentary sessions in Ottawa — each lasting several months — were unable to find a solution to the anti-natural crisis, which was starving and depriving entire families in front of unsold products, and of the possibility of creating much more.

But a so-called urgent six-day session, September 7-13, 1939, was enough for them to decide to enter full speed ahead into a war which was to cost billions of dollars. A quick and unanimous decision was made. A minister from Mackenzie King's Cabinet, J. H. Harris, spoke with all the eloquence he could muster: “Canada,” he proclaimed, “has its eyes glued on this House. Therefore, are we not obliged to see to it that there is within this House a unity of action and of thoughts? The reason is evident; Christianity, democracy, and personal freedom are at stake.”

Christianity and personal freedom had not seemed to him to have been at stake, not any more than to the Government to which he belonged, all the years during which time Canadian families were destroyed by being unable to get bread; during which time youths were taking refuge in concentration camps — also called work camps —  in order to get a meager ration in return for their total servitude; during which time men buried themselves in the bush; during which time unemployed, able-bodied men roamed from one town to the next; during which time others sought shelter in shacks that they had constructed out of pieces of sheet metal or tar paper, salvaged from the dumping grounds of the city of Montreal...

And what did Christianity and personal freedom gain from a war which split up Germany, while putting a part of it, as well as ten other entire Christian countries, under the yoke of the Communist bloodthirsty Stalin?

But Harris and the others knew that going to war was the condition to bring back into the economic body the blood controlled by the superpower, the monetary power.

A diabolical monstrosity

There is not a worse tyranny than that of the monetary power: a tyranny which makes itself felt in all homes, in all institutions, in all public administrations, in all governments.

And from whence does this superpower take its authority? The other three governmental powers obtain their authority from their country's Constitution. But what constitution was able to give to a superpower the right to hold governments themselves under its thumb?

The fact that this same state of affairs exists in all developed countries does not justify this monstrosity. It only goes to show that the superpower of money and credit holds all the civilized world in its tentacles. This makes it even more diabolical.

Yes, it is a diabolical power, but which took on a sacred aura, to such an extent that one looked for the causes of our economic and social woes everywhere, except in the operation of the money and credit system. It is permitted to look somewhere else; but in the monetary system, that is not permitted, not even for the sovereign governments.

It took the light of Social Credit, coming from a genius, C. H. Douglas, to break up this sacred aura, and to unmask a tyranny which has not in the least any characteristic of sacredness. And it took Social Credit apostles to spread this light. But how many souls, who should be more able to understand, to distinguish between a system of domination and a body of service, have chosen to close their ears or their eyes for reasons of pride or private interests!

A constitutional monetary power

The implementation of Social Credit — which we will not explain here, the “Michael” Journal having explained it many times before, and for sure to explain it many times again in the future — would kill this superpower, the scourge of humanity.

What is needed in its stead is a monetary power, established by constitution or by law, in order to make of the monetary organism an organism at the service of the community, as are the other three services mentioned above.

What is needed is a monetary power exercised by an organism similar to the judiciary system, staffed with qualified accountants, instead of judges. These accountants would, like judges, fulfill their duties independently of the powers that be. They would base their operations — additions, subtractions, or rules of three — on statistics which do not depend upon them, but on the statements of the production and consumption of the country, resulting from the free activities of free producers to respond to the orders freely expressed by free consumers.

This means that money and credit would only be the faithful reflection, the expression in figures, of economic realities.

It is the constitutive law of such a monetary power that would set down this end to the organism thus established. The organism would supply the necessary financial credits to the population so that it can order the goods it needs from the country's production capacity. And as it is the individuals and the families themselves who know best what they need, the monetary organism would be obligated, by its very constitution, to supply to each individual and to each family the necessary income for them to be able to order at least the basic necessities of life for a decent standard of living. This is what Social Credit calls a dividend given to each citizen, regardless of his status of employment or unemployment in production.

Then, the same monetary organism would supply to the producers the required financial credits to make use of the country's production capacity, in response to the orders thus expressed by the consumers. It would do so for public needs as well as for private needs.

If the pen of an usurped superpower can create or refuse, according to the will of this tyrant, the financial credit, based on the nation's real credit, the pen from a constitutional monetary power would be as effective to issue the financial credit, to the service of the population, of all the members of society. This end would be specified in the law.

There would no longer be purely financial hindrances. Getting into debt to foreign bankers for things that we can produce in our own country — this preposterousness would cease to exist. Prices going up, when production becomes easier and more plentiful — such an inconsistency would cease to exist in a monetary body obligated, by law, to make of the financial aspects of the economy the exact reflection of reality. The seeking of new job creations while the machine, instead of human labour, supplies products — such a ridiculous policy would be relegated to a past history of subjection to a monster. The astronomical waste, due to the production of things useless to the normal needs of people, with the sole end of creating jobs, would be banned as a lack of responsibility to the generations which must succeed us.

And thousands of other things as well will ensue with the establishment of a monetary power of service, and with the doing away with the unbearable rule that wants to link income solely to employment, when the first effect of progress should be to free man from economic tasks in order to allow him to freely devote himself to activities which are less materialistic, and to tend towards the blossoming out of his personality and freedom.