(An article of Louis Even, first published in the August, 1968 issue of the Vers Demain Journal.)

Well-deserved reproaches

If a Communist says to you:

“In your capitalist countries, wealth piles up more and more in the hands of a few. Some men become very wealthy and put others in their service. The more they have, they more they use it to enlarge their nest eggs. They buy out small concerns. They make the modest industrial concerns disappear, and they establish big companies, with colossal factories, into which the working masses must rush every morning, or often at night, and perform what they are ordered to do. Otherwise, they will die of hunger. It is the small number of capital accumulators who run the show, and it is the great number of workers who are led by the nose.”

If a Communist tells you that, can you reply in the negative? No, obviously, because what he says is very much in keeping with the facts.

And if a Communist says to you:

“In your capitalist countries, when a government or a public body needs to carry out public works, for schools, hospitals, water systems, roads, canals, airports — if it does not have money — it remains paralyzed, even though there is everything required in the country to carry out these public works. If it wants these public works carried out, it must get into debt, that is to say, put the population in debt for works that the population will carry out itself; or it must tax more, thus reducing the purchasing power of the individuals, while the country can very well produce both capital goods and consumer goods — public things and things for private consumption. In other words, your government must deprive you of butter in order to provide asphalt roads, while the country can very well produce at the same time all the necessary asphalt to pave the roads and all the butter needed to spread on one's bread.”

If a Communist speaks to you that way, are you going to tell him that he's lying? If he's in the habit of lying while speaking highly of the Communist regimes, he's not lying when he's putting these absurdities of the capitalist countries under your nose.

You do not want to live under a Communist regime, which conscripts all people to the orders of the party in power and of its technocrats. You do not want a Communist government, which keeps watch over and spies on everything and everyone through its secret police and its informers. You do not want a regime which must surround its borders with 20-foot-high walls, surmounted by a network of barbed wire, flanked by a watchtower fitted with machine-guns, with packs of police dogs, and a night and day surveillance, to deny citizens starving for liberty any possibility of reaching our capitalistic countries where there is still more liberty and, at the same time, where bread is easier to obtain.

But what can you reply to the Communist who accuses the capitalist system of injustice in the distribution of wealth, and of the subjection of the public bodies to the monetary dictatorship?

If you are not a Social Crediter, if you believe that the monetary system which imposes its conditions and its regulations is a sacred and untouchable system, with which one must try to make one's way in life even if it means stepping over everyone else, then you most certainly do not have anything valid to give as an answer to the Communist. Spiritual arguments on religious grounds may perhaps have merit if you are unaware of the sacrificing of natural rights of the human being to the demands of the financial system. But on temporal grounds, on that of a just distribution of wealth, and the emancipation from purely financial obstacles, you are terribly deprived; you are empty-handed. And you are so, more and more of your own volition, because Social Credit has for a long time presented you with the effective remedy to the monetary dictatorship — a remedy which would bring back the capitalist system to its proper role of making the production and the distribution of goods respond to the needs of all, with a maximum of economic security and of personal liberty.

Everyone a capitalist

Question: “And how would Social Credit make this marvellous transformation? How can it change monopolizers into servants concerned with the needs of the population?”

Answer: Social Credit would do it, precisely by breaking the monopoly — a monopoly which is no longer sound capitalism, but a monstrosity stemming from a defective financial system, tyrannical at its source and in its operation. Social Credit would do away with the monopoly by making each individual a capitalist: 30 million capitalists in a Canada of 30 million citizens.

Question: “But how could those who have little or no money be considered capitalists?”

Answer: First, by giving the word “capital” its true sense, the sense of production factor, and not only the narrow sense of sums of money. Think of capital in terms of reality, and not in terms of symbols. Money is only a symbol, a token. It is the goods which are real in production. Money is nothing but a unit of measurement; it only serves to put a figure on, to calculate the comparative values of things, to record, to add.

If I own a farm, with its buildings, its animals, its ploughing implements — even if I had no money in my pockets — I own capital — my farm — capital which I can put into service. Then I can get products. I am a capitalist.

The real capital of a country is its production capacity. If there is no production capacity, even if all the money in the world is put into circulation, no product will result; such a country will not be able to sustain anyone.

A great communal capital

Question: “Very well. But there are people who do not possess any other real capital than money capital; who have no farm, no factory, nor any other production factor. How can we make them capitalists also, since you are saying: ‘All are capitalists’?”

Answer: It can happen, by considering what the factors which go into the country's production are, and to whom these factors belong.

We said in a recent article on the subject: Production, especially modern production, depends upon many things other than the work of producers and the investments of money people. First of all, it depends upon the existence of raw material, natural resources, without which no production is possible. It depends also, and more and more, on progress transmitted from one generation to the next —inventions, discoveries, know-how, improvements in production techniques — progress which brings about faster production, even with fewer employees and reduced working hours.

Now, both these elements — natural resources and progress — are not the sole property of any particular individual. The first element — natural resources — is a free gift from God to all of humanity. The second — progress — is a bequeathed heritage from past generations, and we are all coheirs of it by right.

Therefore there is a vast real capital, of which we are all co-owners — a communal capital that no one takes with him, but which, having become a preponderant factor in modern production, must really be worth a dividend to all the co-owners. It is a social dividend to which all are equally entitled, as members of the national community.

How can this theory be put into practice? It can be done as follows, by using known investment terms: Those who invest private capital in production get a share or several shares in relation with their investment. They become shareholders. Let us say that of all the citizens of a country: all are co-owners of a vast real capital, a big production factor; each gets one social share reflecting his part of this capital. This is a share which does not need to be evaluated in money. It is part of a real capital, and its worth is dependent on the productivity of this real capital in production. Now, we do not hesitate to say that the greater part of modern production stems much more from this social capital than from the personal participation of those who are hired in the production processes, whether as employers or employees. The role of these participants is certainly necessary and must be remunerated, but the role of the social capital increases more and more, whereas the role of the total number of employees subsides more and more. This means that the social dividend should more and more displace the wage and other forms of remunerations to the producers.

Without reaching this effect from the very beginning, during the breaking-in of the system, the periodical dividend to each citizen should already allow each one to get at least the basic necessities of life, which is really the first function of a sound and well-established economic organism.

Report to the shareholders

Then, since all members are shareholders of the communal capital, the public organism in charge of the system would present to them periodically, through public means, the “report to the shareholders” — something as follows, for example:

“During the last accounting period, you have all received a monthly dividend of $800, based on the fulfillment of previous accounting periods. Now, during the latest accounting period, the value of the country's annual production went from 590 billion dollars to 600 billion dollars, without any increase in producing personel. This increase is therefore due to progress, which is a communal capital. Therefore it must not be expressed by a pay increase, but by an increase in the social dividend. The latter will therefore be increased by $15 a month to each of the 30 million Canadians. That is to say, a total of $5.4 billion for the year. The rest of the increase ($4.6 billion) will be integrated through the compensated-price mechanism, to reduce retail prices to be paid by the consumers without infringing upon the producers' cost price.”

This compensated price is a Social Credit technique, which has the effect of making the population pay for all of its various production at the cost of all of its various consumption, which is the just price. We must actually pay the price for what we consume, and not the price for what we produce. That is logical, not only for the individual consumer, but for the national community as a whole. We will not explain here this marvellous Social Credit technique, which would do away with all inflation, as well as all deflation, and which would also allow us to do without the whole complex system of the country's general taxation. (See Chapter 16 for an explanation of the compensated-price mechanism.)

But to return to the system of distributing a share of the production to all the citizens in the form of a dividend, what are the foreseeable effects? We foresee numerous beneficial effects, but it would require another article to outline even a prospective summary of it.

Possible correction

Let us reply here to a remark which comes up much too often: “This conception of a distributive economy can seem logical and marvellous. But is this not a beautiful utopia that is practically unrealizable?” Why unrealizable? Because one would need to make a few modifications, light at that but of a philosophical nature, to the present financial system? But this system is a creation of man. If it is not serving well, we must not submit to it; we must make it more flexible. It is possible, as it was proven during World War II. The system, which had kept the world in a long and major depression before the war, was made more flexible to finance as necessary the whole production of required war engines, and to finance the free distribution of bombs upon the heads of the enemies. It can and must be made more flexible to finance as necessary the whole possible production answering human needs, and to distribute this production as necessary to appropriately serve these needs, in their order of priority, to all people, to all families in the country.

To refuse this correction when it is possible, is a crime on the part of the controllers of the system. To let evil perpetuate itself is, on the part of the country's authorities, either a criminal complicity, or guilty cowardice, inadmissible by the keepers of the law and of the common good of the nation.