By T. V. H. in "Intelligence" (England)
"Let it be your care not to be in any man's debt." No one could carry out this admonition today, not even Samuel Johnson who made it more than two hundred years ago. Even the most thrifty among us is willy-nilly hopelessly in debt by the simple fact of being a member of his community. The less thrifty have all manner of hire-purchase contracts and similar debt obligations in addition.
This country's National Debt now stands at some £27,000 million sterling. Consider the vast sums which the community must find to pay the interest on the debt alone. And then consider the other debts which the community owes, national and international, state and municipal, nationalised industries and free enterprise debentures. We are all in other men's debt and that for millions of pounds which we do not possess and never can possess.
No man seeks to get blood out of a stone, says the proverb. But the community's well-organised creditors have acquired the legal right to do just that — to draw blood-money from a community which possesses only stone-money. The debt is expressed in terms of "money" which the community has not the "right" to create and which is only loaned to it by the "world-organised creditors".
The debts are paid, but only by borrowing the money to pay them! Well might Cobbett write that "the fate of the Kingdom must finally turn upon what should be done with regard to the accursed thing called the National Debt". It was about the same time that Disraeli wrote in one of his novels: "Can anything be more absurd than that a nation should apply to an individual to maintain its credit and its existence as an Empire? The Funding System has made debt a national habit; it has made credit the ruling power".
"Render unto Caesar the things which are Caesar's and unto God the things that are God's", said Our Lord. But what is the material debt we owe to God and what the material debt we owe to Caesar? What is the fundamental currency in which the individual does in the last analysis liquidate his debts? A very great man of our generation, the late C. H. Douglas, answered this question in 1920 when he wrote in Economic Democracy: "that the individual only possesses inalienable property of the one description; potential effort over a definite period of time". In simple terms, that fundamental currency is the man-hours of work. Douglas further stated:
"The cheapest terms in which the individual can liquidate his debt to nature in respect of food, clothes, and shelter, is clearly dependent on process, and by getting free of this debt with the minimum expenditure of time-energy units... he clearly is so much the richer in the most real sense in that he can control the use to be made of his remaining stock."
"Process" is the child of invention and discovery, which combine to save labour, i.e. to reduce the debtowing by man to nature. The extent to which nature's debt has been reduced in recent decades is remarkable and almost fabulous. Man's debt to God for the food, clothes and shelter needed for life on this earth is in constant and continuous reduction by reason of the constant and continuous discovery and understanding of God's laws of nature.
But the material debt which must be rendered unto Caesar is constantly increasing in terms of man-hour labour. While God promises ever greater possibilities of leisure and culture and true religion, Caesar demands ever greater necessities for tasks and toils and austerities in the repayment of "world-organized debt on a scale hitherto unknown in the history of mankind". And behind the menace of world-organized debt lies the menace of world-organized Communism.
The same. C. H. Douglas, in an address delivered in Oslo in 1935, stated:
"...if the world as a whole is consistently getting further and further into debt, it is not, as the ordinary business-man would say, paying its way, and if it is not paying its way it is quite obvious that the price system demands of it more purchasing power than is available...
"In the year 1694 the Bank of England was formed in Great Britain... In the 17th century, that is to say, in the century in which the Bank of England was founded, the world debt — and we have pretty accurate figures with regard to these matters — increased 47 per cent... By the end of the 18th century the world debt had increased by 466 per cent, and by the end of the 19th century the world debt, public, and private, had increased by 12,000 per cent.... and that in spite of the numerous repudiations of debt, the writing down of debts which takes place with every bankruptcy, and other methods used to write off debts and start again."
In the face of such facts it is difficult to deny the existence of "world-organized debt-evil on a scale hitherto unknown in the history of mankind". It is equally difficult to deny that the State has made itself an accomplice to this world-organised debt-evil, which must inevitably result in a still greater world-organised Communist evil, a World Caesar, who will not only usurp all power over our community on earth, but over our power as individuals to fulfill God's will on earth. And only the truth can make us free.
The New Times, June 19; 1959
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