Men of the Right, Empty-Handed

(Written by Louis Even. The introduction and comments are by Alain Pilote, and were published in the November-December, 1995 issue of the Michael Journal.)

The following article was written by Louis Even in 1971 but it is still relevant today as we notice a shift towards what political commentators call “the right”, Neo-liberalism or Conservatism, in Canada and the United States. By this, they mean politicians who pester against the "Welfare State” or any other form of Socialism and State intervention. But, as Louis Even explains it so well, because these so-called “right-wing” politicians do not want to change or condemn the present financial system, which is at the root of all the evils they denounce, the cures they advocate are often worse than the evils they denounce, since they are bound to hurt the people they are supposed to help.

For example, they will make cuts in social programs, hospitals, health care, education, etc., in order to reduce the deficit. They say that they have no alternative but to “redefine the role of the State” (reduce programs) because they simply do not have the money to finance them. It is policies like these that lead many people, in Eastern European nations that were recently freed from Communism and converted to the “market economy”, to say: “At least, in the days when the Communists were in power, we were not starving!”

These politicians say they have no alternative. Yet, they would not be forced to make all these cuts if they decided to tackle the real problem and to reform the financial system along these lines: The sovereign government of each nation must take back its right to issue the money for the nation, instead of borrowing money at interest from private banks. If this is not done, poverty will increase and become widespread among their populations.

What is needed for every country in the world is Social Credit, and Canada should be the first nation to set the example. This will come insofar as the subscribers to the “Michael” Journal make an effort to disseminate the light of Social Credit around them, by soliciting subscriptions and finding new members who will do the same, in order to educate the population, so that all Canadians will cry out to the Prime Minister in one voice: “You there! Create your own money!”

A.P.

Men of the right…

Men of the right, you who reject Communism and all things that lead to it.

You who do not recognize any possibility of an alliance between the Communist heresy and the Christian truth.

You reject Communism, surely because it denies God and it wants to extinguish all religious belief. But even if it did allow the teaching and practice of religion, you would still say no to Communism because it denies human rights, because it abolishes freedom of choice, because of the tyranny of a Communist State, and because of its materialism and ideology.

You condemn any form of collectivism, of State Socialism. You do not want technocrats to be allowed to plan the life and activities of citizens. You fight back bureaucracy and the government's nose being stuck everywhere.

You deny the Government the right to substitute itself for families, for free associations and for intermediary bodies.

You loathe the growing political centralization that drives the administrators further away from those who are administered; a centralization that takes powers and means away from local public bodies and which transfers them to regional organizations, or from regional organizations to those of higher levels, where the voice of financial powers is better listened to than the voice of individuals and famiies

You also deplore the acceleration of economic concentration, which places the control of resources and manpower in the hands of a few; a concentration that creates huge plants in which hundreds, thousands of employees blindly follow orders they receive, whatever the nature or destination of the products may be.

You declare your strong attachment to a system of private property — whether of land, of housing, or of the means of production — property you wish everyone had access to.

Sadly you watch towns being filled with tenants, peasants who have left a land burdened with taxes and debts, to join our cities'proletariat. It is with sorrow that you observe the disappearance of man-size businesses that are either forced into bankruptcy or taken over by industrial or commercial monopolies.

Men of the right, you are surely worried by the attitude of rebellion that is gaining ground among the youth, by their distaste of home and family life and by their loss of respect for their parents, by the unwholesome fruits born by influences outside the family(...)

...empty-handed

But, men of the right, you must surely know that neither your laments nor your speaches will put a stop to this wave of political centralization, of economic centralization, of State Socialism, and of its culmination to Communism.

Neither will you stop it with empty hands. But is it not with empty hands that you denounce it? Have you nothing to oppose Socialism with, other than the present vitiated capitalist system which makes the rich richer and the poor poorer, which makes small owners lose the little they have left?

Oh! You may repeat your condemnations of this type of capitalism all you want. But what do you have to offer that will improve it? If you have nothing to offer, how will you prevent the discontented from turning to Socialism or Communism, even if this means to sacrifice their personal freedom, whether abruptly or gradually? The starving, the have-not, the homeless, hungers for more than freedom talk, a freedom he has already lost for all practical purposes.

You, men of the right, what do you have to offer to the hungry, to the have-not, to the homeless? What means will you take to stop the growing State interventions in areas that are up to individuals, families and local administrations? Can you not see that all these State interventions are said to be necessary, to be motivated by the financial incapacity of individuals and families to pay for municipal, school, and health services?

You are aware, just as we are, of this financial incapacity, but how do you suggest it should be remedied? What solution do you offer, other than your speeches, in which you are too often in a hurry to blame the victims for being the cause of their own financial incapacity?

What do you have to offer? Nothing. Nothing, and therefore you will stop neither nationalizations, nor State planning, nor collectivism, nor the technocrats, nor the bureaucrats, nor the spoliation, nor the regimentation, nor the State-all, nor Communism whether openly declared or disguised under some other name.

Your heart is broken when you see country people leaving their land for the pavement of the cities. But what do you have to offer to prevent taxes and debts from ruining farmers? Nothing? Well, don't be surprised if they decide to abandon a piece of land that must feed the State and the financiers before feeding their own families.

Some will say: This is part of progress. Really? Progress? In the past, with fifteen or twenty cows, a farmer could support a family of twelve children; today, one cannot raise four children if one dœs not have at least sixty head of cattle, a tractor, machinery... and a lot of debts!

Nothing is done to promote family life, to encourage parents to have children, to keep teenagers at home, to defend parental authority. You, men of the right, what do you have to offer to reassert the rights of the family and parental authority? Nothing! Once again, you are empty-handed!

What do you have to offer so that progress, the mechanization of production, automation, will result in free people, instead of people totally or partially unemployed, condemned to live on money taken from the wages of those who have not been displaced by progress yet? What do you offer? Nothing!

Because you are empty-handed, because you have nothing really new to offer, you are reduced to keeping quiet or to dancing to the same tune as the men of the left, to promoting the same measures that lead to the same results.

Communists of Soviet countries or defenders of the free world's Capitalism, men of the left and men of the right of our Nation, do they not advocate the same policy to solve unemployment? A policy of full employment.

And since improvements to the methods of production means that less and less human labour is needed to satisfy the normal needs of people, a solution is sought after in the promotion of new material needs, to keep production going. We no longer advocate the limitation of material needs, befitting to Christians, but on the contrary, we promote the active creation of new needs, therefore the sinking into materialism, the same materialism the increase of which worries you, men of the right. You contribute to it, because you do not know how, or do not want to, advocate a distribution of goods that is dissociated from the requirement of being employed in production.

No one can obtain goods without handing over money, without owning some purchasing power, even though the products have already been made in overabundance, and without requiring all available hands. But this purchasing power can be obtained only if one is employed in production. This wretched rule forces the creation of new jobs that create new goods, and therefore new needs to buy these new goods. You see what this leads to: To materialism. And you hold on to this wretched rule as though it were a Commandment of God.

Supremacy of money

Men of the right, can you not see that the evil in the economic and social organism lies in the submission to a financial system, which rules lead to all the conditions that you deplore.

Our whole economic life is motivated by money. Money reigns supreme. It has become the determining factor of every economic activity, and it also sets the conditions under which the operations are carried out. This supremacy of money is the great economic heresy — and more than merely economic — that Christians are too blind to see, or too bound to denounce, or too coward to overthrow.

Say, men of the right, have you ever seen governments, big or small, worried in their economic plans by anything else than money problems? When they want to build a road, a school, a hospital, do they worry about finding workers to do the work? Where to find stones, bricks, concrete or other materials? Isn't the problem of finding money the major headache of governments? Ask the Minister of Finance.

Yet, following ten years of headache and economic paralysis, in the years preceding World War II, as soon as it was declared, all the governments of the warring countries found the billions of dollars required to finance the war for six years. This proves at least that the scarcity of money could have been ended as early as 1930, since it was ended the very day the war was declared. It also proves that we are dealing here with a criminal money dictatorship, that starved people during peacetime, and that financed slaughter and destruction without any hesitation. And which also gœs to prove that the governments of those days were the lackeys, whether unknowing or accomplices, of this criminal dictatorship. Their successors today have done nothing to change the situation.

And you accept this dictatorship of money, men of the right? You attack everything except this dictatorship. As though money was a god that escapes the will of man. As though rules established in respect to money could not be changed for rules in keeping with the many human needs and the possibilities that exist to satisfy them.

Ignorance or refusal?

You, men of the right, are empty-handed in front of all kinds of disorders, in every domain, because of your refusal to correct this major disorder: the disorder of money having become a sovereign.

I dare to use the word “refusal” because it seems to me that you cannot ignore what has been presented to the world since 1918, and in Canada, with unremitting zeal, since 1935, under the name of Social Credit.

Oh! I know too well that the news media did everything to silence or misrepresent the proposals of authentic Social Credit. I also know that the creation of political parties using that name, in Canada as well as in Great Britain, New Zealand and Australia, contributed to likening this doctrine of truth and liberation to a vulgar pursuit of power, making of Social Credit a faction of politicians to be fought, or electoral speeches to be ridiculed.

But men of the right should have learnt, a long time ago, to search for the truth elsewhere than in a news media infested with leftists and liars, and elsewhere than in the waffle of politicians. And if you are prejudiced against Social Credit, you should put your prejudices aside, for they have no reason to exist in a sincere search for a solution to the serious problems that you recognize and denounce.

Social Credit, an efficient solution

Social Credit is an efficient solution, since the implementation of its financial principles would turn finance into a flexible servant, instead of a master that dictates decisions in the economic order. It would liberate every level of government from subjection to the present controllers of financial credit.

By adjusting the issuing of financial credit, i.e. of money, to the possibilities of producing the goods required by the needs, one would no longer have to look at the pityful sight offered by a production capacity that stands paralyzed before unsatisfied needs.

Today's production can easily meet the orders of consumers when they are accompanied by the proper purchasing power. Social Credit would guarantee to every individual, through a periodic dividend, a basic purchasing power at least sufficient to allow the purchase of the necessities of life, in a country where the productive capacity can easily supply this amount of goods.

Moreover, there would be no inflation in a Social Credit economy. One cannot speak of a high cost of living, since a mechanism of price adjustment (not of price fixing ) would establish a balance between total effective purchasing power in the hands of consumers, and the sum of the prices of the goods offered on the market to satisfy the needs.

A dividend or guaranteed annual income

Comments by Alain Pilote, taken from the November-December 1995 issue of the “Michael” Journal:

Present debates about the future of social programs like welfare, employment insurance and pensions for the elderly, show the urgency of implementing Social Credit. A dividend must be given to every citizen. This would be much more efficient than all these other measures. Being short of money, governments tend to cut into social programs. This will inevitably hurt some people, especially the poorest.

Welfare recipients become an easy target for bashing because their benefits are paid for by the taxes of those who work. Middle-class wage earners show discontent, not without reason, for it turns out that some people on welfare are better off than they, who have to work at the sweat of their brows.

The Social Credit dividend would be infinitely better than the present welfare system with its many inquiries to know who is eligible and who is not. Contrary to welfare, it would not be financed by the taxpayers'money, but by new money, created without interest by the Bank of Canada. Moreover, this dividend would be given to every citizen, whether he is employed or not. Those who are employed would therefore not be penalized, since they would receive the dividend plus their wages. Wage-earners could no longer accuse those who don't work of having unfair privileges, since they would receive the same privileges, in addition to their wages.

Some people may think that giving such a dividend to everyone would make people idle: That people would no longer want to work, knowing they would receive a guaranteed annual income,. To this, the Social Crediters say that, on the contrary, with a guaranteed dividend, there would be a flowering of creative activities; people would then be placed in a position where they could take part in the type of activity which appeals to them most, activities for which they are best suited.

This stand was confirmed by a study of the Science Council of Canada, as reported by the Canadian Press on July 31, 1991:

“The fears that a guaranteed annual income to each Canadian family would harm the will of the people to work are groundless, say Derek Hum and Wayne Simpson, the two researchers who signed the document... A government spokesman pointed out that this project of a guaranteed income was on the shelf for now, but could surface at the next general election.”

We know that this project did not surface for the October 25, 1993 elections in Canada. The Conservatives were swept away, going from 157 seats to only 2 seats!

Interestingly enough, in November 1985, the Macdonald Commission (created by Prime Minister Trdueau a few years earlier) had released its three-volume, 1,100-page report, which recommended three major changes:

1. Free trade with the U.S.A.;

2. A shift in tax policy toward consumption; and

3. A guaranteed annual income.

The Mulroney Government carried out the first two recommendations, the North American Free Trade Agreement and the Goods and Services Tax, but did not implement a guaranteed annual income, which would have done Canadians more good than the two other measures. Was it because of the pressure of the Financiers?

It is now the Liberals who are in office. Will they be more courageous than Mulroney's Tories? The idea of a guaranteed annual income is not unknown to the Liberals. Columnist Richard Daigneault wrote in the January 4, 1985 issue of Quebec City's “Le Soleil”:

“A certain number of Liberals believe that the guaranteed annual income — a minimum income to which every citizen would be entitled — is the system of tomorrow. According to Mr. Armand Bannister, chairman of the Reform Committee of the Liberal Party of Canada, the issue of unemployment, for instance, can no longer be seen in the light of the past, from the standpoint of the thirties. The use of modern technology at all levels of production and commercial activity will create unemployment. Can we continue claiming that each citizen, man and woman, is entitled to a job? Mr. Bannister says that this is not the case in a technological context.”

In 1982, John Farina, a professor in the faculty of Social Sciences at the Wilfrid Laurier University, in Waterloo, Ontario, said:

“Man invented machines so that man would not have to work, and we've succeeded to the point of having one and a half million unemployed. But instead of cheering about it, we're in despair. To me this is sheer raging idiocy.”

In June 1990, Paul Martin, who was then a candidate for the leadership of the Liberal Party of Canada, promised that if he was elected Prime Minister of Canada, he would hasten to set up a guaranteed annual income for every citizen. In 2004, Paul Martin was Prime Minister. Was he still willing to implement this idea?

For the Canadian Government to give this guaranteed annual income, and for the Government to serve the Canadian citizens instead of blindly complying with the orders of the International Monetary Fund, the readers of the “Michael” Journal must keep up their apostolate work to educate the population by distributing our offprints and by soliciting subscriptions to our Journal, so that the pressure of the people on the Government will be stronger than the pressure of the Financiers.

This is the only effective method to obtain a change in the right direction. For example, as was mentioned in the June 25, 1995 edition of “The Toronto Star”, Finance Minister Martin attacked the banks saying that he was only responding to public anger. This support of the population also led another Liberal minister, Roy MacLaren, to say, about the banks: “Who are those sons of (...) to be telling us how to run the country when they're hauling in so much money?”

Readers of the “Michael” Journal, let us not deviate from our mission: let us continue to solicit subscriptions to “Michael”, to make Social Credit known and to increase the support of the population. The Government will soon send the bankers packing for good, and give a dividend to every citizen. There is no other solution but Social Credit, so let us concentrate all our efforts for the triumph of this cause; all other issues are just a waste of time and energy.

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