When we talk about economics, we're talking about man's activities to place the earth's goods at the service of his needs.
It's not enough to produce things. The goods must get to their destination. Otherwise, the economy fails to achieve its goal. It's not enough to get wheat out of the ground; bread must enter the hungry stomach. Shoes must be put on bare feet, clothes on cold backs, furniture in houses, wood in stoves, etc.
Economics is good when it does this. It's bad when it doesn't or when it achieves this for only a privileged few.
Every person has a right to a minimum of goods on earth; at least the necessities of life. A system that does not guarantee this to all members of society is a defective system. The Church affirmed this long ago.
Food, clothing, homes, furnishings, fuel, medicine, education—these are the riches that sustain and beautify life.
Today, it's easy to produce these useful things. They're advertised for sale everywhere. Today, we are looking for buyers. There is an ample supply and workers are not the issue.
Today's problem is not getting wheat out of the ground, but getting flour and bread onto the table; it's not making shoes, but putting them on feet.
Why is that so difficult?
Food is available for the hungry and the hungry need the food. Why don't the two come together?
Coal awaits the furnace. The furnace waits for the coal. Why don't the two join forces, even while the coal miner is out of work and children are shivering?
Why don't the sick person and available medicines come together? And so for everything else, even with lots of advertising and lots of shopkeepers there is a missing element.
Wealth is useful things that people need. Wealth is there, but the permission slip to take it is not. The permission slip is money. The wealth, as we define it, is there, staring at the public from store shelves. But money is not in the hands of the public so the public can't have the things made for them.
Money is just a permission slip to get things that are waiting for us to use. If there were no things waiting, money would have no value because there would be nothing to purchase with it. But if the things are there and it's the money that's missing, you can't take the things without that permission slip, money. We are deprived in the face of abundance.
What's harder to do: produce food, clothes, furniture, houses, or give people permission slips to take them? Yet it's the food, the clothes, the furniture, the houses that are there, and the permission slips that are lacking.
The permission slips consist of round metal coins, rectangles of printed paper or simple accounts in bank books, which can also be used in electronic form by means of bank cards. All these permission slips are equally valid. The important thing is to have them. This can be achieved with Economic Democracy, as conceived by Clifford Hugh Douglas.
Who brings wealth into the world? Workers.
Who gives the world its permission slips? Bankers.
Workers, aided by machines, bring a lot of wealth into the world. But bankers, aided by a diabolical system, make permission slips exceedingly rare.
The permission slips are rare, because the banker, in bringing them into the world, lets them go for a certain time only, then requires us to give them back to him. He even requires us to return more permission slips than he has issued. So they may well become rare. There would be less than nothing left, were it not for public debts, mortgages on farms and houses and numerous bankruptcies, all which represent permission slips kept beyond their term.
The money-makers are bankers who regulate the quantity of permission slips and so they regulate the standard of living. We don't eat according to the country's food supply. We don't dress according to the country's supply of clothes, and neither do we live off the country's available lumber and other building materials. We do all this and more according to how much money the system allows us to have.
The popes have denounced this, but it goes on all the same.
When and how do banks make money? When and how do they destroy money, thereby cutting off the permission slips we need to live? All this has been explained in various Michael journal articles, and we return to the subject from time to time. Everyone should know the answer in order to understand the remedy.
The government doesn't make money.
The government taxes the population and borrows from banks to get money. But it doesn't bring money into the world. When individuals have reached the end of their tax and borrowing capacity, the government borrows from the banks.
The commercial banks have received authority from the government itself to make money for it. And when the government wants money from them, it pays them and goes into debt. A fine return for the privilege it has graciously granted to private banks!
It is the government, the representative of society, which should make the supply of money, according to the total quantity of useful things for sale in the country. Instead, it submits to the will of the bankers, and all the people, like the government itself, suffer from lack of money.
This subordinate role of government to banks makes it the servant of private interests. And all the people have become the slaves of these private interests.
People who take the trouble to study the issue are stunned by such disorder, and more and more they are demanding that the government itself make the money supply according to the country's needs and potential.
This is not to say that the government should make money at the whim of the men in power, nor that it should use that money as it pleases.
Producers make goods and consumers use them. With regard to the volume of money, the government can act as an accountant for the country's total production and consumption. The accountant is not the owner of the money he counts. He keeps the books. He doesn't create the facts; he records them.
It is on this, and on other principles set out in numerous articles here, that Economic Democracy calls for a Dividend for every citizen and a total supply of money in relation to total salable production.
Study Economic Democracy. You'll appreciate it if you believe:
1.That every man has the right to the necessities of life;
2.That money should serve man, and not man serve money;
3.That money should follow production, not production follow money;
4.That systems are made for people, not people for systems;
5.That money must not limit the freedom and fulfillment of the human person.
Today's economic system is based on money. It starts at the wrong end. Finance governs production; production governs consumption; man has to make do with what he is offered and what he is allowed to get.
The economic system, cleaned up by Economic Democracy, will begin at the other end, with man. Man, as a consumer, will express his needs to the production system and the system of production will respond to those needs. As for finance, it will be in command to express the consumer's desires and give him what he wants—everything he wants, within the limits of what is possible.
Is there room for morality here? Yes, where man acts like a man, freely. It's in expressing his needs that the consumer must act like a man, guided by his reason. That's where education, morality and religion come in.
Today, it's finance that intervenes. Finance has usurped the place of reason in driving human demands. Economic Democracy puts things in their correct place.
Louis Even
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