Taxation is the most important subject for current consideration, because it is the means whereby financial and governmental policy is imposed upon every detail of our daily lives. It creates the unnecessary poverty which is the basic cause of the social ills which make living a burden instead of a joy. That is why taxation is imposed with a moral odour as well as a legal threat. Taxdodging is now the eighth deadly sin. The late bank lord Stamp said during the war:
"We have seen that the human or social temperament has a much wider range than we supposed. Taxation, thirty years ago, seemed to reach a breaking point and was regarded as psychologically unbearable at levels which today are merely amusing. There can be little doubt that, with the right application of psychology and education, the mind of man would be still more adaptable.”
We have seen all four political parties competing with each other to apply this infamous imposition of "psychology" and "education”, aided by press, pulpit, and radio, to dragoon the wageearners as well as the managers into a quite unnecessary poverty.
Plato said:
“Taxation is an instrument of governance.
C. H. Douglas wrote:
"Taxation is robbery.”
Together these mean:
“You are governed by being robbed.”
That is why the late Sidney and Beatrice Webb (devotees of Stalin's system in U.S.S.R.) said of Social Credit:
"We don't know whether the scheme is sound or not, we don't like its object.”
The object of Social Credit is the liberation of the human spirit; the freedom of the individual; the release of private initiative from the restriction of monopoly finance (both private and nationalised.)
We know that these aims cannot materialise while humanity is cramped under a burden of fear, anxiety and frustration, due to totally unnecessary poverty. So the first aim of Social Credit is the total distribution of the maximum potential, but now suppressed, abundance of wealth which we know to be possible. Douglas wrote:
“Taxation is no less a robbery because it is effected through the medium of a political democracy which is made an accessory by giving it a share in the loot.”
We see all political parties agreed upon spreading this socialised loot in order to extend the ambit of the robbery. We get a share in the loot in the Health and Insurance rackets for our submission to an ever-increasing burden of unnecessary taxes,
But there are still people who falsely imagine that taxation can be used to do good. It cannot.
Taxation is entirely evil – even though the Labour Party's latest pamphlet threatens heavier taxation in order to "redistribute incomes". The Beveridgeites even suggest that it must come more taxes if we keep on living at all! Thus priming the Chancellor to increase taxes for bigger old age pensions.
We should expose the monstrous illusion that it is possible to insure, or save up for old age. Such a notion is nonsense. It is quite impossible to save cheese, butter and beans from age 18 and then start consuming them at 65.
Insurance and savings merely save money, and by so doing you withdraw needed purchasing power from shopkeepers'markets.
When you are 60, you consume the products of contemporary youth. This youth will still be producing cheese, butter and beans (and praying for someone to buy them), while it kids itself the old are a burden, as it pays away its own income in taxes for fear that it might die for lack of bits of paper (£ notes) when it is 60!
The workers loathe P.A.Y.E. (pay-as-you-earn), as they loathe Insurance contributions; but it has been dinned into them that to pay taxes is the only way to get security in sickness and old age. They think they must abstain from what they need all the time they are young, in order to have what they may need when old or ill — totally different things, and all in ample supply at all times.
Three great bankers'organizations have now decided that P.A.Y.E. must continue for ever 1. The Trade Union Congress; 2. The Federation of British Industries; 3. The British Bankers' Association.
Taxation cannot be used to maintain a stable price level. It is inflation. The price level is determined by the debt level. Stop debtgetting and prices will fall. Douglas said::
"A policy of inflation is taxation of the purchasing power of the workers.”
Which is true. We have seen it working: prices rising steadily side by side with Treasury policy of more and more taxes which are idiotically supposed to pull prices down in deflation.
All this is because the policy of recalling overdrafts, which operated after 1918, is not now possible. Instead we arm every other nation whose Government can be got to wring taxes out of it. But no Government now dares to tell its farmers to burn their crops and manufacturers to smash their machines, and so throw millions of workers on the dole.
The Debt System, in fact, has blood pressure. The Government have to urge more and more taxes because the banks have to pour out greater loans into the system. This is because the productive power of the people has outrun the power of the banking system to control it. The social credit now threatens to swamp the Debt System. Hence the spread of taxation. More than 1543 million persons in Britain now pay income tax. Before the war, only 372 million paid it.
We are now tired of the "vicious spiral”: higher wages provoking higher prices, and higher taxes for more costly social services (loot). So the game of pretending to separate one tax from another is still played by all parties.
A tax on petrol, for example, pretends to hit the rich car owner. But, in fact, petrol tax adds to the cost of every commodity because it raises the cost of every commercial traveller, delivery van and transport lorry. These added costs increase every price paid by the most depressed section of the community.
This oppression is worked by taxation, not by deflation, by using taxation to inflate prices and so nullify the wage-rises of the powerful organisations of Trade-Union workers. For all incomes, in final analysis, are obtained from the payment of prices for goods and services.
To add the cost of any tax increases all prices. The greatest bulk of price-payers are the working classes — because they are the majority.
This governmental crime is worked in all our lives by manipulating taxation; holding us up as a thug holds up a decent citizen. As Tom Paine wrote:
“Governments no longer levy taxes in order to wage wars. Instead, they wage wars in order to levy taxes.”
They do this to sabotage our immense social credit. Free men, untrammelled by government controls, by Trade Union controls and by bank debts, can produce gluts of every conceivable commodity. That fact is the social credit. It is yours, now. Social Credit is power: the power that inheres in the brain and brawn of every free man and woman to go on inventing untold wealth, — provided always that their neighbours have the money-demand to buy the produce.
Our credit is not a "national cake” as all the political economists pretend: a limited thing from which if I have two crumbs more, you must have two crumbs less. No, the social credit is a dynamic, like time and space, beyond computation, unknown, unexplored, and immeasurable. It is the substance of the unseen things, thoughts, ideals and aspirations which man has sought for ever — and, as far as we have seen, keeps on finding, even under the devilish restrictions he now endures.
The machine we propose to liberate that spirit — the social credit — is the total distribution of what is is possible to produce — and to watch. Then, and not until then, shall we be able to see what the world has never seen: if there is anything that men can not produce if women have the demand-money ready to offer for it.
Never forget that the beautiful ruins of Egypt, Greece and Rome were dreary poverty to those wlio dwelt there. The ruin started because the woman with the shopping basket in the market place had not enough money to buy the grapes her neighbours were anxious to sell. It was not because of a shortage of grapes.
Just as British agriculture was ruined between wars, because the British housewife had not enough money to buy the milk, meat and onions which the farmers were aching to sell at a price that would pay them to grow.
And this was because that price always consists of the real cost (the real cost of production, that is, consumption), plus a vast accumulation of taxcosts reaching right back to burden every item, every action, every power-plant in the chain of total costs that become prices.
The first step to a better world is to eliminate taxation.
GLADYS BING
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