It is not uncommon to hear opponents of Social Credit, if they live in the province of Quebec, state that Social Credit is but another form of communism. And if they live in Ontario, they are inclined to label Social Credit as just another brand of fascism.
Both communism and fascism have this in common, that they consider the individual as the property of the State. Government is supreme and must dictate to individuals what to do and what not to do.
Social Credit is the exact opposite to this conception of the State. The technical proposals of Social Credit, as put forward by its founder, the engineer C. H. Douglas, go to free the individual and provide him with the means to organize his own life as best suits him, as long as he does not thwart the same right of his fellow citizens.
In the words of Douglas:
“So far from exerting further compulsion upon individuals in order that they may conform to some machine-made conception of a perfect state, I should like by the simplest possible methods to provide people with the means of making their own individual lives approximate to their own ideas, and not to mine...
“The more I see of Governments, the lower is my opinion of them, and I am confident that what the world wants at the present time is a great deal less government, and not a great deal more.
"Now I want you to get a further perfectly simple idea into your minds. And that is that Governments are your property, and you are not the property of Governments.
"There is no more pernicious and blasphemous nonsense existent in the world today than the statement, which has been incorporated in the constitution of the modern dictatorships, which claims that the State, by which is indicated the Government, is everything and the individual is nothing. On the contrary, the individual is everything, and the State is a mere convenience to enable the individual to co-operate for his own advantage.
'"It is the idea of the supreme State in its various forms which has made the State the tool of the international financier who has mortgaged all Ştates to himself”
C. H. Douglas.
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