We proclaim the importance of the individual. The true purpose of the humblest group or the mightiest state is to contribute to the happiness and well being of those who compose it.
Leisure, freedom of action and freedom of choice are among the chief blessings of civilization; so far as consistent with the rights of others, individual freedom should be unrestricted; control from without should be replaced progressively by the self-discipline of a free and adult-minded people.
It is incompatible and absurd to replace human energy by solar and atomic power and still to assume that human work provides the only rightfull title to goods and services.
Accordingly, in the Age of Power, an unsupplemented wage system is an anachronism and unsuited to achieve a proper distribution of the goods and services available. From this defect spring many of the material ills of the industrial civilization.
We regard every person as an heir to the accumulated wealth that the labour, skill, invention and organisation of former ages have made available, and believe that each individual should receive a National Dividend on his share of this cultural inheritance in the form of a money income additional to his earnings.
We recommend the Social Credit mechanism of the Retail Price Discount as a means to ensure a proper balance between the goods available for sale and the money available to buy them.
The function of the money system is to make easier the working of the economic and other organisations of society, and money is costless to create. We therefore assert that the money from time to time needed to deal with our expanding requirements, ought not to come into being merely as the counterpoint of interest bearing debt to the banks, but should be created and issued by the State on behalf of Society as a whole.
Social and industrial reforms are needed, but neither can accomplish anything really effective unless preceded or accompanied by reform in our money system.
From "ABUNDANCE" Mexborough, England