Real Social Credit, True Social Justice

The phrase social credit has a bad name, being termed more accurately social control because it is associated with a system of social control in the People’s Republic of China. Social justice is really another term for Marxism, albeit with a stress on all things racial and lately transsexual. Once though, both terms had different and quite benign meanings.

Social Credit – properly capitalised – was the term given by C.H. Douglas to a system of payments to citizens simply because they are citizens. The principle actually goes back a long way before Douglas and is known today as Basic Income, but Douglas deserves to be credited as its true originator because he developed the theory including the mathematics behind it. 

You can read a bit about Major Douglas here but briefly, as technology advances, fewer and fewer people can create more and more goods and services. To take an extreme example, when canned foods were first produced in the early Nineteenth Century, they were sealed by hand; a good craftsman could seal perhaps six an hour. Ten years ago, the Heinz company was said to be selling a million and a half cans of baked beans in Britain every day.

Granted that increased output leads to more leisure time for us and this in turn generates more employment, but apply reductio ad absurdum by asking yourself what will happen when robots and other advanced technology do 99% of the work? The answer is more and more people will become “unemployed”, although properly there is no such thing as unemployment. How many unemployed billionaires do you know? Precisely! While some of us are lucky to have a vocation or even a calling, most people work out of necessity. 

Repetitive, dirty and at times dangerous jobs are increasingly being done by machines, which means that the jobs of the future will be high tech or require serious training. What about the people who are not up to it? What about dullards, people with severe disabilities, or people who are so disreputable that no employer in his right mind would employ them?

Chinese social credit is a system of punishments and rewards. The Social Credit of Major Douglas is about rewards and only rewards. The wealth society creates today is due largely to the genius of people who are long dead. They were overwhelmingly men, and almost all of them were white, but their legacy belongs to all of us as our common cultural heritage.

The two greatest obstacles to the instigation of Social Credit are the debt-based financial system and the skewed notion that every able-bodied person should have to work for a living. This is particularly popular with conservatives who never like to see anyone get something for nothing. Anyone except themselves.

That is Social Credit, but what was Social Justice? Again, the phrase should be capitalised (and italicised) because the original Social Justice was a magazine. Its publisher was Father Charles Coughlin (1891-1979). Coughlin was a famous radio priest; although born in Canada his parish was in Michigan. The magazine had a short life; its first issue was dated March 13, 1936 and it folded in 1942. This was because Coughlin pulled no punches in his attacks on communism, and pressure on the Vatican led to his activities being shut down.

Like many anti-communists he was accused of anti-Semitism, an allegation that like that of “racist” has now become so broad that almost anyone can be accused of it. It is also an unfortunate fact that undesirables are attracted to anti-communist movements the same way they are to moderate left wing movements, but the smear works only one way. Father Coughlin’s radio broadcasts attracted a massive audience, and he had few if any admirers in the Ku Klux Klan, that once burned a cross on his lawn.

Like its founder, Social Justice was opposed to both the tyranny of communism and the excesses of finance – as opposed to free enterprise capitalism. This is in stark contrast to today’s self-styled social justice warriors who above all other things are incredibly well-funded by those they would have us believe they are intent on stripping of both their assets and their power.