THE ALBERTA BONDS

Press, Volume LXXII, Issue 21861, 14 August 1936, Page 18

THE ALBERTA BONDS

to tki editox or m phii. Sir. —The prosperity certificates just issued by Mr Aberhart as a professed first instalment of social credit are surely the most contemptible travesty that any responsible statesman could perpetrate at the expense of genuine social credit doctrine. Real social credit requires the “creation,” not merely the “issue,” of monetary wealth, against real physical wealth in sufficient quantity to bridge the gap between the amplitude of goods and the insufficiency of purchasing power. In the light of this, Aberhart’s contemptible dodge, for it is nothing less, is but a thinly veiled form of taxation, up to £50,000. The orthodox way with most governments would be to pay the unemployed the required total of wages, say, £50,000, and tax the people £50,000 to recoup the outlay. That is simple and direct. In th:j way it is easily seen that the people pay. In the Alberta “prosperity bonds” system the unemployed receive them as wages, and the people, b having to affix £50,000 worth of one cent stamps (which they purchase from the Government) on the bonds till a dollar’s worth of stamps have been affixed to each dollar bond, pay for the bonds; and therefore the people and not the Government, pay the unemployed exactly as under direct taxation. It is the thinnest of evasive tricks in the collection of indirect taxation. No more money is in existence. The Government has paid the unemployed with what the Chamber of Commerce describes as illegal money, and the people have parted with an equivalent of real money in the purchase of Government stamps. And this spurious pretence of social credit has been v-rked by evangelist Aberhart, the Prime Minister, to cover uo his sublime ignorance as to how to implement his promises of sound monetary reform. Social credit will not ultimately suffer from such dishonest bluff, but mere political tricksters of the Aberhart order will suffer the same loss of reputation through such a discreditable counterfeit as does the counterfeiter of good cheques when found out.—Yours, etc., ANTIDOTE. August 11, 1936.