SOCIAL CREDIT MEETING

Evening Star, Issue 23723, 2 November 1940, Page 17

SOCIAL CREDIT MEETING

Mr W. Pine was the speaker at the last Social Credit meeting. The Labour Party, he said, had stated that the capitalist system had failed, and that we needed a new economic order. Both statements were true enough, but it was of little value to assert the failure of the present system without a clear analysis of why and where it had done so. It was necessary to distinguish between the industrial and financial aspects of the system. The Labour Party condemned both equally, and it was here chiefly that the Social Credit movement differed from those Labour politicians. The one thing that our economic system could do well was to produce goods. What it did not do and was no nearer doing, was to distribute those goods to the people who wanted them. The sole reason why industry was working inefficiently to-day was because it could not sell its products, and that was entirely the fault of the banking system, and could in no way bo attributed to any shortcomings on the part of the industrialists. Industry could, in the fullest sense of the term, deliver the goods under normal conditions. The reason why the goods did not reach the people was because they had not the money to buy them. Mr Pine said that the purchasing power, in its cycle from the banks through industry back to the banks, was short-circuited, causing a gap between the total amount of spending power disbursed and the total amount of prices. It was shown that by issuing consumed credit by means of the national dividend and by operating the just price discount, the gap could be spanned, thus making possible an era of complete economic prosperity in which it would no i doubt be found that the methods of private enterprise were the most satisfactory.