Re: Text of a speech I made for school

[Steve Hummel BenFranklinWasRight]

Excellent, excellent speech. How in the heck did you as a high school
student get so smart and wise? :) Can I touch you so that
perhaps....some youthfulness transmits to this 60ish form? :)
Seriously, just one little nit pick. The truth is modernity lacks
faith, as in confidence, largely as a result of an onerous system.
Therefore altering your closing so as to affirm the necessity of the
application of both science and wisdom would be inclusive and not
enable a false pragmatism the opportunity to obscure the greater
power and necessity of the latter.

On Jun 7, 7:24 pm, johnwip...@gmail.com wrote:
>             The purpose of this speech is to present the philosophy of
> Social Credit and its subsequent policy as relating to economic matters.
>
>             The name, Social Credit, uses the word Credit as it is –
> credit, like on a balance sheet, where on one side is debit, and the other,
> credit.  Credit comes from the Latin word *credere*, meaning “to believe.”
> The social credit is the belief in the capacity of individuals working
> together in a society to accomplish certain objectives.  If we were to make
> a balance sheet listing our real societal assets and our real societal
> liabilities, then what is on the assets side is our Social Credit.
>
>             What does Social Credit say, is our social credit?
>
>             It is handy to state it in the form that Adam Smith stated it –
> land, labor, and capital.  But there is also a fourth thing that is a
> credit to us, and that is what Social Credit terms the unearned increment
> of association.  This increment is the advantage that accrues to each
> individual that comes by working together in a society, that can’t really
> be attributed to specifically land, labor, or capital.
>
>             Take the example of a group of cavemen who want to move a huge
> boulder.  If each of them, separately, tries to move the boulder, then
> nothing happens.  Even a lever – “capital” as it were – would not be of
> benefit to the caveman acting alone.  But if they all work together, and
> push the boulder at the same time, then suddenly, a new possibility opens
> up which was not attainable before – they can move the boulder.  And this
> came about because they chose to cooperate, that is, they chose to
> associate.  It is an increment derived from association, and it is unearned
> because no one individual worked to achieve it on his own- it accrues to
> each individual as a part of the group.
>
>             Another example is the division of labor.  Referring to Adam
> Smith again, he wrote in his masterpiece The Wealth of Nations about a pin
> factory.  He noted that he had seen a pin factory that employed only ten
> men in its process, each doing a separate piece of the task of turning wire
> into pins.  He stated that, if each man were left to make pins on his own,
> each of them could turn out maybe one in a day’s labor, if they were
> lucky.  But the men, working together, would be able to turn out 48,000
> pins in a day.  As a rate per worker, that would be 4,800 pins per man– but
> each worker did not turn them out on his own, he did it by working with the
> others, and that difference, between one pin and 4,800 pins, is the
> unearned increment of association.
>
>             Social Credit takes the stance that while land, labor, and
> capital may be owned by individuals, the unearned increment is not.  It is
> property of the community at large, and should rightly be distributed to
> it.  In modern times, the unearned increment is possibly the largest
> contributor to our wealth; the way to discern this is to imagine if we
> suddenly stopped working together, and worked separately.  Land, labor and
> capital may have some use, but by and large our standard of living would be
> next to nothing, barely above starvation, if even that.
>
>             Now the Social Credit analysis shifts to looking at the
> economy.  It posits that the purpose of the economy is the same as the
> reason why individuals come together in a society in the first place:  to
> improve everybody’s lot.  For the productive economy, the specific task, it
> says, is to produce as much wealth as is desired with the least trouble on
> the individual’s part.  The economy and its parts should therefore be
> designed towards this goal.
>
>             To this end, Social Credit sees private enterprise as the best
> way of doing things.  It allows the freely expressed desires of the
> individual to determine what goods and services are provided, and rewards
> those who do the best job of meeting those desires.  However, this system
> has been perverted by a malfunctioning distributive system- the money
> system.
>
>             Social Credit analysis contends that the basic problem with the
> money system of distribution as it stands is that it does not credit to the
> community at large the unearned increment of association.  The way this
> manifests in money terms is that the amount of income distributed to
> individuals in respect of a certain amount of production is not able to
> liquidate the entirety of the costs generated by that amount of
> production.  These costs eventually become prices, and the consumer is
> responsible for paying them all.  However, the amount of income that the
> consumer has at the time that those prices come on the market is largely
> dependent on future production.  As the costs of production, and thus
> prices, are higher than the income distributed in respect of that
> production, and as that income has largely been already spent, income must
> be always rising, to keep up with rising prices.  Rising income in turn
> causes rising prices, both as higher costs and as higher demand, since the
> amount of money distributed in respect of future production may be more,
> and often is more, than enough to liquidate the prices now that come from
> production in the past.
>
> Social Credit theory also states that the factor that causes income to
> individuals to be less than total costs is largely the application of
> capital, read technology.  It generally lowers prices, but it lowers
> incomes even further, causing the displaced or underpaid to seek further
> income, mostly through work.  In this way the community is always kept at
> work seeking income.  These jobs generally become less and less useful, as
> there is less and less useful work to do, as technology replaces people in
> that useful work.  At a point these jobs become pernicious to the welfare
> of the community, modern examples being those created by the drug trade,
> fast food, finance, and inefficient bureaucracies, and others are created
> simply to combat the effects of maldistribution, such as the police force
> and charity and welfare work.
>
> The main contention is that all of this is caused by an improper national
> accounting that does not credit the community properly to liquidate all the
> costs of production as they come on the market through prices.  Since there
> is a sort of “unearned increment” in prices, Social Credit contends that
> there should be simultaneously an unearned increment of income available to
> individuals so that there is a balance between prices and income.
>
> Social Credit theory suggests two methods by which this balance can be
> brought about.  The first is that a direct income be created and
> distributed to all individuals, so that they have the proper amount of
> income with which to liquidate prices without necessarily seeking further
> and fundamentally unnecessary work.  This income would in no way be taxed
> back, for its purpose is to credit to the community that which it cannot
> get by itself through wages and salaries distributed in the course of
> producing desired goods.
>
> The second is that a certain ratio be applied to the prices of all ultimate
> goods so that collective prices equal collective income.  This ratio would
> be determined by the total income in a period of time, divided by the total
> prices in that period of time.  Thus if income was greater than prices,
> prices would be raised, and if income were lower, prices would be lowered.
> The purpose of raising prices would be to obviate true inflation, when
> prices rise and then become incapable of falling back down without business
> failure.  It is contended that this method would allow prices to rise and
> fall with income.
>
> The administration of the price adjustment is fairly simple in concept.  If
> prices were raised, it would work like a sales tax, except the money
> collected would then be destroyed instead of spent.  If prices were
> lowered, it would be more like a subsidy, except the amount paid to the
> business would be the amount the business had lost on sales by lowering its
> price by the ratio.  Since it is a ratio that applies to all final goods
> and services it does not affect competition in the free market.
>
> Social Credit theory posits that by combining these two methods, prices
> would follow income, instead of continuously rising.  It is suggested that
> given our current powers of production, the direct payment could likely be
> enough to guarantee a basic living, freeing the individual from the
> necessity of wage/salary slavery.  The individual could then be free to
> pursue whatever employment desired, paid or unpaid, which, in turn, would
> likely greatly increase the efficiency of production, since work taken
> voluntarily is generally of a higher quality than that taken under
> compulsion.
>
> This state of affairs, Social Credit contends, is the most desirable one.
> Technology would be allowed to flourish as desired; unemployment would be
> seen as leisure, instead of poverty.  Production would follow the desires
> of consumers, instead of the necessities of income distribution.  Real
> freedom, being based in economic freedom, would come to the world.
>
> But this is all contention.  I have spent a lot of time researching Social
> Credit over the past few years.  I have not found fault with it yet.
> However, I leave it to your judgment.  I have not even touched on the
> criticism it has received from orthodox economic circles.  My purpose here
> has been simply to try to explain, in what is a comparatively short amount
> of time, the unique perspective it offers of society and economics.