The banks ( the bogie men ) inflate and deflate at will or appear to.

We are told that the tariffs on money are too high and the tellers are answered that the bank rates on overnight money are almost nil. So that is not the real crux. The banks possibly use their freedom to inflate and deflate to their own disproportionate advantage.

TWO sorts of nations exist: those which control their finances and those which "are financed".

There are, I take it intermediate degrees, nations that try more or less to control part of their finances. Or that exercise a semi-conscious control over their finances, or have an unconscious influence on them.

The American ( U.S.) treasury was "freed" a century ago. It was somewhat confused by the civil war. etc.

Come to think of it. Once again we are not even concerned with HOW a people or nation is to get control of its economics but with WHAT it ought to do with them if it did get control.

An answer to this form of the question is: what price shd. it insist on getting from the present controllers if it continues to tolerate their control. I.E. how

I forget whether every fanatic got an equal share or
It dont much matter, it was so little long ago, but at any
rate they had national dividends, at least as long
as they continued to conquest.

It is difficult to conceive national dividends in our day
and in our countries without a noisome increase in bureaucracy

National dividends have worked in the past. Undoubtedly
most people wd. like to receive 50 dollars a month in
crisp bills from the postman or other trusted minion
of officialdom.

It sounds so easy, so easy that hardly anyone
(including the author) can believe it.

It seems as if the recipients ought at least to
go through the motions, or to hold themselves ready
to do something useful in return for the bonanza, or at
least to keep awake and make sure that something
was being done, that the green backs or Bradbury's
or whatever meant and continued to mean something
other than greenbacks.

I remember seem to remember a time when Maj. Douglas wrote books without mention of national dividends.

I am now making simply a catalog or alphabetical list
of offered " solutions ". I am inclined to leave the
national dividends to show HOW they will insure the

certificate of work done, a fair certificate equivalent
TO the work done.

Then I appear ( to some readers ) to say that he gets
too much. When I ~~I am~~ ought apparently to say that
he gets too little.

There is no contradiction. He gets too much, or asks
too much for some of his product, and is unable to
get anything for the rest.

Let us say he makes one million brooms that ~~really~~ cost him 3d. each.

He asserts ( in accordance to inherited beliefs of
his accountants that they cost him 5d. and must be
sold for 6d.

He sells 400,000 for 6d. has 6000,000 left on his
hands and ultimately goes bust. Despite the fact that
5 hundred or 7 hundred thousand people cd. use
the brooms.

That is an "impossible case". Or rather it is a crude
statement, and there are various intermediate conditions.

Say he drops his price to 1d. and sells his
6 hundred thousand spare brooms, and thereby ruins some other
manufacturer, etc. etc.

~~My~~ imaginary example is merely to show that
high price needn't ensure perpetual success, and needn't
be the best possible commerce.

47

The issue of credit ( or money ) must be just . I.E.
neither too much nor too little.

Against every hour's work, an hour's certificate.
That can be the first step. That can be scientific.
Ultimately it must be scientific.

BUT it will not get you out of necessity of using
intelligence re/ what and how much you produce.

What? can be answered by " Everything useful or
desirable. "

And the how much can be answered by " all that is wanted"
with allowance over for accidents,

That may sound very vague, but it is nevertheless reducable
to mathematical equations and can be scientifically
treated.

The equations ( algebraic equations ) will not
mean merely any old quantity turned out + hap hazard.

Their answer will govern the length of the working day.
By which I still mean the number of hours per day
for which a man is paid.

Over and above which he can
paint pictures on his wall, stuff his arm chairs;
breed fighting cocks, buy lottery tickets or indulge

can equal one hundred gallons thru a different pipe at
another speed / the bigger the slower ,
the faster the smaller ; etc.

A small amount of " money " changing hands rapidly will do
the work of a lot moving slowly , etc. etc.

As in mechanics some sizes of machine are found fit for
some work etc. detailed applications without change of
principle. Fruits of experience as to detail : ideas as
to main causes.

This looks like a mare's nest or like wilful
confusion ? It matters less what the Major said
15 years ago matters less than getting a valid and
clear statement.

The manufacturer is "paid" in two ways under present system.
He gets " money " or "is owed " money for what he sells ,
and he gets ability to borrow from banks. I.E. His
action and potentiality to produce enable him to get credit
as well as payments( cash and deferred ) and
the banks get more credit than they give HIM. I.E.
he has to hand part of it back to them , and for the
part he hands back he gets no direct credit , though
he may get the ability to have more ( on similar terms ).

Perhaps the only value of these statements is a test value.
I mean that I am merely saying 5 and 2 make 7
in place of the other economist's statements that 2 and 5
make 7.

To see whether either they or their readers
understand their previous statements.

After all, this is a very rudimentary treatise.

By the time the banks have got more credit than they gave
the manufacturer, the potential consumer hasn't enough
credit to purchase the goods consumed. Where wd. he
get it. The banks will always give him less than he
has to give them. They are not there for their health.

52

The bookkeeping cost of the goods is the cost ( real )
of the goods plus the cost of the money, or the
rent of the money.

I take it that in the perfect economic state the
cost of the money is reduced almost to nothing , to
something like the mere cost of postage and that this
cost is borne by the state, I.E. distributed so as
to be a burden on no one in particular.

Once that end is attained, the general intelligence can
apply itself to the problem of what and how much to
produce.

The state conceived as the public convenience. Money conceived
as a public convenience. Neither as private bonanza.

Chapter X Novelties

The possibility of novelties in economics is probably some
what exaggerated. Hume by 1750 is already talking of paper
credit and cites someone or other to the effect that
the great amount of gold coin in Athens seemed to be no
use to the Athenians save in facilitating arithmetic.

20 years ago we were asked to think that
someone was being a "modern" with a large M economist
because he "left out money".

Some know and many fail to state or keep clearly in
mind the need of money, which is the need of a
common denominator FOR THE SAKE OF ACCOUNTING, so as
not to send bookkeepers crazy with columns of ten horses
twelve cows, nine locomotives. Consider
the chips in a poker game, more convenient than to
have each man betting his shirt, watch and cufflinks.

A GRAVER FAILURE to dissociate : is in the nature of
wealth.

Crises in the sheek and sheep trade seldom occur. I mean
that the primitive grazer counts his property in sheep
and is not continually worried if he can not sell out
his whole herd.

Half the modern trouble is the mania
or hallucination or idee fixe of MARKET, market value
The fundamental difference in wealth is that of animal
vegetable and mineral kingdoms.

Hume might have served as a warning; for his exigencies of state are mainly war, which ought to have made people think a bit more deeply. I suppose it didn't for the simple reason that they didn't in the least understand his first proposition.

No book can do ALL a man's thinking for him. The utility of any statement is limited by the willingness of the receiver to think.

The practice of rent and interest all arise out of the natural disposition of grain and animals to multiply. The sense of right and justice which has sustained the main practice of rent and interest through the ages, despite countless instances of particular injustice in the application, is inherent in the nature of animal and vegetable.

There is no need to postulate any greater perversion than natural indolence, and that in itself is insufficient as postulate. There has always been a supply of lackers, members of less civilized tribes, or non-essential ready and glad to watch sheep for part of the wool. The impulse of the French in our day to get work out of the Congo is wholly traditional and "normal".

As for selling children into servitude " etc. The whole problem is no longer, but at many periods of history has been hardly more than the duration of mortmain. How long shall the dead hand rule, and to what extent ?

57

Foot =note

After the last war Ford as an experiment broke up a number of
armoured vessels. He made no money profit, he got back
what it cost him, and he lost was left with a great
number of engines, which, for all I know he still has.
There is no reason to suppose that these engines do any
harm, any more than the ruins of Aigues Mortes or
Carcassonne.

Yes, they occupy space. You don't want 'em in
Piccadilly circus. I have also seen a sign " Mountain
to let, capable of enalping 30,000 muttons. " There is
still room to breathe and walk about the face of the
planet.

Chapter XI

Dissociate, or rather the fail to dissociate permanence
from permanence.

The perdurability of granite from the perdurability of a
grain or a species of animals. Some people seem to
kind of durability from a germinating organism that they
do from the lump of rock.

At the other end of the scale they say : A banker, that is
a good banker need know nothing save the difference between
a bill and a mortgage.

Economic habits arise from the nature of things ( animal mineral vegetable ) and economic mess, due to failure to keep the different nature of different things clearly distinct in the mind.

The economic "revolution" or an economic revolution occurred when raw supply ceased to be limited to static mineral matter, ( plus animal and vegetable increases ).

The minute work began to be in great measure "raw supply" the need for a change in economic concepts arose.

The minute you have practically unlimited stores of work at your disposal, by the simple device of letting water run down hill thru a pipe onto a turbine, you have ( or any other device ) you have got to begin to readjust your mental derivatives.

Not only will sheep go on begetting each other, without much attention of the shepherd, but lights will shine, stoves give heat, trains move, etc. while a couple of men watch a dynamo.

The cattle drover fed his family. The turbine can work for the group. Even the idea of national dividends ( which I dislike ) seems less goofy whom this angle.

Hume's reasons for wanting what he calls a properous state
were manifestly despicable, consisting mainly in the idea
that if a state were prosperous some disgusting louse
like Louis XIV wd. be able to pay the dregs of the
population ( his own or some one else's ) to go ~~unlimited~~
kill or rob some one else. But that is no reason for
not observing his intelligence. He already saw through money,
and saw through coined money at that.

Some of his propositions are still valid, and possibly
unsuperceivable.

You will probably find nothing more valid inside its own
scope than the statement that *prosperity* depends not
on the quantity of money in a country but on its
*constant*ly increasing.

This was before the term inflation was in daily use.

## DISSOCIATE

Inflation, first used as a derogative term
and now ( 1932 ) advised as policy " all over the place ".

DISSOCIATE inflation from steady increase. The term inflation
might be limited to mean disproportionate and faked
augmentation of the amount of paper currency, an
augmentation having no relation to fact , or having
a faked relation to fact.

INCREASE or proper augmentation.

As certificate of an increasing productivity,

increase of product, increase of means of production
there SHOULD be an increase in the printed certificates
of value ( circulatable certificates ).

But here again one must distinguish, and here in
particular one can learn from history and in particular
the American history of the 1830s. At which time there was a
land boom, fools bought land and boosted the sales price
regardless of the fact that the merchandise (land)
wasn't producing, wasn't being worked, couldn't be worked
at once or for a considerable time, and there were
crises and panics, etc.

"Worthless" land was just as worthless then as worthless
machinery and factories are now.

To need certificates of
value the product ( of land or of factory ) must be
wanted by someone, and there must be means of getting
it to them.

There are four elements; and it is useless
trying to function with three:

The product

The want

The means of transport

AND the certificates of value, preferably legal tender
and "general", in the sense that they should be
good for wheat, iron, lumber, dress goods or
whatever the heart and stomach desire.

67

And ( replying an earlier proposition ), everybody must be
able to get a certain number of these certificates
on what might be called decent conditions
I.E. without ~~inhuman~~ torture
and without excessive worry.

Preferably on "fair terms", namely that the conditions
for getting them must not be violently different in the
cases of A, B and C.

For the nth. time, I repeat that the straightest road
to such desirable condition is via the formula : a small
amount of work for everyone, with a certificate of
work done, as the consequence.

The brains of the nation or group to be used in
discerning WHAT work is most needful ~~of~~, what
work is less necessary and what is desirable even tho
not strictly necessary.

Such work shd. be paid. It wd. not fill up any man's
day.

The rest of his day he cd. employ in expressing his
difference of opinion with the majority, and in
such "work" or activity as he ( as distinct from
the brains of the country, officially organized )
might consider proper, necessary or desirable.

Ultimately you'll credit board or your bank scoundrels
or whoever is the financial and economic executive

or may not be damned ≪ unlikely to get it, but
there is no harm in trying.

At any rate in the dimension QUALITY there is ample
field for all human energy, no one need feel cramped
at having only 4 hours a day for paid work.

After that the problem of civilization is
pretty well outside the domain of the economist. Neither
the billionaire nor the whole howling populace can bribe
coax or bully the artist into surpassing ≪ his own qualifications.

500 people can get any kind of civilization they
like, up to the capacity of their best inventor
and maker. But all they can do for him is to
feed clothe and give him leisure and space to work in.