The Other Social Credit

When Old Dog mentioned social credit, I thought he was talking about something else. During the Great Depression, there was something in Canada called "The Social Credit Movement". Their theory was that every citizen is valuable to society, if only as a consumer, because they contribute to the economy. Because of this, they proposed that everybody be paid periodic dividends, based on how well the economy was doing. It was kind of like everybody was a stockholder in the economy at large. They formed their own political party and even got some of their people elected to various offices, but they were never able to get their agenda adopted by the Canadian Parliament. The party eventually split up over ideological differences, and the idea died out along with the Great Depression.

I stumbled across this information one evening on Wikipedia and found the concept interesting. I have read a number of times that consumer spending represents 70% of all the economic activity in the US. It would seem, then, that the more money there is in consumers' hands, the better the economy should function, kind of a "trickle up" theory. Maybe the reason the idea never took off in Canada was that they put the word "social" in it. If you think about it, this would be more like capitalism than socialism because we would all be stockholders in all the nation's corporations. I don't know why the corporate people wouldn't go for this, but they never did. I mean, all the money they paid out in dividends would eventually trickle right back up to them. What's not to like?

Of course this has nothing to do with what those goofy Red Chinese are doing. The blame for that goes to Richard Nixon, who embraced the Red Chinese at the expense of our loyal allies in Taiwan. I said at the time that no good would come of that, and it certainly hasn't.

In the early days of the Institute, Uncle Ken and I tried without success to adjust the type size without much luck. 

I just checked now, and they offer some different options than they used to.

I don't know if I like these any better than the options they used to offer.

It seems they still offer the old options, one being too small

and the other too big.

As far as color,

What's wrong

with plain old black?