Social Credit

This is one of those things that I stumbled across on Wiki one day while looking up something else:
During the Great Depression, there was something going around in Canada called the Social Credit Movement. It started out as somebody's economic theory, then progressed into a grass roots movement, and eventually became a political party. It ultimately broke apart because of internal ideological differences and, I suppose, because the depression came to an end. It was thought to be pretty radical at the time, but would not seem so if it was introduced today.

The idea is that everybody contributes value to the economy by being a consumer. Of course some people contribute more than that, but everybody is a consumer, if nothing else. When the consumers don't have any money, for whatever reason, they can't buy anything, and the economy goes to hell. Historically, consumers got their money by working for a living, but now jobs were scarce, many companies had failed, and start up capital for entrepreneurs was hard to come by. If some way could be found to get money into people's hands, the downward spiral might be reversed. One way might be to think of consumers as shareholders and pay them all a dividend, somehow calculated from the total value of the economy as a whole.......Whoops, it just now occurred to me that the economy as a whole was going backwards at the time, so there would have been nothing from which to pay dividends. A company that is losing money can't pay dividends to its shareholders, now can it. Oh well, it was just a theory.

The more I think about it, though, social credit might be an idea whose time has come. There is lots of money floating around nowadays, we just need to find some way to flow it into the hands of the general public. It seems like they don't want to pay us to work anymore, so maybe they should to pay us not to work. Of course, if they paid us too much not to work, then it might be hard to get people to  go back to work if the ever needed us again. What they need to do is guarantee everybody a certain minimum income whether they work or not. Any money people manage to make on their own should be theirs to keep and should not diminish their regular guaranteed income. That way, ambitious people would not be held back, and lazy or otherwise disadvantaged people could still keep their heads above water.

One reason that social credit failed in Canada was that nobody could figure out how to pay for it, but I've got that one covered. As it is now, the Federal Reserve creates new money out of nothing and gives it to the banks. Why not give it directly to the people? Most of it will end up in the banks sooner or later anyway, but the people will get to use it first. It is said that the government can't give you anything without first taking it away from someone else but, in this case, it's new money that has never been in someone else's possession. Sounds like one of those win-win things, doesn't it?