LABOUR OR LIBERTY

by Eric de Maré
Dynevor House, New Street
Painswick, Gloucestershire
England GL6 6UN

On the following pages are printed revelations of authority on three matters of universal concern. First, on the disastrous control of the human race through the years by the Money Power. Secondly, on the way the banks create interest-bearing debts out of nothing and thereby not only rule all governments, industries and individuals but keep the world chronically short of buying power and heavily burdened with needless taxes. (The annual interest paid on the National Debt of the UK and almost entirely owned by the private commercial banks is in this year of 1996 around £23,000,000,000.) The effects are widespread decadence in poor education, increasing drug addiction and crime, insane terrorism, over-population, hideous urban growths and rapidly growing pollutions of land, sea and air, to say nothing of the needless hunger of millions of people all over the globe. Funds for urgently-needed scientific research are being seriously restricted - research, for instance, on alternative sources of energy that will be needed when the fossil fuels run out. As a result of its induced and artificial economic struggling, the criminal Debt System could, indeed, bring about another world war of such unrestrained savagery that it could end all life on this planet for ever. The situation is dire. We desperately need a new philosophy that is based on realities. Thirdly, therefore, is here appended an anthology on the need to eschew the prevailing Work Ethic on which the bankers rely for their retention of tyranny in favour of the emancipation of the individual human being by machine-granted leisure. Not Full Employment but Full Enjoyment in self-development.

This can only be achieved by three inter-related means: (i) The restoration of monetary control to where it rightly belongs: Parliament and People. (ii) The payment of debt-free and interest-free national credits to all retailers to enable them to sell their stocks below cost prices, so eliminating inflation for good while precisely filling the present blatant and increasing gap between buying power and prices - a kind of VAT in reverse. (iii) The regular payment to every citizen, over and above any earnings, of National Dividends (Basic Incomes) as a birthright representing the fruits of that cultural inheritance belonging to us all, and to which the micro-chip and automation are the latest and most remarkable additons. As the costing engineer and distinguished originator of these Social Credit ideas, the late Major Clifford Hugh Douglas, wrote in his first book, "Economic Democracy" back in 1920 even before the micro-chip had been invented: "It is fallacy that labour produces all wealth, whereas the simple fact is that production is 95 per cent a matter of tools and process."

Money is not in itself wealth but only its token - a ticket system. What is physically possible to achieve must therefore be financially possible to make and distribute. Price Adjustments and National Dividends would allow this to happen to everyone’s benefit in a splendid New Age that has become not just a romantic science-fiction dream but a real possibility. We can now gladly accept that modern machines and technology can increasingly eliminate human labour in production of wealth and so provide us all with that monetary independence, and therefore liberty, on which civilised living is founded. Let Douglas summarise our situation in the words he spoke in a lecture he gave in Newcastle in 1923 on "The Breakdown of the Employment System":

"I would commend to you, therefore, a most serious consideration of this issue: whether you wish the economic system to be made the vehicle for an unseen government, over which you have no control, which you did not elect, and which you cannot remove so long as you accept its premises, or whether, on the other hand, you are determined to free the forces of modern science, so that your need for goods and services may be met with increasing facility and decreasing effort, this, in turn, permitting humanity to expend its energy on altogether higher planes of effort than those involved in the mere provision of the means of subsistence".

THE HIDDEN POWER

I believe that banking institutions are more dangerous to our liberties than standing armies. Already they have raised up a money aristocracy that has set the government at defiance. The issuing power of money should be taken from the banks, and restored to the people to whom it belongs. - Thomas Jefferson

Banks have done more injury to the religion, morality, tranquillity, prosperity and even wealth of the nation than they can have done or ever will do good. - President John Adams in 1819

I have two great enemies, the southern army in front of me and the financial institutions in the rear. Of the two, the one in my rear is the greatest foe. The Government should create, issue and circulate all the currency and credit needed to satisfy the spending power of the Government and the buying power of consumers. Money will cease to be master and become the servant of humanity. Democracy will rise superior to the money power. - Abraham Lincoln. (Were these views the cause of his assassination?)

If this mischievious financial policy (issue of Lincoln Greenback notes) shall become endurated down to a fixture, then that Government will furnish its own money without cost. It will pay off its debts and be without debt. It will have all the money necessary to carry on its commerce. It will become prosperous without precedent in the history of the world. The brains and the wealth of all countries will go to North America. That government must be destroyed or it will destroy every monarchy on the globe. - Editorial, The Times[London] , when the Greenbacks were issued.

The death of Lincoln was a disaster. I fear that foreign bankers with their craftiness and tortuous tricks will entirely control the exuberant riches of America, and use their power systematically to corrupt modern civilization. They will not hesitate to plunge the whole of Christendom into wars and chaos in order that the earth should become their inheritance. - Bismarck, when lamenting Lincoln’s murder.

From the time I took office as Chancellor of the Exchequer I began to learn that the State held, in the face of the Bank and the City, an essentially false position as to finance. The Government was not to be the substantive power, but was to leave the Money Power supreme and unquestioned. - Gladstone

The world is governed by very different personages from what is imagined by those who are not behind the scenes. Governments do not govern but the hidden hand. - Disraeli

Of the Versailles Peace Conference after the First World War: The international bankers swept statesmen, journalists, and jurists all on one side and issued their orders with the imperiousness of absolute monarchs. - Lloyd George

The great monopoly of this country (USA) is the monopoly of big credits. The growth of the nation, therefore, and all our activities, are in the hands of a few men who chill and check and destroy genuine economic freedom. - President Woodrow Wilson

Permit me to issue and control the money of a nation and I care not who makes its laws. - Mayer Amschel Rothchild

Every effort has been made by the Federal Reserve Board (FED) to conceal its powers, but the truth is - the FED has usurped the Government. It controls everything here (in Congress) and it controls all our foreign relations. It makes and breaks governments at will. - Congressman Louis T. McFadden

The truth is well known among our principal men now engaged in forming an imperialism of capital to govern the world. While they are doing this the people must be kept in a condition of antagonism. By thus dividing the voters we can get them to expend their energies in fighting over questions of no importance to us, except as teachers to lead the common herd. Thus by discreet actions we can secure all that has been so generously planned and successfully accomplished. - The Bankers’ Magazine, USA, 1892

It is obvious that in our days wealth and immense power have been concentrated in the hands of a few men. This power becomes particularly irresistible when exercised by those who, because they hold and control money, are also able to control credit and decide to whom it shall be allotted. In that, they supply the life-blood, so to speak, of the whole economic body. They have their grasp on the very soul of production, so that no one dare breathe against their will. - Pope Pius XI, Quadragessimo Anno 106-9

Until the control and issue of money and credit is restored to the government and recognised as its most conspicuous and sacred responsibility, all talk of the sovereignty of Parliament and Democracy is idle and futile. - Mackenzie King, Prime Minister of Canada in 1935

The main mark of modern govenments is that we do not know who governs, de facto any more than de jure. We see the politician and not his backer; still less the backer of the backer; or, what is more important of all, the banker of the backer. Throned above all, in a manner without parallel in all the past, is the veiled prophet of finance, swaying all men living by a sort of magic. - G. K. Chesterton

The nation state as a fundamental unit of man's organized life has ceased to be the principal creative force. International Banks and Multinational Corporations are acting and planning in terms that are far in advance of the political concepts of the nation state. - Zbigniew Brezinski, Secretary and founder member with David Rockefeller, President of the Chase Manhattan Bank, of the Trilateral Commission which links the hidden leaders of Europe, America and Japan

The United Nations International Children's Emergency Fund (UNICEF) estimates that 500,000 children die in the Third World each year because of the debt crisis and the cruel and counter-productive policies the economist-bankers of the International Monetary Fund have imposed upon the wretched of the Earth. - William F. Hixson in "A Matter of Interest", 1994

Banking was conceived in iniquity and born in sin. Bankers own the earth; take it away from them but leave them with the power to create credit, and, with a flick of the pen, they will create enough money to buy it all back again. Take this power away from them and all great fortunes like mine will disappear, and they ought to disappear, for then this world would be a happier and better world to live in. But if you want to be slaves of bankers and pay the cost of your own slavery, then let the bankers control money and control credit. - Lord Stamp, a Director of the Bank of England, in a speech in 1940

In this country the Institute of Bankers allocated five million pounds to combat the subversive ideas of ourselves. The large Press Association were expressly instructed that my own name should not be mentioned in the public Press. - C. H. Douglas, "The New Age", 28th March 1929

The issue which has swept down the centuries, and which will have to be fought sooner or later, is the People versus the Banks. - Lord Acton in 1875

I set to work to read the Act of Parliament by which the Bank of England was created and I soon began to perceive that the fate of the kingdon must finally turn upon what should be done with regard to the accursed thing called the National Debt. I saw how it had beggared and degraded the country... The scheme, the crafty, the cunning, the deep scheme, has from its ominous birth been breeding usurers of every description, feeding and fattening on the vitals of the country, till it has produced what the world never saw before - starvation in the midst of abundance. - William Cobbett

ITS HUGE SWINDLE

Banks act as "creators of money". - Professor Alan Day in "The Economics of Money", 1959.

They (the bankers) manufacture Credit by a mere stroke of the pen. - W. Hadley Robinson, Fellow of the Institute of Bankers

As the situation stands at present, the banker is in a unique position. He is probably the only known instance of the possibility of lending something wihout parting with anything; and making a profit on the transaction, obtaining in the first instance his commodity free. - C. H. Douglas in a speech in Newcastle in 1923

Banks create credit. It is a mistake to suppose that Bank Credit is created to any important extent by the payment of money into the Banks. - Encyclopaedia Brittannica, 14th edition

It is the fact that Bank deposits are used as money, which provides for the statement that "Bank loans create deposits". The creation takes place when the value of the loan is credited to the customer's account. - Chambers' Encyclopaedia, 1950

By creating deposits banks create money. When the manager of a branch of one of the joint stock banks opens an overdraft account for a customer, the loan creates a deposit; that is to say, a book debt has been incurred to the customer in return for a promise to repay it. - The Penguin Dictionary of Economics, 1979

So we have the principle, which is one of the axioms of modern banking, that every increase in lending creates a deposit. New money can be created by a net additon to bank lending, and money can be destroyed by a net repayment of bank loans. - E. Victor Morgan in "A History of Money", 1965

Money in the United States is not only a relatively small amount of cash, but we have primarily the bank deposits. This money has been created by the banks through their volition, not through the volition of Congress. - J. H. Rand Jr., President of Remington Rand, Inc.

It is not unnatural to think of the deposits of a bank as being created by the public through the deposit of cash representing either savings or amounts which are not for the time being required to meet expenditure. But the bulk of deposits arise out of the action of the banks themselves, for by granting loans, allowing money to be drawn on an overdraft or purchasing securities, a bank creates a credit in its books, which is the equivalent of a deposit. - Lord MacMillan in "The Report of the MacMillan Committee on Finance and Industry", 1931

The banks do create money. They have been doing it for a long time, but they didn't quite realise it, and they did not admit it. Very few did. Today I doubt very much whether you would get many prominent bankers to attempt to deny that banks create credit. - H. W. Whyte, Chairman of the Associated Banks of New Zealand in his evidence before the N. Z. Monetary Commission, 1955

I am afraid that the ordinary citizen will not like to be told that the banks or the Bank of England can create or destroy money... The amount of money in existence varies only with the action of the banks on increasing or diminishing deposits. - Reginald McKenna, erstwhile Chairman of the Midland Bank and Chancellor of the Exchequer

It is simply childish to say that a country has no money for social betterment or for any other purpose, when it has the skill, the men and materials to create that betterment... The history of money is one long unbroken history of fraud, and this power of money-creation by the banks is the final chapter. In brief, the creation of money, once performed by the producer of wealth, then by the custodian of wealth, who fraudulently issued more paper than the wealth he guarded, has passed to a set of people who neither produce, nor own, nor guard wealth, but are merely book-keepers. I find it incredible that a stable society can persist founded on the most colossal lucrative fraud that has ever been perpetrated on society. If we hypocritically claim that the employment system is a moral system and that man must be kept at work rather than choose work, we are sealing the doom of this civilization. - C. H. Douglas in a lecture at Ashridge Park in 1936

THE PHILOSOPHY OF LEISURE

Leisure is the best of all possessions. - Socrates

The perfect constitution will turn no citizen into a working mechanic. In the future every instrument should do its own work, the shuttle weave itself and the lyre be plucked without a guiding hand, so that foremen would not need workers nor masters slaves. - Aristotle

The economic problem, the struggle for subsistence, has always been hitherto the primary, most pressing, problem of the human race. If the economic problem is solved, mankind will be deprived of its original purpose. Will this be of benefit? For the first time since his creation man will be faced with his real, his permanent problem - how to use his freedom from pressing economic cares, how to occupy his leisure, which science and compound interest will have won for him, to live wisely, and agreeably and well. - John Maynard Keynes in "Essays in Persuasion", 1963

We shall have to question fundamentally why we work, how we take our leisure, and whether work itself is a positive activity. What is so special about work, especially if it will no longer be necessary, that we make such a feature of it? The Haitians have a very wise and perceptive old proverb: "If work were a good thing the rich would have found a way of keeping it all to themselves". We do not believe that work per se is necessary to human survival or self-esteem. - Clive Jenkins and Barry Sherman, Trade Union leaders in "The Collapse of Work", 1979

Work is the refuge of people who have nothing better to do. - Oscar Wilde

It is mentally and morally injurious to man to do anything in which he does not find pleasure, and many forms of labour are quite pleasureless activities and should be regarded as such. All works of that kind should be done by a machine. And I have no doubt that it will be so. At present machinery competes against man. Under proper conditions machinery will serve man. The fact is that civilization requires slaves. Unless there are slaves to do the ugly, horrible, uninteresting work, culture and contemplation become almost impossible. Human slavery is wrong, insecure and demoralizing. On mechanical slavery, on the slavery of the machine, the future or the world depends. - Oscar Wilde in "The Soul of Man"

The ultimate aim of the machine is leisure - that is, the release of other organic activities. - Lewis Mumford in "Technics and Civilization"

Is ideal man, then, to be idle? I answer that, if so, I see no wrong but a great good. I deny altogether that idleness is an evil, or that it produces evil, for I am well aware why the interested are so bitter against idleness - namely, because it gives time for thought, and if men had time to think their reign would come to an end. Idleness - that is the absence of the necessity to work for subsistence - is a great good. I hope that succeeding generations will be able to be idle. I hope that nine-tenths of their time will be leisure time; that they may enjoy their days, and the beauty of this beautiful world, that they may rest by the sea and dream, that they may dance and sing, and eat and drink. I will work towards that end with all my heart. - Richard Jeffries in "The Story of my Heart", 1883;

Increased means and increased leisure are the two civilizers of man. - Disraeli

I suppose that this is what is likely to happen, that machinery will go on developing with the purpose of saving men labour, till the mass of people attain real leisure enough to be able to appreciate the pleasure of life and begin to find out what it is they really want to do. They will soon find out that the less work they did (the less work unaccompanied by art, I mean) the more desirable a dwelling-place the earth would be. - William Morris

Civilization is rooted in noble play. - Johan Huizinga in "Homo Ludens", 1970

The tendency to overvalue work and the effort of doing something difficult is so deep-rooted that it even effects our notion of love. At the zenith of the Middle Ages it was held that sloth and restlessness, "leisurelessness", the incapacity to enjoy leisure, were closely connected; sloth was held to be the source of restlessness, and the ultimate cause of "work for work's sake". It is only in and through leisure that the "gate of freedom" is opened. The world of "work" and of the "worker" is a poor, impoverished world, be it ever so rich in material goods. Leisure is only possible when a man is at one with himself, when he acquiesces in his own being. It is an attitude of mind, a contemplative attitude, not a Sunday afternoon idyll, but the preserve of freedom, of education and culture, and of that undiminished humanity which views the world as a whole. - Joseph Pieper in "Leisure the Basis of Culture", 1952

I am inclined to agree with the Biblical saying that work is a curse. If you have the money, you can have leisure, but if you have no money, it's unemployment. Personally, I'm rather doubtful about this blessing of work. - Dr. Temple, Archbishop of Canterbury

For the last few centuries man has been obsessed by the idea of work, by the need for constant activity. He is almost incapable of being lazy for any length of time. This contrast, however, is only apparent. Laziness and compusive activity are not opposites but are two symptoms of the disturbance of man's proper functioning. The opposite of both is productiveness. Man has created such sources of mechanical energy that he has freed himself from the task of putting all his human energy into work in order to produce the material conditions for living. He could spend considerable part of his energy on the task of living itself. - Eric Fromm in "The Art of Loving", 1976

If leisure and security were enjoyed by all alike, the great mass of human beings who are normally stupified by poverty would become literate and would learn to think for themselves... Goods must be produced, but they must not be distributed. And in practice the only way of achieving this was by continuous warfare. - George Orwell in "1984"

Modern finance imposes on us a totally unnatural privation. The wage system is really a slave system. The factory workman is not a responsible human being, responsible for what he makes. He is only responsible for doing what he is told. He has been reduced to a sub-human condition of intellectual irresponsibility. He is only a man in his spare time. It is because man has free will that he is a man, and not because he has twenty dinners a day and forty motor cars. The artist is not a special kind of man, but every man is a special kind of artist. Art is that work and that way of working in which man uses his free will. A civilization based on the doctrine of free will naturally and inevitably produce artists. In such a civilization all men are artists and so there is no need to talk about it. - Eric Gill in "Money and Morals", 1937

Were mechanisation an end in itself, it would be an unmitigated calamity, robbing life of half its fulness and variety by stunting men and women into sub-human, robot-like automatons. But in the last resort, mechanisation can have only one object: to abolish the individual's physical toil of providing himself with the necessities of existence in order that hand and brain may be set free for some higher order of activity. - Professor Walter Gropius, world-famous architect

In what lies the significance of human life in which machine power has grown to be the destructive factor that it now is in the hands of the Money Power? There will come a universal margin of leisure, greater rational freedom for the individual than any known by previous civilizations - but that only if the creative artist is there in his true place, the machine in his hand as a tool. Money should have no power whatever in itself. Employment is not enough! What a man wants, if democracy works, is not so much employment as freedom to work at what he believes in, what he likes to do. Consult Social Credit! The most practical of all the systems of "money" yet devised. - Frank Lloyd Wright, world-famous architect in "The Living City", 1963

There is no doubt that if the human race is to have their dearest wish and be free from the dread of mass destruction they could have, as an alternative, what many of them might prefer, namely, the swiftest expansion of material well-being that has ever been within their reach, or even within their dreams. By material well-being I mean not only abundance but a degree of leisure for the masses such as has never before been possible in our mortal struggle for life. The majestic possibilities ought to gleam and be made to gleam before the eyes of the toilers in every land and ought to inspire the actions of all who bear responsibility for their guidance. - Sir Winston Churchill at the opening of Parliament, November 1953

Man is an active, creative being, born to explore the universe around him. There is no hint of a suggestion that his genetic structure, his psychological needs and drives, or even his social heritage, demands that he spend a vast chunk of his life poring over figures in a neon-lit office, driving a diesel engine throught smoky streets, or watching a million bottles a day pass him on a conveyor belt. As we move towards the end of this century, therefore, expect to find man throwing off the shackles of compulsory mindless labour, and embracing the new intellectual riches which the computer will provide. - Dr. Chris Evans in "Scientific Fact", 1979

Consider the lilies how they grow, they toil not neither do they spin, yet Solomon in all his glory was not arrayed like one of these. - Jesus Christ

Eric de Maré, RIBA, RDI, (b.1910) has earned his living mainly as an architectural journalist and photographer, and for some years edited the weekly "Architects’ Journal" in London. He has written and illustrated many books and articles on architectural history and topography, and on the art and craft of photography (See "Who's Who."). Since student days during the Hungry Thirties he has been an ardent advocate of the Social Credit ideas of the late Major Clifford Hugh Douglas, and among his writings is the paperback "A Matter of Life or Debt" which relates Social Credit to the new world of the micro-chip and automation, and is available from Humane World Community, Inc., P. O. Box 788, Onalaska, WA 98570, USA. $12US tax and ppd.