Potential Delivers the Goods
SIR,-Wherever Mr. Bray may have obtained his information about social credit, it was not from the works of C. H. Douglas. Consider his imagined social credit reforms: 1. 'Creation of money by the banks should cease." Social credit is not primarily concerned with the creation of Money, but with the "creation" of a correct statement of the community's real credit. If the community's real credit is correctly determined, then the "money" will as correctly and surely follow as do theatre tickets the provision of theatre seats, Social credit does not propose that the community's credit-claims ("money-) should he "spent by the Government", but by the individuals who comprise the community. and who are the creators and rightful owners of the credit.
2. Social credit does not propose to "fix the amount of money to be created year by year". It is the community by its cultural inheritance and present labours which "creates" the community's credit, and consequently the amount of credit-claims which may be veeded to draw upon that credit. The real credit of a community naturally increases with the increasing power and willingness.to produce goods and services, and so should, correspondingly. the credit-claims, or "money", giving right to draw upon that credit.
3. The amount of these credit claims ("money") would certainly not be linked to the gold reserves. A community's real credit potential, as also the statement of that credit. can have no possible relationship with "gold" which would make "money" itself, and not the "credit", the thing of value. Does gold affect the ability to grow potatoes or to build houses?
The question is not whether government or banks create and issue money, but whether money is made the servant or the master of the national credit account, Money is an abstraction, of '" no value in itself. It should be a mere reflection
of what people want to have and can have-what they want to do and can do. It should be the Church's business to teach them what they ought to do.
Mr. Bray seeks "a new approach to the problem of money ', when what is required is a new approach to the problem of real credit (a correct estimate of the rate at which a community can deliver goods and services as when and where required when no hindrances other than physical are allowed to operate) and its financial reflection. His conception of "a new discipline based upon international social justice" is the conception of one seeking a world communist state. and is the very opposite of all that is meant by social credit.
T. V. Holmes Bill Green Farm, Saffron Walden.