🚀 go-pugleaf

netspider4@lycos.com (Karl-Hugo Weesberg) wrote in message news:<7666ed5f.0410222337.d037179@posting.google.com>...
> In 2050, most jobs from Earth have been moved to Mars and Venus,
> leaving most Earthlings unemployed.
> 
> Bad!
0


Perhaps not Mars or Venus, but certainly the Moon!
http://www.elistas.com/list/socialcredit/subscribe
See No. 2 below:

1. The "Kingdom of Assinaria."

"...Social credit provided the central theme of the 
Cuanduine trilogy of Eimar 0'Duffy. The latter also 
published a social credit text, *Life and Money,* 
described as a 'critical examination of the 
principles and practice of orthodox economics with a 
practical scheme to end the muddle it has made of our 
civilization' (0'Duffy 1932) which went through 
several editions. He questioned the assumption 
underlying the growth of competition. Why should the 
'manifold devices for the saving of labour' coupled 
with the multiplication of the fruits of nature and 
'increasing social aggregation...have so utterly 
incongruous a result?' (0'Duffy 1932: 19).

"0'Duffy's mythical science-fiction fantasy in three 
volumes is a comic indictment of politics and 
economics in the contemporary world. *King Goshawk 
and the Birds* (1926) portrays the philosophy of the 
capitalist financial system followed through to its 
logical conclusions: a monopoly has been established 
over song-birds and wild flowers.  In the second 
book, *The Spacious Adventures of the Man in the 
Street,* a world where a sane credit system secures 
sufficiency and leisure for all is viewed through the 
unsympathetic eyes of a speculative opportunist.

Finally, in *Asses in Clover,* the god-hero travels 
through the kingdom of Assinaria. There professors of 
the dismal science discuss how far the standard of 
living must be lowered in order to raise it, and the 
impossibility of providing an income for all in a 
land of plenty when there is no demand for labour. 
Despite their comic form, the books carry a sombre 
message. A social credit Utopia on the moon is 
destroyed by capitalist financial pressures. On 
earth, those who can afford to pay to see song-birds 
and wild flowers are content to do so. Those 
suffering abject poverty are too preoccupied with 
their plight to care about the world they have lost. 
The trilogy has an uncannily prophetic ring. On his 
death in 1935 0'Duffy was described by Douglas as an 
economist of 'no mean order...combining the typical 
Irishman's hatred of pomposity with a delicate sense 
of proportion...His books will, for many years, 
provide a touchstone of reality' (Douglas 1935b: 
70)."

Frances Hutchinson and Brian Burkitt, *The Political 
Economy of Social Credit and Guild Socialism,* 1997: 
page 168.

2. Robert Hogan, *Eimar 0'Duffy,* published 1972, 
pages 73-77:

*Asses in Clover* is the final volume in the 
Cuanduine trilogy. It takes up again the story of 
Cuanduine and his battles against the modern economic 
system, as personified by King Goshawk and his comic-
strip colleagues. As a story, this last book is much 
more rambling and ineffectual than was either *King 
Goshawk and the Birds* or *The Spacious Adventures of 
the Man in the Street.* The reason is largely that 
0'Duffy was, during much of the writing, suffering 
acute physical pain, and it is remarkable that he was 
able to complete the book at all.

Its plot begins with a council of state between 
Goshawk and his liege kings, then diverges to chart 
at length the adventures of a new character, Mac ui 
Rudai, who is a kind of hyper-typical man on the 
street, and then after 160 pages or so returns 
leisurely to the original story of the birds. One of 
the birds has escaped from Queen Gusselinda's aviary 
and taken refuge in Ireland, where the natives refuse 
to give him up. Goshawk and his men mount a massive 
air attack upon Ireland, intending to devastate the 
country with bombs and poison gas. Cuanduine goes to 
Ireland, constructs a great airplane, and then in an 
excellently conceived battle scene destroys Goshawk's 
airforce. He next attacks Goshawk's castle, and 
although Goshawk is destroyed, his economic adviser, 
Mr. Slawmy Cander who is the real power in the world, 
is spared. Because Cander's power is so pervasive, 
Cuanduine finds it impossible to liberate the birds. 
So, giving up his attempt to reform the world, he 
returns to his wife, only to discover that his 
children have in his absence become creatures of the 
modern world. Quite thoroughly disgusted, Cuanduine 
and his wife fly away from the earth, never to be 
seen again.

There yet remain six chapters in the book, which tell 
what happened to the earth after the failure of 
Cuanduine. According to 0'Duffy's reading of 
contemporary economics, the ironic central fallacy is 
that the capitalist state produces goods which the 
workers who produce them cannot afford to buy. 
Therefore, at the suggestion of 0'Kennedy, who has 
returned from his travels on Rathe, an expedition was 
launched to the moon to open up a new market among 
its inhabitants. This works excellently for a while, 
but then:

"After a time, indeed, the stream of goods began to 
diminish, because the imports of Selenite material 
[from the moon] could not keep pace with it. 
Unemployment at once began to rear its unwelcome head 
again on earth; but Mr. Cander was not to be defeated 
so easily. He arranged that in future the surplus 
profits should be invested in new enterprises on the 
spot: in other words, terrestrial-owned industries 
were to be started on lunar territory. The solved the 
difficulty for a time, giving much-needed employment 
to the 'heavy' industries; but after a while the 
competition of the lunar factories began to be felt, 
prices fell, and many terrestrial businesses were 
ruined. Only one course now remained: to conquer the 
Moon, and bring it within the ambit of the Earth's 
financial system. As the Economists put it, the 
economic problem was One Big Two-World Problem which 
could not be solved on narrow one-world lines."

The great powers of the earth--the British, the 
Americans, and the Japanese--all claim the moon as 
their rightful province and launch expeditions to 
subdue it. On the moon, however, the three 
expeditions spend most of their time destroying each 
other, and the remainder of the earth armies is 
easily repulsed by the Selenites. The the great 
powers of the earth combine in several joint 
expeditions to subdue the moon, but when these too 
are easily repulsed all hope is given up for the 
project.

"The effect on the Earth was immediate and tragic. 
Deprived of the only available market, industry after 
industry went smash, and the world sank into the 
blackest trade depression it had ever known."

This depression was followed by a great war which 
destroyed most of the civilized world and reduced the 
few remaining inhabitants to a primitive pastoral 
existence.  In a few more years, the society of men 
has been succeeded by a society of rabbits, and in 
the last chapter two of the Gods "observed a dim star 
among the drifting millions flash suddenly, and go 
out." One of the Gods muses that, "There ends another 
of my experiments."

And the second God inquires, "A successful one?"

"'Nay, a miserable failure, though at one time it 
gave good promise. That star gave birth to a number 
of planets, on one of which I evolved, after much 
thought and toil, a strange creature call Man. At 
first he was truly interesting, but he reached his 
zenith too quickly, and then rapidly declined. During 
his last few hundred years, when he was already far 
gone in decay, he achieved a mastery of natural 
forces that was marvelous in a race so stupid, but 
his wickedness and folly were such that it did him 
more harm than good.  In the end I superseded him by 
a somewhat lower creature called rabbit; but this had 
no great potentialities either for good or evil, and 
so nothing came of it. A few million years ago the 
planet fell back into its parent sun, which has now 
itself come to an end.'

"'Did these Men that you have mentioned achieve 
nothing of lasting worth?' asked the other God.

"'Almost nothing,' replied the first.  'A few of them 
did occasionally show some glimmerings of divine 
wisdom to which their fellows paid no heed. That, and 
some trifles of tolerable music, is their only 
memorial.  If you listen you may catch some echo of 
the latter still moving among the spheres.'

"The Gods were silent; and the ghost of the Ninth 
Symphony came stealing through the ether."

This is an effectively wry conclusion to a highly 
talented writer's major work...

3. Robert Hogan, *Eimar 0'Duffy,* published 1972, 
pages 68-73:

I am quite totally unqualified to discuss 0'Duffy's 
*Life and Money.* Nevertheless, it stands in the same 
relation to his creative work as Bernard Shaw's *The 
Intelligent Woman's Guide to Socialism and 
Capitalism* does to his plays.  Indeed, if anything, 
*Life and Money* is more important for an 
understanding of 0'Duffy's last work than *The 
Intelligent Woman's Guide* is for an understanding of 
Shaw.

0'Duffy's book came out originally in 1932 and 
quickly went into two revised editions. It was an 
analysis of the causes for the Depression, and an 
indictment of the economic system which had so 
spectacularly broken down in 1929. More important, if 
undoubtedly less sound, was 0'Duffy's remedy, a kind 
of modified social-capitalism whose chief feature was 
its money reform--in other words, a Social Credit 
scheme.

In the most general sense, 0'Duffy's view is that:

"The economic troubles of the world are occasioned by 
the fact that a monetary system which originated at a 
time when the demand for goods was greater than the 
supply, and when competition between man and man was 
inevitable, is still in use at a time when the supply 
of goods is greater than the demand, and competition 
is giving place to co-operation."

The monetary system of the world caused in 0'Duffy's 
time the anomaly of millions of people starving in 
the midst of plenty. He wrote:

"Modern industry is so well equipped and organized 
that it can produce enough goods to satisfy 
everybody's wants without calling on everybody to 
work. But in spite of this, society insists that no 
individual shall take a share of the product unless 
he works. In consequence, the goods which an 
unemployed man would consume are presently left 
unproduced, with the result that those who would have 
made them are unemployed in their turn, and a fresh 
shrinkage of production follows, leading to more 
unemployment, and so on *ad infinitum.*"

According to 0'Duffy, the two most usual economic 
remedies are Sisyphism and Procrusteanism. The 
sterile labors of Sisyphus are for 0'Duffy "an 
excellent symbol for the policy of 'making work' 
instead of distributing the product." Following 
Frederic Bastiat, a nineteenth-century French 
economist, 0'Duffy outlines Sisyphist reasoning as 
follows: Industry is an effort followed by a result; 
the result is wealth or prosperity; and hence it 
would seem to follow that the greater the industry 
the greater the wealth. Consequently, the Sisyphist, 
when faced by some economic catastrophe, attempts to 
remedy it not by a distribution of goods, but by the 
creation of work. This was the highly inadequate 
remedy of the British government during the Great 
Famine in Ireland in the nineteenth century. 0'Duffy 
notes that De Valera's statement that Ireland had 
been well served by its Civil War because repairing 
the damage would cause employment, was nothing but 
Sisyphism. Or the French Minister who opposed the 
cultivation of sugar beets on the grounds that it 
required little land, labor and capital to provide a 
large amount of sugar, was nothing but a Sisyphist. 
Or the W.P.A. in the United States during the 
Depression was nothing, in 0'Duffy's view, but a 
Sisyphist makeshift.

According to 0'Duffy, "the way to prosperity is to 
increase the proportion which result bears to effort: 
to get the maximum result from the minimum of 
effort."  In his view, the problem in a time of 
plenty is not to create artificial employment, but 
properly to distribute goods and leisure.

A second usual economic remedy 0'Duffy calls 
Procrusteanism, and the Procrustean remedy is to fit 
the society to the economic muddle. The most usual 
methods advanced to do this are emigration and birth 
control. The great hue and cry today about 
overpopulation and the immediate necessity for birth 
control over the world would be regarded by 0'Duffy 
as rampant Procrusteanism and an admission that the 
economic system is unable to function efficiently. 
The recent demands of Mr. Enoch Powell in England, 
that immigration to England by citizens from other of 
the Commonwealth nations should be immediately 
curtailed, and that the two mission Irishmen working 
in England should be immediately deported, are 
Procrustean solutions to the country's economic 
problems.

0'Duffy's solution, which he works out in ingenious 
detail, is a form of Social Credit. We have allowed, 
he says, the banker to treat credit as his own 
private property:

"We have allowed him to grant or withhold the use of 
it at his own discretion, to charge us interest on it 
while it is lent to us, and to withdraw it at his 
pleasure to our own prejudice. The foundation stone 
of the new system, therefore, must be the restoration 
of this credit-power to its rightful owners, the 
people, and its administration by a national 
authority in the people's interest."

He then proposes that, instead of issuing a currency 
based on gold, that a new currency should be issued 
annually based on consumable goods, under a guarantee 
of cancellation with the consumption of the goods. 
Or, as he sums the argument up:

That money shall be valueless, a mere ticket for the 
exchange of goods.

That the issue and control of money shall be in the 
hands of a national authority responsible to the 
people.

That the amount of money issued in any particular 
period shall be equal to the collective prices of the 
goods available in the same period.

That goods shall be sold at their true economic 
price, calculated scientifically.

That a National Industrial Dividend shall be paid to 
every citizen without conditions as to work.

That new capital developments shall be financed out 
of new credits created for the purpose instead of out 
of savings.

Then in great detail, he outlines a plan for the 
administration of the scheme. This resume is, of 
course, a considerable simplification of the bare 
outlines of 0'Duffy's scheme. However, I am sure that 
the perusal of the scheme in all of its rather 
persuasive detail would still undoubtedly lead one to 
conclude that this is only the visionary Utopia of 
yet another crank. Indeed, Bernard Shaw in 
*Everybody's Political What's What* takes the 
following caustic view toward the various schemes of 
Social Credit:

"Finance and money are much more puzzling than direct 
commercial profiteering for one's own hand with one's 
own little capital. They produce crazy schemes to 
which the Everyman family lends a greedy ear, as they 
all promise plenty of money for nothing. The Currency 
Crank is a nuisance in every movement for social 
reform; and the apostles of Social Credit once 
actually persuaded a Canadian legislature to budget 
on its imaginary riches. They are supported by the 
mystery of banking, which seems to create millions of 
money out of nothing, and by the fact, of which 
everyone has daily experience, that scraps of paper 
are accepted in discharge of debts of thousands of 
golden pounds.  In these phenomena there is much more 
substantial evidence for the existence of the 
philosopher's stone, with its power of transmuting 
base metals into precious ones, than the old 
alchemists were ever able to produce. We may cease to 
believe in the philosopher's stone, and be convinced 
by the experience of the Alberta exchequer that there 
is something wrong with Social Credit; but as long as 
banking remains a private business, and rich people 
enjoy enormous unearned incomes without lifting their 
little fingers to earn it, there will be crazy 
schemes in the air under one name or another; and the 
Everyman family will run after them just as they ran 
after the South Sea Bubble."

Shaw's conclusion is just, inasmuch as it is 
inconceivable that a scheme like 0'Duffy's would be 
implemented anywhere in the foreseeable future. In 
the hysteria that followed the Crash of 1929, 
however, when it was perfectly obvious to everyone 
that the economic system was most lamentably 
inadequate, his scheme probably appeared to large 
numbers of the Everyman family as worth some 
consideration. At any rate, his book very quickly 
went into three editions. In the economic recovery 
which was largely impelled by the vast creation of 
work necessitated by a World War, schemes such as 
0'Duffy's were relegated to the dusty back shelves of 
libraries.

Yet perhaps one should not dismiss this volume quite 
so easily, for the soundness of its indictment may 
certainly still be seen in the patchwork Socialism of 
the great nations in the post-war world. Even such an 
economically reactionary country as Ireland has found 
it absolutely necessary to provide an imposing array 
of doles, welfare services, and state control of 
various key industries. The worldwide fact, plus the 
equally apparent floundering of the economy of the 
great nations, would indicate to this writer's 
admittedly ignorant view of the situation that a 
scheme lie 0'Duffy's may be thoroughly impractical 
but nevertheless right. Or at least more right than 
the various economic bandaids that have been applied 
to a cancerous economy in the post-war world.
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