🚀 go-pugleaf

                       The Economy Of The Future 

     Here is a futuristic article scanned from a prominent American
bankers association magazine.
     I thought it would interest those of you who are locked into
maintaining The Old Economy.

               keesy@pi.net


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                              CONSUMERCARD  

    Ending Recessions, Depressions,  Unemployment, Inflation, and High
Living Costs - ConsumerCard

      In both principle and practice, the permanent solution to our
chronic unemployment problems is relatively simple.  In principle, all
we need do is base most of our industrial production on the long-term
industrial orders of Consumers rather than on the short-term industrial
orders of Investors.  In practice, this simply means contracting with
one of our major credit-card companies to issue and administer a special
new credit card which would enable consumers to place long-term orders
with industry and to pay for these with their labor rather than with
money.  Consumers and businessmen would then do whatever else was
necessary to make the new credit card work.
      Unemployment is simply the result of insufficient numbers of
consumer orders reaching Industry.  Consumer Orders are the fuel upon
which industry runs.  When the flow of consumer orders slows, industrial
production slows and unemployment results.  If industry is to maintain a
high level of productivity, its managers must draw from a full fuel tank
of long-term consumer industrial orders.
         In the past, we have always acted as though only Investors
(private and governmental) could order things for consumers and maintain
industry's backlog of orders.  Therefore our economic policies have
concentrated on encouraging more investors to initiate more and more
job-producing industrial orders and then providing investors with
convenient and reliable means of doing so.
       Regrettably, this short-sighted policy neglects entirely the
second major source of economic orders: the ultimate consumers
themselves.  This neglect is unfortunate since working consumers
outnumber investors ten to one, and they have forty times more financial
capacity than investors.  Consumers also know more about what consumers
want, and in one month they can place more firm long-term consumer
orders with industry than industry can handle in fifty years.
       Thus to create lifetime full employment for all Americans -
regardless of age, race, gender, education, or disability - we must
expand our economic policies to encourage consumers as well as investors
to place many long-term consumer orders with industry and to provide
both consumers and investors with reliable means of doing so.
Unfortunately, unlike investors, consumers are provided no such means.
Therefore we establish in our local and national banks a special
consumer-based credit system to parallel our present investor-based
credit system. 
       This new credit system could take the form of a special
credit-card whose use would be identical to that of an ordinary credit
card except for two major differences.  First, instead of being used to
BUY existing Investor-ordered products off retailer shelves, the new
"ConsumerCard" would be used exclusively to ORDER the production of
future consumer goods and services.  Second, instead of being repaid in
investor-created currency, consumer credits could be paid only in the
labor of the ordering consumers.

       Once distributed en rnasse to scores of millions of current and
future credit-card holders, the many potential benefits of this unique
ConsumerCard would induce consumers to use it, and the potential profits
would pressure businessmen to facilitate its use and accept its credits.
To the extent that it was used, unemployment would end nationwide.  So
would all other economic problems, from monetary Inflation, cyclical
business recessions, and general economic instability, to labor strikes,
unscientific pricing policies, rnisproduction. haphazard development,
and gross misappropriation of human and natural resources.
       The use of the new consumer-based credit system would produce an
energetic surge of efficient, sensible, and stable industrial activity
which would double our Gross National Product and everyone's wages
within one year and every seven years thereafter. Consumers would
receive what they wanted, not what investors thought they wanted or
should have, or what investors could afford to order.
       Full employment would promptly shrink the public dole while the
new affluence would greatly enlarge our tax base. Huge new tax revenues
would quickly convert government budget deficits into surpluses and
enable governments to repay their ponderous public debts within three
years while providing ample new funds for education, defense, public
health and public works, and the maintenance of our crumbling
infrastructure.
       The new employment security would stabilize jobs and thus
families, individuals, communities, and cultures.  These stabilized
communities would in turn reverse urban decay and elevate public morale
and morality.  Stabilized social pressures would also discourage crime,
fraud, and debt evasion while tighter financial controls and the disuse
of negotiable cash would prevent them.
       Consumer orders would enable businessmen to set prices and wages
scientifically since consumer evaluations of ordered products could be
properly compared with worker evaluations of the jobs created by those
orders.  This practice would permit the economy to establish proper
production priorities and to determine the optimum allocations of human
and natural resources.  This would end the aggressive tug-of-war method
of setting prices and wages and the subsequent frustrating misplacement
of invaluable workers and wasteful misallocation of irreplaceable
resources.
       Long-term consumer contracts would reserve limited land and
mineral rights for the exclusive use of specific individuals and
families. These individual allocations would inspire a broad
conservation of natural resources and restrain excessive fertility. The
limits of these personal allocations would thus discourage current
excessive population growth, the rape of natural resources, and the
further extinction of species without official intervention.
       Pollutants in our air, land, food, and water would gradually
disappear once its high costs persuaded consumers to pay higher prices
to manufacturers to fund the suppression of pollution at its source.
Scientific research would be stimulated since its estimated value would
elicit ample investments from consumers and from the many businessmen
looking for better and more efficient ways to fulfill their fifty-year
backlogs of orders.  Similarly, useful inventions would find immediate
applications and markets through the consumer agencies which would be
organized to utilize fully the many opportunities of this new
consumer-ordering device.
       After we have controlled unemployment at home, as world leaders
we can inspire similar economic reforms abroad.  In doing so we would
not only help other nations improve their economy and our international
relations, we would also divert the flood of illegal immigrants fleeing
the economic chaos in those nations.  Full employment abroad would also
persuade economic refugees already here to return voluntarily to their
own countries, while our newly closed local economies could compel them
to do so.
       As this brief review Indicates, the potential benefits of this
consumer-based credit system are enormous.  In monetary terms alone, the
system is potentially worth at least One Trillion Dollars Annually to
the people of the United States and proportionally more to other peoples
of the world.