William Wallace (1862-1942) During his time in Alberta William Wallace was a school teacher and a local official. He may be most noteworthy for the extensive political writings he produced during the last years of his life.
This was during a turbulent time in Alberta's history, with the Farmer government being pushed out of power replaced by radical monetary reformist government led by Aberhart. Wallace had strong notions of Aberhart's Social Credit theories and sent great reams to country political writer. Formerly a scientist, he had studied with Lord Kelvin, electrical pioneer. 1902-1907 principal of Cockburn High School of Leeds
He acquired a case of blood poisoning that he couldn't shake it off.
was advised to seek a completely new vocation and climate, and he chose Alberta. This was back when Alberta was a sort of health spa!
He came to Edmonton in 1907.
homesteaded in Paddle River country, 75 miles northwest of Edmonton. (from PAA 70.158, file #1)
The district's name, Campsie, was taken from the name he had given his farm, Campsie Mains, itself named after a place-name near his old home in Scotland.
served as postmaster at Campsie, Alberta, JP, etc.
his home became the local telephone centre when a long-distance line was put in. (Edmonton Bulletin, Dec. 27, 1921)
----------------------------------------------------------- 1914 account by William Wallace of a fictional discussion between a bachelor and his neighbours, parents of children, upset at him and other struggling bachelor homesteaders for voting against the creation of a public school.
One of the aggrieved parents says that the situation harkens back to the Middle Ages when the rule was "Riches to the rich, and poverty to the poor" and "Knowledge establisheth wealth but poverty is perpetuated by ignorance." They eventually all agreed that the government should support local schools in new settlements until the area economy is developed enough to support schools by itself. (If this reflected the situation in Wallace's district, it was short-lived as the Cavell School District was formed there by 1917.) ("The Turned Down School", Grain Growers Guide, Nov. 25, 1914; Edmonton Bulletin, Feb. 16, June 28, 1917)
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------- 1918 write-up on Edmonton Bulletin (April 16, 1918) of the experiment he and his son, Hugh B. Wallace, had done on his farm with Prelude, a quicker-growing wheat even than Marquis. 1918 Campsie news in Edmonton Bulletin cover the recent deaths by the 'flu of a father and mother in the district, the orphan children to be sent to live with relatives in Scotland.
Also report made that the Cavell School District is waiving all present and past taxes due by soldiers during their period of service. (Edmonton Bulletin, Dec. 24, 1918) Not all municipalities made this offer - many Edmonton vets, for example, came home to find their families had lost their homes.
1929 second vice-president of the Alberta Educational Association (La Survivance, April 11, 1929) organized a school and taught at it his daughter-in-law, A. Hollingshead, wrote "He had enormous patience to hear one's side of a subject and then with a clear analysis that was like the illumination of a searchlight, he would in the interest of impartial truth, show where inconsistencies and prejudices obscured the facts. He was a stickler for facts and one could not gainsay his logic that in the end would clarify the situation for everybody."
1924 Robert Walker sentenced to three months hard labour for assaulting William Wallace, a schoolteacher in the Edmonton district. (Redcliff Review, May 8, 1924)
During the Great Depression he put forward novel socialistic remedies for the widespread unemployment, and held little regard for Social Credit schemes of the time.
================= 1919 Wallace's views on the cause of, and cure for, the high cost of living were published in the Edmonton Bulletin (June 11, 1919)
Wallace wrote: "There can be no relief from the high Cost of Living until Capital agrees or is compelled to cut its profits to a worthwhile minimum as determined by the needs of the rest of humanity."
Wallace wrote that The 'Power of the Market' at present enjoyed by Capital is the essential characteristic of plutocracy, and Democracy is impossible while Capital retains that power.
The cure he proposed for profiteering was government control of the interest rate, where the interest rate would rise if Capital pushed consumer prices higher (above an allowed one-percent fluctuation), thus imposing a brake on consumption, investment and employment and compelling prices to drop again. Labour's and Capital's "chase in the ring" for higher wages and higher profits/higher prices ("by which it thwarts the desire of Labour for greater security of living while appearing to grant it") would then be settled by themselves. Capital would be compelled to cut its profits, through government, as outlined above, checking the expansion of credit and currency and maintaining a steady per-capita circulation of currency. Among the many points Wallace makes is this statement:
"As a consequence of the increasing cost of living, the investing capacity of the lower middle classes is being steadily reduced and its sympathetic attachment to Capital therefore gradually weakened, so that the time appears ripe for the organization of the lower middle class into a consumers' Anti-Profiteering League."
And he closed with this one, "An amalgamation of the farmer, the wage-earner and the low middle class consumer should be sufficient to give to parliament the composition necessary to secure the passage of the following measures of reform: 1. the public audit of the accounts of all companies engaged in the manufacture and distribution of staples, so as to discover the real cost and profits involved. 2. the inauguration of government control of currency so as to maintain a steady per-capita circulation. 3. the development of adequate means of scientific research with a view to promoting improvements in the means and methods of production and distribution which, by reducing the cost of production and distribution, are the ultimate sources of betterment for all classes of society. =============================
As a political scientist, he wrote "The Political Group" in it, he said human activity is variously distributed between work and play throughout the different grades of society, at the bottom is all work and no play; at the top, all play and no work, with every sort of intermediate ratio in between...
the obvious injustice of the arrangement that assigns unlimited leisure to people who render no service and no leisure at all to those who render the most strenuous service at the most disagreeable tasks, to mention only the extremes, may be taken as the cause of the social unrest that has affected civilization for many centuries but particularly since the Industrial Revolution in the later half of the 19th Century. When people are at work, they are producers; when at play, they are consumers. As consumers, whether of commodities or service, all are in the same category, the proper regulation of expenditure whether public or private, is a matter that concerns all in the the same sense...the difference in consumption that differentiates the different grades of society, being primarily a matter of income and therefore occupational, belong to the producer side of the account... thus in relation to regulation of retail marketing and of public services, the neighbourhood group is the proper means of determining and conveying the will of the people. As producers, people fall into fairly well-defined groups, the specific interests of which are highly competitive, in relation to each other and constantly fluctuating. The relative value of different kinds of services from which the income is derived, are matters of intensely vital concern to all in relation to which a perpetual struggle is maintained between the different groups. The organization of these groups is a matter of comparatively recent history and is still in process of evolution. As active factors in the political world, they have not yet achieved general recognition. But this much is clear that in these days of universal education, there can be no more efficient instruments for the clear formulation of and presentation of the political needs and aspirations of the various occupational groups than the organized occupational groups themselves. For such purposes, the Neighbourhood Group is absolutely hopeless including, as it necessarily must, members of many occupational groups as individuals only. Its voice in this regard is as the voice of the mob, an inarticulate din. It is, from its very constitution, incompetent to utter determining premises on the most vital question of the morrow, the tangled problem of the inequitable distribution of income among the various grades of society. To meet efficiently the political requirements of the day, the political system of a nation demands a dual system of electoral organization - in Neighbourhood groups and Occupational groups, simultaneously - the former to take care of the local and general interests of the people as consumers; the latter to extend to all questions arising out of the occupational interests of the people as producers. There should be two co-ordinate elective Houses of Representatives corresponding respectively to the two types of electoral organization, general and functional. It does not follow that locally autonomous subdivisions should also be organized in this dual fashion irrespective of local conditions. In Alberta, the bulk of the population and almost all the territory covered, are devoted to a single occupation, farming. It would be sufficient to maintain a single House and uselessly extravagant to maintain two. But the representation in that House would have to be based on an occupational organization of the community, for whereas the composition of such a House would be sufficiently well distributed to take care of local questions with reasonable efficiency, a House returned on a local basis representing Neighbourhood groups would be entirely incompetent to take care of occupational interests. The reason why the Neighbourhood group has prevailed so long in politics is obvious. Until the Industrial Revolution gave birth to Big Business, men not only lived as individuals - they also worked as individuals, masters as well as men.
The only material that could have produced an occupational group was the agricultural community, but the farmers were so landlord-ridden that they dared not organize. In these latter days, however, while people still lived as individuals, they work in groups possessing greater or less solidarity, and serous problems have arisen out of the more complex relations of industrial life that only be solved through the intensive activity of organized occupational groups.
To continue to ignore the specific appeal of the occupational group, as being the expert exponent of vital interests, is surely a policy of confusion." William Wallace, Campsie, April 10, 1927
A Germ of Industrial Disequilibrium, March 18, 1935 There appears to be no question that overcharging consumers, underpaying employees, substituting machines for men and women, have become regular and reprehensible practices in industry under private ownership, and that these practices have been possible without directly contravening the laws governing industrial operation. Nor does there seem to be any doubt that the iniquities of modern profiteering have proceeded directly from the inequitable stranglehold that private industrial ownership has been able to establish over its function of Social Providing, through its wage-price system. The stranglehold relates to the fact that in the matter of providing the means of livelihood of the people, the private owners as a whole enjoy a full monopoly - there is no competition on the part of public corporations.
The "hands-off" policy of Laissez-faire has for more than a century left that function without a controlling governor - with the dire results we know. The system has been assumed to be self-governing, but the recent generation of private owners has discovered how to tie up the governing apparatus of the machine. The amazing wealth-producing efficiency of modern industry results from the no less amazing volume of novel devices (inventions) that have characterized its progress under laissez-faire. The germs of trouble can be found in the Patent law. When the term of a patent expires, (during which time, Wallace said, the consumers have amply paid for it), the protection automatically ceases and theoretically anyone is at liberty to produce the device, which is now public property or rather no one's property, like the air we breathe and the heavenly lights. In another essay "The Ownership of the Instruments and Means of Industry" Wallace points out that factories can produce even toys and simple articles of domestic use, not to mention washing machines, and radios, far more cheaply than individuals at home, so it is a vain and misleading gesture to pretend that the free and unconditional release of the valuable devices delivers to the general public the right to produce the device whose patent has lapsed. Producers thus fall heir to valuable cost-reducing devices that for the time at least increases the volume of the profits, by cutting labour costs - by replacing labour with machines, thus casting off employees "whose services the industrial owners are enabled to dispense with, and whose burden of support the general public becomes responsible. In "The Ownership of the Instruments...", Wallace explained that the negative effects of labour-cost-saving did not become clear "until there broke upon a bewildered world the disastrous and puzzling nightmare of technological unemployment.
"This was a direct and inevitable result of the very maladjustment we are now discussing, seeing that the shortage of employment in question is due to the progressive increase in the use of labour-saving devices, the motive of which is to reduce wage costs so as to increase the distribution of dividends to industrial shareholders.
And that unsocial behaviour of Industry is justifiable and possible on the assumption that these labor-saving devices are the exclusive property of the share-holders. (Wallace, "The Ownership of the Instruments and Means of Industry," Feb. 15, 1942. PAA 70.158, #14) Wallace suggested instead that the patent law be amended so that all patents, instead of simply lapsing on expiry, should become public property like the natural resources.
With such an amendment on the statute books, every machine and appliance as well as every process in use in our factories would now be paying an annual royalty to the public treasury.
But it is not the financial significance of these neglected royalties that concern us now.
It is rather the consideration that they would now have represented a part title of ownership in the instruments of industry. While the actual set-up of these instruments is unquestionably the private property of the private owners, the devices that they embody (in all but the most parts temporarily covered by current patents) would have been public property and could have been made the basis of public partnership in industry that might have been used to prevent the present impasse. it is not too late. In 20 years, to a less extent in ten, there would be such an accumulation of expired (but still alive and wriggling) patents as to justify an effective claim of public partnership that could be used to supply the regulating function that the governor-less machine now lacks.
And it is likely that when such a measure is seen to be inevitable, Industry will co-operate with the public authority in devising a new organization for Industry on the basis indicated. [the basis indicated was not made clear] All that is needed is to amend patent law by adding a clause that on the expiry of the patent, all rights whatsoever in the device or devices concerned revert to the patent office...
It would then require only a brief period to establish an effective claim on the part of the public authority for a progressively increasing partnership in industrial property as a whole, the consequences of which it would be difficult to predict with any degree of accuracy. For one thing, it would furnish a substantial and expanding basis of real Social Credit. And it would tend automatically to lead to the ultimate goal of public ownership, by a natural process of evolution." (Wallace, "The Ownership of the Instruments and Means of Industry, Feb. 15, 1942". (PAA 70.158, #14)) Feb. 21, 1935 he argued and counter-argued with Major C.H. Douglas, head-man of the Social Credit-ers.
Wallace wrote criticisms of Aberhart's plan for $25 dividends to be paid out by the Alberta government to each Albertan. He wrote that for the government to issue $25 per month to each eligible Albertan - there were about 400,000 eligible citizens in Alberta - would require $10M per month, which, if the government taxed it all back, could be used again the next month.
But the government would be hard-pressed to tax it all back in sales taxes (under SC, in the form of the unearned increment tax that was part of some SC schemes), even at the necessary average rate of 33.33% (or as high as 40%, and leaving aside administration costs) unless monthly expenditure for living costs was four times the dividend or $100/per month. But most (all but 23,000 citizens) live on - and spend - less than $750/per year and there can be no law forcing people to spend all their cash on hand.
[Thus the $25 monthly dividend amounted to about a third of the annual income for most Albertans.]
The real obstacle that the Aberhart's plan would have to face at the outset, if it were adopted, would be a general (but not necessarily concerted) policy of restricted spending on the part of those who would otherwise have to pay more in unearned increment taxes than they receive in citizen's dividends. That would inevitably jam the machinery of the plan, passing the cost of its installation to the already heavy debt burden of the provinces." (Wallace, "Mr. Aberhart's Plan the Weak Spot in the Plan" (PAA 70.158, file 55)
In "The Aberhart Dividends, No. 4", he wrote that the bulk of Albertans (roughly three-quarters of them) will not gain or lose through dividends and the sales tax that will come with it, and will suffer from debt caused by its collapse.
The group of taxpayers whose personal interest could naturally lead them to oppose the adoption of the plan (about 5 percent of the electorate) would be hopelessly swamped in an election on the issue but would nevertheless be able, literally without moving a finger, to block the operation of the plan effectively and immediately. The government would have no power to compel the big spenders to shoulder the burden by maintaining their high level of spending."
In "The Aberhart Dividends No. 5", Wallace parsed one of Douglas's statements, just one example of Douglas's dense and opaque writing style, and found it lacking in logic and understanding of day-to-day business.
In "Less Hurry, Less Speed", he wrote that Major Douglas's "National Dividends" represent a claim of public ownership in part only - a claim of national partnership in industry, and that this was different from the CCF, whose aspiration is to straight public ownership of the instruments of industry. Thus, both aim to take something from the present industrial owners (the shareholders) which is, to them, their private property, and both profess to be anxious to achieve their ends without violence, by constitutional means.
Both Douglas and the CCF have so far attracted the support mainly of those sections of Society which, by education and mental habit, are less able to weigh adequately the value and implications of the arguments advanced...
Thus, a snap vote of the electorate would be nothing better than a leap in the dark. That is no way to inaugurate a new Social Order!
The issues are too big and fateful...
we should take time to let at least a reasonable majority (60 percent of the electorate) acquire a competent grasp of the salient questions involved. ..
In the meantime, as in time of war, let us take such emergency measures as may be necessary to keep the machinery running so as to provide for the sustenance of all. Then let us enter the "Delectable Land" through the "Wicket Gate", instead of having to be hoisted over the wall." (March 18, 1935 (PAA 70.158, file 55))
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During the Great Depression of the 1930s, many Albertans turned to the Social Credit theories to find way out of the economic crash. Wallace analyzed both Major Douglas theories and the theories of the newly founded Co-operative Commonwealth Federation (a forerunner of today's NDP)
In "The A-plus-B Theorem of Major Douglas", Wallace wrote -
the theory of insufficient purchasing power causing depression and "Poverty amidst Plenty" holds up if phrased differently -
- the incomes of the lower grades of Society are deficient, they are not able to buy all they need, while the rich have the resources but are not willing to buy more than they need.
Thus, society's purchasing power, although possibly not deficient in absolute terms in "conditions of normalcy", is insufficient to buy all that is produced due to its mal-distribution.
And Wallace pointed out that there seldom are conditions of normalcy - due to human greed, the craze of get rich quick, there are trumped-up booms, based on mob-psychology, "which in the wink of an eye, change from a wild rush to a mad rout, from an orgy of blind confidence to a panic of desperate fear."
Prices veer from inflation to deflation.
And in times of dropping prices, people put off purchases as long as possible to save money, hoping prices will go even lower, while in times of rising prices, people try to save money by buying as fast as possible, hoping to buy before prices go higher.
As well, savings take away from purchasing power, making available purchasing power to be less than enough to buy the society's production.
In times of lack of purchasing power, those with goods that must be sold (farmers' production of food) and those who are pressed by financial needs suffer through having to sell at low prices....
Summing Up ...the living standards of all classes are constantly being advanced without increase in the total volume of circulation but simply through the improved utility of the new goods and services that replace the old...
Society could get along very well for a long time if only individual incomes were equitably distributed....
Most communities are today taxed to the limit to meet the obligation imposed on them by their grandfathers who were guilty of some paternal presumption in thus making specific provision for the grandchildren beyond the requirements of their own generation. These obligations commonly are double the actual costs originally incurred.
Until the saturation point is reached, individual and corporations spend more than their income. By spending borrowed funds, they lose as much as 50 percent of their purchasing power.
In boom-times, the acceleration of spending, made possible through the mortgaging of future incomes, has exercised an important influence on industry. Rapidly increasing demand has induced a corresponding acceleration in all lines of production...
And now that the saturation point has been reached, and spending is necessarily limited to actual incomes, Industry finds itself overloaded with superfluous industrial equipment...
That is the piled-up debt Major Douglas is so much alarmed about, and there is the root cause of the Great Depression, in the inevitable ending of the Great Expansion." (April 30, 1935, PAA 70.158, file 55) "With a managed Provincial Currency, backed by the Available Dominion Currency based on Export income without Issuing Social Dividends and Without Calling in Question the Exchange Value of Provincial Currency,
The Province of Alberta Could..." 1. Abolish Poverty and minimize Unemployment 2. Revive Agricultural prosperity 3. Finance local industries with cheap credit 4. Finance its social services without borrowing 5. Reduce its dependence on Imported products 6. Begin to Reduce its Public Debt. The Province of Alberta Could do this By: 1. Establishing a Government-owned provincial bank (Bank of Alberta) 2. Organize a system of regulated-price stores. Sell Made-In-Alberta goods at a discount.... cost-prices to be determined by an agreed rational formula (Douglas Plan to prevent price-inflation) 3. The limit of the government's license to utter additional provincial currency to be defined as the limit of absorption, or the saturation point, of home consumption of home products. The application of available Dominion currency to the purchase of imported goods to be regulated by a graded luxury sales - a tax on imported consumer goods payable in Dominion currency and sufficient to finance necessary government expenditures on imported goods and to regulate the demand for Dominion currency in exchange for provincial currency. [Alberta did - and does - have right to print its own currency. Heck, if Canadian Tire can print its own money, then surely a province can. And I am not alone in this opinion.] 4. Consolidate the marketing board for agricultural products destined for export in a Government department. 5. To re-absorb the unemployed.
As a first step, organize public works projects issuing wages in provincial currency exchangeable on demand for Dominion currency at any branch of Bank of Alberta. The nature of these projects should be such as to provide jobs for men at their own trade as far as possible, and one of these having regard to the revival of agricultural activities that would necessarily result from the new policy should be a system of model farm projects to address the notable increase in farm produce - not so much plain bread, which people get enough of, but cake, processed cereals made in Alberta, and meat, poultry and dairy products.... and a back-to-the-land movement on the part of many of the unemployed....
local production of workboots, harness and of woolen goods, especially blankets, would be promoted.
"We have been too long content, as a primitive community, to dig out our natural resources and export them in their raw condition, for other communities to elaborate [process] at exorbitant charges." 6. [not copied] 7. Credit at cost for industrial purposes 8. As profits grow, surplus currency would accumulate. The currency cost the government practically nothing to produce and therefore could be destroyed at a like cost...
The real cost involved is the cost of the human effort brought into action by the sanction of the people expressed through the people's money. 9. The transfer of the burden of current public and social services from extraneous borrowing to current taxation, where it belongs.
An intelligent democracy must refrain in its own control the final say-so as to all social services; but it should not have to pay more for any service than its actual cost in labour and materials.
Under present fiscal policies, it has to pay twice the actual cost, merely because it has been fooled into delegating its money-power to private exploiters who achieve their ends by keeping money scarce and cornering the available supplies in order to make a rake-off, through unearned interest charges, from public taxation. 10. After putting the unemployed back to work and making provision for all unemployables and casual unemployment, beside boosting the sale of local farm products,
the next and last step is to pay all wages and salaries of public and social service, municipal and provincial, in provincial currency and tax back the amount involved through a provincial service tax payable in provincial currency so graded as still further to reduce the spread between higher and lower incomes to reasonable dimensions... the tax can be used to correct mal-distribution of incomes by placing the burden of taxation on the shoulders best able to bear it. 11. The level of the levy of the luxury tax payable in Dominion currency, and the level of social services that it pays for, can be changed by the government overtime. It will realize that the provision of new social services can only be paid by "cutting into the luxury expenditures of the well-to-do. The necessary public expenditure must always take precedence over private luxury.
The only debatable question is as to the necessity of the service - hardly a novel issue." 12. Monetary theory of the proposal is that - as for grain, the main source of provincial export income - elevator companies, backed by banks and government guarantees, take delivery and discount the export price in cash payments to the farmers.
These funds circulate around the province with the velocity proper to provincial business, dribbling out of provincial circulation more or less continuously as it is applied to the purchase of imported goods." (William Wallace, July 20, 1935, PAA 70.158, file 55. There were six more numbered items, not mentioned here, but they seem to be debate points and explanations of points of monetary process.)
In "Why People are Poor in Alberta", he says that "Price inflation does not reduce purchasing-power as a whole - it merely transfers purchasing-power from buyers to sellers, enriching the sellers at the expense of the buyers and that includes producers as well, since they are the primary sellers...
if tomorrow wages and prices were re-adjusted so as to represent an equitable distribution of the products of industry to all consumers, but without providing for continuous price control, it would not be long before the present inequitable distribution of purchasing power was restored by price-inflation, and the situation would exhibit all the well-known features of the so-called purchasing power deficiency. There would be no deficiency of purchasing-power on the whole, but it would be as inequitably distributed as now, favouring sellers at the expense of buyers. Three important conclusions emerge from the foregoing argument: 1. that the people of the province as a whole, are living far below the standard to which their natural resources, industry and skill entitle them not because they are unable or unwilling to produce as much as they are able and willing to consume but because the existing monetary sanctions that regulate consumption and promote production are inadequate for the purpose
2. that the inadequacy of these monetary sanction relates primarily to the existing supply of currency, which is derived almost entirely from export business and has no direct relativity to the possibilities of local self-support, and
3. that no currency system can continue to function equitably unless it is associated with an adequate system of price-control based on the actual costs of production, since without price control purchasing power inevitably drifts from buyers to sellers." In "Provincial Price-Control Ultra Vires?", Wallace wrote that "the working classes at length realize that their efforts to achieve higher wages are more or less futile without price-stabilization since the upward movement of price, which inevitably follows, offsets the advantage gained. The farmers too have learned that their prices fall faster and farther than any others when depressions set in and are the last to recover in the return to normalcy while they themselves are most serious sufferers from the extravagant price-spreads that result." He wrote that there was a difference between reform of the control of money-power and price control.
"What do we as citizens of the dominion expect to get out of our citizenship? In the main, three things: 1. Greater ease in the acquisition of personal property 2. A greater volume and variety of usable personal property 3. Greater security in the enjoyment of our personal property, greater, that is, than if we lived in isolated freedom. The rights of personal property are based on the elementary principle of human justice, that what a man makes by his own effort is his personal property and can only be justly transferred to another with his assent and on his own terms. A seller cannot be forced to part with his wares without his say-so, and too the buyer is not bound to accept the seller's terms.
Price-control sets the price that sellers can sell at and is tantamount to tyranny. He says the Canadian Railway Board does not set the price of a private seller - the transcontinental lines are supported and guaranteed by the government so the Board represents the capital-interest of the nation. and, as they operate as a near-monopoly, with little other option for buyers, the Railway Board represents the consumer-interest of the nation....
As banking processes are ultra vires the provincial governments, it is difficult to see how the province could effectually control prices. although the establishment of a provincial bank might serve of course. Today's government-owned Alberta Treasury Branches (banks in other words) show that a provincial bank is possible.]
"The ABC of Social Credit, 2. Alienation of the Public Domain" Society's real concern is neither with the land, nor with the raw materials nor yet with the ownership of these things, save in so far as the effective assignment of them contributes to the material welfare of the her citizens.
Neither is Society immediately concerned with the means and instruments whereby Industry produces the things that constitute the daily likelihood of Society, but directly only with the adequate distribution of the products themselves. To accomplish this, it is necessary only for the society to have such an equity in them as would be sufficient to prevent miscarriage and injustice in the distribution of the products. Public equities the arguments advanced in support of these public equities mainly tend to confirm the presumption that underly the theories and plans proposed by Major Douglas, to whom belongs the honour of first directing attention to this hitherto latent element of public credit, which he distinguishes as Social Credit. The effective application of SC, so as to achieve a more equitable distribution of the products of industry and at least begin to resolve the enigma of poverty in the midst of plenty, is in part a matter of proper monetization." (PAA 70.158, file 55)
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