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What do you think of Social Credit (the economic system) (en.wikipedia.org)

submitted 2 weeks ago* (last edited 2 weeks ago) by NotSteve_@lemmy.ca to c/asklemmy@lemmy.ml

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Social credit is a distributive philosophy of political economy developed in the 1920s and 1930s by C. H. Douglas. Douglas attributed economic downturns to discrepancies between the cost of goods and the compensation of the workers who made them. To combat what he saw as a chronic deficiency of purchasing power in the economy, Douglas prescribed government intervention in the form of the issuance of debt-free money directly to consumers or producers (if they sold their product below cost to consumers) in order to combat such discrepancy.

(From the wiki page)

previous (possibly incorrect) ChatGPT summary

Social Credit is an economic theory by C.H. Douglas that aims to fix a fundamental problem: the total cost of producing goods and services is always greater than the money people have to buy them. To solve this, Social Credit proposes a National Dividend, a regular payment given to all citizens to boost their purchasing power, and a Compensated Price Mechanism, which reduces prices so consumers can afford more while producers still make a profit. The idea is to ensure that the economy works for everyone by closing the gap between what people earn and what they need to spend, without relying on debt or heavy government control.

Stumbled onto this randomly and I find it interesting and rarely talked about. It almost seems like a capitalistic approach to communism which I had no idea existed. The oddest thing about it to me is that most parties advocating for it were highly religious and right wing. On the surface, it seems fairly progressive and left leaning to me though.

What are your thoughts?

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[–] iii@mander.xyz 6 points 2 weeks ago (1 children)

this "free" credit come from

It can come from issueing new currency. The cost of that is inflation.

cost to manufacture is always more than what people have

That's what I'm wonder about mostly. This statement doesn't occur in the wikipedia page, and seems unsubstantiated. A human or LLM hallucination.

[–] NotSteve_@lemmy.ca 2 points 2 weeks ago

You're right, I'll see if I can find a better (human written) summary. Asked ChatGPT for this one since I don't understand it well enough to write one myself and I didn't want to paste the whole wikipedia page in.