Some Comments on Social Credit

In China, the social credit system (SCS) is a national reputation system that rates the trustworthiness of individuals, businesses, and government entities.  The idea is to regulate social behavior and ensure compliance with laws and regulations.  The SCS assigns a score to each entity, with higher scores leading to more benefits and lower scores leading to more penalties.  High scores can lead to tax breaks, jumping the public housing queue, and easier access to credit.  Low scores can lead to denial of licenses and permits, exclusion from booking flights or high-speed train tickets, and restricted access to public services . . . all based on some bureaucrat’s idea of how good a person you are.  It’s a fun and easy way to have your life ruined.

Was Henry George a Socialist?

In a recent email, someone stated, “Henry George was definitely NOT a Socialist.  Quite the contrary.  He wanted to untax labour and capital, treat land rents as the source of public revenue and restore the mediaeval system of financing the Crown through land rents.”

“Christianity in Action”?

We’ve never been able to track down the original source of it, but adherents of Major Douglas’s version of “social credit” claim that Douglas declared that it is “Christianity in action.”  If he did, indeed, say it (and we’re not doubting it, just saying that we couldn’t find the source), it is fully consistent with what we do know about social credit and its antecedents in “the New Christianity.”

Feudalism v. Distributism

Someone asked us recently whether we thought distributism and feudalism are pretty much the same thing.  Off the top of our head (or is that “heads”?) our first response is “no.”  After all, feudalism meant that most (if not all) land was “public” land, and people “held” the land in return for specified service(s) to the State, usually military service.  Land was not private property.

A Brief Discourse on Social Credit, VIII: The Analysis, Part Two

Last Thursday we looked at some of the flaws in Major Douglas’s social credit proposal, e.g., the wrong definition of money and abolition of private property by taking away the usufruct, to say nothing of allowing politicians to avoid accountability for their actions.  After all, is it really coincidental that as more and more of the government’s budget consists of money created by emitting bills of credit instead of tax revenues, the number of programs that go contrary to the fundamental beliefs of most people have proliferated?

A Brief Discourse on Social Credit, III: What the Social Crediters Say

One of the problems we’ve encountered with discussing the various types of socialism is that the natural tendency of such groups to splinter, reform, separate, and regroup makes tracing their genealogy a little confusing.  When you toss in the habit of “re-editing the dictionary” so that people become even more confused by the constant changes in meaning of fundamental terms, and the reliance on assertion and ad hominem logical fallacies, it’s no wonder why so many people end up being attracted to socialism.  Not knowing what it is, they figure it has to be better than anything they can actually understand.

A Brief Discourse on Social Credit, II: What the Experts Say

Yesterday we declared we were more than a little baffled when attempting to define “social credit” briefly and accurately.  Today we are going to see if anybody else has done any better — confining ourselves to experts who seem to have a bit more credibility than we do.  Not that we necessarily agree with these experts, but others might.  We’re only trying to dig down and uncover the truth in a way ordinary people can understand.

A Brief Discourse on Social Credit, I: What IS “Social Credit”?

Recently we received an email from one of our numerous fans and followers asking us to comment on a couple of articles covering “social credit” he had seen on a distributist website.  He had seen us mention social credit a number of times, but we did not really go into what it is, or explain in any depth why we classify it among the seemingly countless varieties of socialism with which the modern world is afflicted.