Economic theory

Douglas disagreed with classical economists such as Adam Smith and David Ricardo who divided the factors of production into land, labour andcapital. He also disagreed with Karl Marx who claimed that labour created all wealth. Douglas believed the “cultural inheritance of society” was the primary factor in production. Cultural inheritance is defined as the knowledge, technique and processes that have been handed down to us incrementally from the origins of civilization. Consequently, mankind does not have to keep “reinventing the wheel”. “We are merely the administrators of that cultural inheritance, and to that extent the cultural inheritance is the property of all of us, without exception.”^[7]

Closely associated with the concept of our cultural inheritance is the Social Credit theory of economic sabotage. While Douglas believed the cultural heritage factor of production is primary in increasing wealth, he also believed that economic sabotage is the primary factor decreasing it. The word wealth derives from the Old English word wela, or "well-being", and Douglas believed that all production should increase personal well-being. Therefore, production that does not directly increase personal well-being is waste, or economic sabotage.

"The economic effect of charging all the waste in industry to the consumer so curtails his purchasing power that an increasing percentage of the product of industry must be exported. The effect of this on the worker is that he has to do many times the amount of work which should be necessary to keep him in the highest standard of living, as a result of an artificial inducement to produce things he does not want, which he cannot buy, and which are of no use to the attainment of his internal standard of well-being."^[8]

By modern methods of accounting, the consumer is forced to pay for all the costs of production, including waste. The economic effect of charging the consumer with all waste in industry is that the consumer is forced to do much more work than is necessary. Douglas believed that wasted effort could be directly linked to confusion in regards to the purpose of the economic system, and the belief that the economic system exists to provide employment in order to distribute income.

"But it may be advisable to glance at some of the proximate causes operating to reduce the return for effort ; and to realise the origin of most of the specific instances, it must be borne in mind that the existing economic system distributes goods and services through the same agency which induces goods and services, i.e., payment for work in progress. In other words, if production stops, distribution stops, and, as a consequence, a clear incentive exists to produce useless or superfluous articles in order that useful commodities already existing may be distributed. This perfectly simple reason is the explanation of the increasing necessity of what has come to be called economic sabotage ; the colossal waste of effort which goes on in every walk of life quite unobserved by the majority of people because they are so familiar with it ; a waste which yet so over-taxed the ingenuity of society to extend it that the climax of war only occurred in the moment when a culminating exhibition of organised sabotage was necessary to preserve the system from spontaneous combustion."^[9]

Douglas claimed there were three possible policy alternatives with respect to the industrial/economic system:

"1. The first of these is that it is a disguised Government, of which the primary, though admittedly not the only, object is to impose upon the world a system of thought and action. 2. The second alternative has a certain similarity to the first, but is simpler. It assumes that the primary objective of the industrial system is the provision of employment. 3. And the third, which is essentially simpler still, in fact, so simple that it appears entirely unintelligible to the majority, is that the object of the industrial system is merely to provide goods and services."^[10]

Douglas believed that it was the third policy alternative upon which an industrial system should be based, but confusion of thought has allowed the industrial system to be governed by the first two objectives. Often, people confuse the second and third objectives of an economic system, and are concerned with the levels of unemployment within the economy. However, if the purpose of our economic system is to deliver the maximum amount of goods and services with the least amount of effort, then the ability to deliver goods and services with the least amount of employment is actually desirable. Unemployment is a logical consequence of machines replacing labour in the productive process, and any attempt to reverse this process through policies designed to attain full employment directly sabotages our cultural inheritance. Douglas believed that the people displaced from the industrial system through the process of mechanization should still have the ability to consume the fruits of the system, because we are all inheritors of the cultural inheritance, and his proposal for a national dividend is directly related to this belief.