An Epidemic. Dangerously sick: the Pound, the Franc, the Dollar

But the diet is enjoined on the Citizens

Crack-brained Doctors: the Ministers of Finance

Vigorous production. Sick currencies. Everything at sea

Measures aimed to rescue the money traffickers

The Pound

            For several months by now the Britons have been subjected by their Government to a regime of austerity. Why? — the aim is to rescue the pound, they were told.

            The pound is in England the legal tender unit — just as the canadian dollar is in Canada, the french franc in France, the lira in Italy, the mark in Germany, and so on.

            The pound is sick. Wilson's Government remains by her bed-head, with its expert the Chancellor of the Exchequer leaning over the sick one. She must be saved. And in order to save her, all the citizens of the country are called on, not to novenas of prayers, but to months of austerity, may be years of austerity, for the illness keeps growing worse.

            Which austerities? — Reducing their standard of living. The doctor sees that this is done with an income tax rise. With higher tariffs against imports, against goods entering the coutry. What does not enter the country can certainly not reach any home in the country. With measures egging on to export, to take goods out of the country. What leaves the country can no longer enter homes of the country.

            It is the pound that is sick, but it is on the Britons, not on the sick pound, that a diet is enjoined. One may wonder if the physician is not crackbrained a bit.

            The Franc

            But come along! This is not peculiar to Great Britain. The condition is the same in France. The franc has been shaken, with spasms. A corps of doctors — say the Ministers of Finance, for the sake of their identity have gathered from various countries, and they examined the case. Because when sick of such lineage belong to powerful countries, if the illness of one of them is prolonged, grows worse, its kin of all other countries may before similarly affected, and this could turn out to a world-wide illness. A world-wide crisis that might prove unresolvable but by a world war, as was the case in the thirties.

            Well, the corps of physicians in consultation at Bonn recommended to treat the patient the franc, through devaluation, as Wilson had done the sterling pound. But in an outburst of pricked pride, De Gaulle shouted to the whole French nation: Not that affront! France can patriotically take an austerity cure without any surgical operation on the sick franc. At bottom, is it not the same medicine as in England: treating the Frenchmen, subjecting them to diet, because their franc is ill?

            An Epidemic

            But hasn't an epidemic begun ? Is it not in almost every country that the Government warns the people that they must face measures of austerity ? Rises of income tax and curtailment of services. Because their currency is sick or in danger of becoming so. Have not the ministers of Finance of the ten richest countries met again more recently ? In Geneva, this time, for the purpose of examining the case of what they call the international currencies. Thus of every currency ... at least those of the free world, because in the Soviet world measures of austerity are chronic.

            Does our Canada, our province, escape the general disease? But, not at all! Ottawa makes us aware of it. Quebec makes us aware of it. Toronto makes you aware... And journalists do their utmost to comfort us, by telling us that at least, our Governments are frank enough nowadays — they weren't before? — to explain clearly to us the predicaments, even if disagreeable. Because, they also assert, people can stand the shock and take the treatment in good part.

            Care is taken, besides, that every nation shall realize that it is its own fault, if its currency is sick. It is because the people lived beyond their means. That old formula is often revived by our ministers of finance, when they turn over, in their minds, schemes to puncture the citizens' wallets. But whether that formula is correct, this we may call in question.

            A preposterous charge

            On what do people live? — On products and services. On bread, on clothes. On houses to lodge in. On medecine to be cured with. On roads and means of transport to move about, etc., etc.

Have those goods become so difficult to produce, that now we must learn to do without them?

            I have before my eyes an article signed Jacques Duboin, in the September 1968 issue of "La Grande Relève", prepared after De Gaulle's call to save the franc through austerity. Mr. Duboin brings forward statistics taken from "Le Parisien Libéré" of July 25th, showing the remarkable progress made in agricultural production : 143 million quintals of wheat, for 127 last year ; 9 millions quintals of potatoes for 8.9 ; 576 millions tons of peaches, for 417 ; more butter and more milk then ever ; an abundance of wine exceeding the peak year 1962. "La France regorge de tout" ("France is glutted with everything") was the title in "Le Parisien Libéré" of last July 25th. De Gaulle himself declares that; since the war, French industry has enlarged to three times its pre-war output ; and that agricultural production increased twofold while it employs smaller manpower.

            Was not Jacques Duboin justified in entitling his own article : "Une cure d'austérité est-elle vraiment nécessaire ?" ("Is an austerity cure of real necessity ?")

            I mentioned France, because I had those pages before my eyes. But the same holds true in respect of any of our developed countries. And it is again in every one of our developed countries, that people are warned this way: You have lived beyond your means? If indeed the whole world has lived beyond its means, on what ever did it live? Did it fetch its food, its clothes, its goods and services of every kind in the moon? Or where else?

            Where parts are reversed

            But of course, it is financial means that are referred to by ministers anxious about the disease of the great currencies. They mean that we live beyond our financial means; that we live on existing goods, yes, but are running into debt, as we heap up public and private debts in order to enjoy public services and the private goods we consume.

            As it works similarly everywhere, the richest country in the world, the United States, being the country with the highest public and private debts, this means that the whole world is running into debt in order to live. Droll enough, since all the things on which the inhabitants of the earth live, are either natural or produced by the inhabitants of the earth themselves. How is it ever possible, that the world may be indebted for the goods that itself has produced? And why need it be punished for having lived beyond its means, whereas as a matter of fact it lives on its own production?

            Production is stout in all countries. It is the currencies that are sick. Now, the guardians of the common good, whom we elect and pay that they may look after the good of the community, try to lower, what is stout down to the level of what is sick.

            In that is summarized all the disorder that exists in the economic system: it places the producing system under control of the financial system, instead of making the financial system servant of the producing system. And it regulates distribution of goods according to sufficiency or lack or money, instead of making money a pliable tool yielding to both the consumers' needs and the physical possibilities that exist to answer those needs.

            The fact money is wanting when displayed goods are facing needs, is indicative of an inaccurate, unhealthy money system. That our men of government subject the conditions of living of persons and families to decisions of such a wrong system, is surely suggestive of considering them as lunatics.

            All at sea

            "All at sea", this idiom summarizes most properly the condition of our economic — and furthermore our politics too — where decisions must be weighed up in terms of money.

            The economic system has lost its bearings. It no longer knows what is its peculiar aim, the goal for which it exists. Why production? Why industry? Why employment? Why the full-employment policy?

            The industrialist will tell you that he produces in order to "make money", to achieve profits. There is no doubt that he feels an interest in getting buyers for his products, but always with the mere purpose of "making money" by the sale of his goods. And if he does not succeed in making money, he quits, even if there are still consumers in need of his products. Consumers without money to pay cannot interest him. All his decisions are ruled by his concern for money.

The employee will tell you that he works for his salary, for money. There is no doubt that he needs money, to live. But if he is able to choose between a, job that makes a living for himself and his family, and another job that pays twofold, he will choose the second job, even if the latter goes to put forth products that are useless or much less useful to the community.

            The politician — the sociologist too — will tell you that capitalists should be invited to set up new industries in order to supply individuals with jobs. Between a manufacture that would employ ten men and another one that would employ one hundred men, the second will be preferred, even if not a single family in the country needs its product, even if it produces killing devices that — thanks to God ! — will have to be renewed before being used. It' is not the product that is considered important, but the employment provided. And yet, logically, the most perfect industry would surely be that which could simultaneously achieve a flow of useful goods and yet let everyone use his time in his own way. But one must present money to obtain products not made by himself, that is the matter. Now, by virtue of financial rules held supreme, sacred, inviolable, one's income is tied down to one's job in the producing system. Therefore, ... Thus it is that the full-employment policy is boosted everywhere; in a countersense of technological progress which makes human labour less and less required for production processes.

            When production abounds with less employment, the no-employment-no-income system leads to invent new products and create new needs by means of mass advertising.

This is feeding materialism. And nevertheless, moralists agree with that full-employment policy, that everybody should have a job — not a free job, but hired labour for money. Moralist who also lost their bearings, because they submit to rules of a system that causes the best fitted to lose their bearings in every field and at every level.

            The obstinacy the system shows in binding the right to live to employment, in spite of progress, leads to paradoxical acknowledgements of facts. As Marcel Dieudonne, another member of the staff of "La Grande Relève", spiritedly wrote in October 1967:

            "This must be admitted, natural disasters and social ills are economical blessings.

"The exodus of a population, an earthquake, a conflagration, flood, hurricane, riot, war, illness accident, etc., are economical blessings the more efficacious as the havoc they work is the more important. The reason is, they give men numerous occasions to earn money, which is the goal of the activity of every individual in our economy where money needs be earned to supply a living.

            "For instance, physicians earn money by attending sick persons and victims of accidents. The more numerous the patients, the more do the doctors earn money. Their interest therefore lies in this, that there be many sick and injured.

"Without illness and accidents from work or travel, what would become of the hundreds of thousand physicians, surgeons, dentists, druggists, medical assistants and secretaries, manufacturers of drugs or devices for surgery or prosthesis, employees of the health department or social welfare or insurance companies, etc. ? If illness would happen to be conquered, society would have to create it anew in order to supply the hundreds of thousand persons, who live on it with opportunities to make money again,

being unable to find for them new jobs in the devil knows which professional lines, all of these being copiously provided with personnel.

            "Hundreds of thousands individuals make their living out of alcoholism; 80,000, out of prostitution; 30,000, out of tierce, national lottery and casinos; 500,000, out of apprenticeship in the art of killing and destroying. Throughout the world, 100 million wage-earners, all of them pacifists, are making equipments, uniforms, armaments, the use of which will be to kill other men, brethren in Jesus. The devil with the social feature of such jobs! The devil with the harm done to other people, as long as is reached the goal of everyone's and all's economical activity: earning money. A fig for morals, one has to live!

            "Useful wage-earning jobs are increasingly being eliminated by automation and abundance, the modern fruit of technics in accelerated progress. Natural disasters and social ills become the more and more indispensable auxiliaries of our economy in which every individual must necessarily earn something (wage or profit) if he wants to live. War is the most effectual of those auxiliaries, since it works the most extensive destructions."

Another indication of the inconsistency to be found in the system is: prices steadily grow which causes products to become more difficult to be had, whereas increasing plenty and massive flow of goods should produce the opposite result. Can one ever find it normal, that prices increase continually, facing a production more and easier to achieve? The reason is, prices belong to the financial bearing of production, and when indeed finance is at variance with reality, the result cannot be very logical.

            That unceasing price inflation, the fruit of a wrong and out of order money system, saps the value of thrift that just the same system preaches and preaches again so insistently.

But in fact, does the saving of money retain any valuable significance from a merely economic point of view? Would saving be considered as important as it is considered now, if the money system would be conformable to reality?

            Let a wise man or a soul-pastor urge: "Fix a limit to your material needs. Your virtue will profit by that self-restraint. It will promote your spiritual growth. You will succeed more easily in making yourself free in order to do others some good. The money that you will spare this way will also enable you to help other people". That speech is right and wise. But when the power to buy is taxed in order to save the dollar, the pound or the franc, the matter is no longer the salvation of souls, but the preservation of dirty traffics in the hands of money-traffickers.

            And is there any meaning when we are told: "Save, spare money in order not to go hungry in your old age”? . . . The bread I eat to-day is made from wheat that is present to-day. In forty years, say, will not out country be able as it does to-day to grow enough wheat to make bread enough for everyone? Shall I, in that future 40 years ahead, and in order then to live, subsist on the money that I am saving to-day, or on bread made from wheat grown in 40 years from now? If one answers me that I shall lack money to pay for the bread, this only means that in forty years from now, people will still be submitted to a money system at variance with the facts of production. Can one seriously fancy that the folly of the present system may last so long?

            Treatment

            A lot of other aspects of our economics, and of our politics too, reveal how absurd and noxious it is to submit to an inconsistent monetary system which, openly acknowledged as sick, is moreover harmful and criminal. Are not our national and provincial men of Government, our municipal officials and school-board directors, and various other men of high responsibility, continually harried by merely financial problems to such a point as to catch heart diseases or brain-fags? Whereas so wonderful realities, that are quarantined all round, could make their tasks so easy and so beneficial to both their own personalities and those of the persons under their administrations.

It is a more wholesome climate that your seriously diseased need, honourable Ministers. Turn the financial system into an exact expression, in numerals, of the plain realities, of the huge modern possibilities to produce, and then your currencies will be as healthy, as vigorous and as stout as those very realities. A crowd of problems will vanish. The treatment lies within your reach: enforce the Social Credit proposals on finance. Yourself will be the better for it, and all the people with you.

Louis Even