Here are excerpts from a talk given by Clifford Hugh Douglas in November 1934 on the BBC (British Broadcasting Corporation):
The technical definition of war is any action taken to impose your will upon an enemy or to prevent him from imposing his will upon you. You will, I think, recognize at once that this definition of war makes the motive, rather than the method (Editor's note: tariffs or armies), the important matter to consider.
I suppose most statesmen at the present time would agree that their primary problem is to increase employment and to induce trade prosperity for their own nationals and there are few of them who would not add that the shortest way to achieve this would be to capture foreign markets. Once this, the common theory of international trade is assumed, we have I believe set our feet upon a road whose only end is war.
The use of the word capture indicates a desire to take away from the inhabitants of some other country something with which they, being unable also under present conditions to be prosperous without general employment, do not desire to part vet is endeavoring to impose your will upon an adversary and his economic war. And economic war has always ultimately resulted in military war and probably always will.
Now, so long as we are prepared to agree firstly that the removal of industrial unemployment is the primary object of statesmanship and secondly that the capture of foreign markets is the shortest path to the attainment of this objective, we have the primary economic irritant to military war always with us and moreover we have it in an accelerating rate of growth because production is expanding through the use of power machinery and undeveloped markets into which surplus can be poured are contracting.
Any village which has two grocer shops each competing for an insufficient and decreasing amount of business while continually enlarging its premises is a working demonstration of the economic causes of war, is in fact itself at war by economic methods…
If one of the village grocers captures the whole of the other grocer's business the second grocer and his employees will suffer, or if it remains true that if one nation captures the whole of another nation's trade, the population of the second nation will be unemployed and being unemployed they will suffer also.
To know therefore whether war is inevitable we have to know whether firstly there is enough real wealth—not money but goods and services—available to keep the whole population in Comfort without the whole of a population being employed, and secondly, if this is so, what it is that prevents this wealth from being distributed?
In regard to the first question, I believe there can be no doubt as to the answer. We are all beginning to be familiar with the phrase poverty amidst plenty and it is generally admitted that the crisis of the past four or five years has been a crisis of surplus, and not a crisis of scarcity yet during that crisis poverty has been widely extended because unemployment has been widely extended so that we have experimental evidence that full employment is not necessary to produce the wealth that we require, it is only necessary to the end that we may be able to distribute wages, quite a different matter.
In regard to the second question therefore, we know that it is lack of money in the hands of individuals to enable them to buy the wealth which is available, and not the lack of available goods.
So that it is not too much to say that the causes of War and the causes of poverty amidst plenty are the same and they may be found in the monetary and wage system and that broadly speaking the cure for poverty and the beginnings of the cure for war can be found in a simple rectification of the money system.
This rectification must, I think, take the form of a national dividend, so that while there is real wealth to be distributed, nobody should lack for want of money with which to buy the real wealth…
The practical effect of a national dividend would be firstly to provide a secure source of income to individuals which, though it might be desirable to augment it by work when obtainable, would nevertheless provide all the necessary purchasing par to maintain self-respect and health. By providing a steady demand upon our producing system it would go a long way towards stabilizing business conditions and would assure producers of a constant and home market for their goods.
We already have the beginnings of such a system in our various pension schemes and unemployment insurance but the defect for the moment of these is that they are put forward in connection with schemes of taxation which go a long way towards neutralizing that beneficial effect. While this is inevitable under our present monetary system, it is far from being inevitable when the essentially public nature of the monetary system receives the recognition which is its due but is not yet granted to it by our bankers.
Clifford Hugh Douglas
In short, we can conclude with Douglas: As long as nations need to fight to sell their surpluses to other peoples, trade wars will continue. But if everyone can afford to buy what is produced, then international trade becomes a voluntary and equitable exchange, not a struggle for economic survival. The national dividend is not a utopia, it's a necessity. It is, in fact, the only real alternative to war.
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