A few years ago, the Eastbourne (England) Social Credit League had the privilege of hearing an address from Mr. Council Feather of Southend. Mr. Feather, who is a Fellow of the Institute of Chartered Accountants, chose as the title for his address, "Is Taxation Necessary?". He pointed out that, while taxation might be a necessity and unavoidable in a primitive society, the case was very different under modern conditions. Yet taxation was one of those things which are accepted as inevitable, irrefutable, and universally necessary. People grumble about it, but hardly anyone stops to question whether it is really necessary.
It had been left to C: H. Douglas and a few others to question the whole assumption. Douglas has written:
"Modern taxation is legalised robbery, and it is none the less robbery because it is effected through the medium of a political democracy which is made an accessory by giving it an insignificant share in the loot." (Warning Democracy, p. 61).
The fact is that taxation not only could be abolished with great benefit to everybody, but if it is not abolished and goes on the way it has been going on, the populations of the world are going to suffer a decline, in spite of all the material progress in other ways.
In a primitive society, in which everything is produced by manual labour, the total production is probably just enough to go round, and it is necessary to take some of it from the producers and give it to those engaged in administration and in defending the others. But under modern conditions, very much the greater part of production is done by electric and other power and by machines. Such production obviously does not all belong to the machine-minders, and in any case could not be consumed by them. Neither can the machines themselves consume what they helped to produce. There is thus clearly a very large balance available for the administrators, the defenders, and other non-producers. It is therefore only a question of spreading the product over both producers and non-producers by ensuring that there is the requisite amount of money in the pockets of both to enable them to pay the prices of it. There would be no need for taxation.
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Why then is taxation imposed? — Following his above quoted statement, Major. Douglas, the founder of Social Credit adds:
"But I do not think that robbery is its primary object. I think policy is, much more than mere gain, its objective... I have come to the conclusion that we are witnessing a gigantic attempt, directed from sources which have no nationality, to dispossess a defective democracy and to substitute a dictatorship of Finance for it." (Ibid., pp. 61-62.)
So the real object of taxation is to dispossess democracy and substitute a dictatorship of finance for it, — to keep us all poor and so more amenable to submit to the will of the financial dictators.
Taxation imposed on producers increases prices; and taxation imposed on the buying public depletes purchasing power.
There is nothing mysterious about our heavy taxation and rising prices. Any business which continually increases its overdraft, must devote increasingly large amounts of its earnings in the repayment of debt and interest thereon, and puts its prices up in the attempt to do so. The whole nation is in this position.
Expansion is the naural order of progress, and the expansion of real wealth necessitates also the expansion of the money supply. But because of the peculiar system under which we live, any expansion of money means expansion of debt. The nation does not obtain the money it needs from abroad. It is created within the country and is marked up as a debt owing by the community to the banking system. To bring additional money into existence to correspond with increased production is natural and necessary; but to tax the people in order to pay it back with interest, as if it had been lent by someone who had it before, is nothing less than a swindle. Why do our administrators and the public put up with it and the taxation it involves?
(From "Eastbourne Social Crediter")