Social Credit - Literary Figures in Social Credit

Literary Figures in Social Credit

As lack of finance has been a constant impediment to the development of the arts and literature, the concept of economic democracy through Social Credit had immediate appeal in literary circles. Names associated with Social Credit include C.M. Grieve, Charlie Chaplin, William Carlos Williams, Ezra Pound, T. S. Eliot, Herbert Read, Aldous Huxley, Storm Jameson, Eimar O’Duffy, Sybil Thorndyke, Bonamy Dobrée, Eric de Maré and the American publisher James Laughlin. Hilaire Belloc and GK Chesterton espoused similar ideas. In 1933 Eimar O’Duffy published Asses in Clover, a science fiction fantasy exploration of Social Credit themes. His Social Credit economics book Life and Money: Being a Critical Examination of the Principles and Practice of Orthodox Economics with A Practical Scheme to End the Muddle it has made of our Civilisation, was endorsed by Douglas.

Robert A. Heinlein described a Social Credit economy in his posthumously-published first novel, For Us, The Living: A Comedy of Customs, and his Beyond This Horizon describes a similar system in less detail. In Heinlein's future society, government is not funded by taxation. Instead, government controls the currency and prevents inflation by providing a price rebate to participating business and a guaranteed income to every citizen.

In his novel The Trick Top Hat, part of his Schrödinger's Cat Trilogy, Robert Anton Wilson described the implementation by the President of an alternate future United States of an altered form of Social Credit, in which the government issues a National Dividend to all citizens in the form of "trade aids," which can be spent like money but which cannot be lent at interest (in order to mollify the banking industry) and which eventually expire (to prevent inflation and hoarding).

More recently, Richard C. Cook, an analyst for the U.S. Civil Service Commission, Food and Drug Administration, NASA, the U.S. Treasury Department, and author of the books Challenger Revealed and We Hold These Truths, has written several articles relating to Social Credit and monetary reform at Global Research, an independent research and media group of writers, scholars, journalists and activists. Frances Hutchinson, Chairperson of the Social Credit Secretariat, has co-authored, with Brian Burkitt, a book entitled The Political Economy of Social Credit and Guild Socialism.