 We produce more in value than we are automatically given in income. We can monetize the difference, the profit, and distribute it to the shareholders as a type of dividend. Well, Oliver, I want to thank you for coming on the show. Actually, the reason why you're on is Floyd connected you and I a couple of months ago, and I had Floyd, if you guys missed a couple episodes, we had a really interesting episode and a lot of interesting feedback. It seems to be kind of like a polar reaction to feedback. We had an episode on UBI, and there's a group of people that loved it. There's a group of people that hate it. It's always interesting when you have a polarity. I always say when you have a polar reaction, you're onto something. You know what I mean? And so then you started bringing up social credits, and you're like, you got to go talk to Oliver. And so here we are. And I kind of briefly knew about social credits before. I came across it in a crypto space. A lot of people are trying to experiment off of that. I purposely didn't want to dig in further into social credits. I want to be kind of like a meal fight and learn, you know, for the first time you're experienced with that because you've been studying this for a while. And so why don't we kind of just jump into it and for people listening out there or people watching out there, let's dive into social credits. Where do they come from? What are they and how can we start utilizing them to create better and more, let's say, better design systems to help people. Okay. So social credit is something that was developed by a British engineer, Major C.H. Douglas. He was born in 1879 and died in 1952. And during the interwar period, so between the First World War and the Second World War, through a variety of books, speeches, articles, et cetera, he began what turned out to be a worldwide monetary reform movement. Now, social credit is actually broader than finance or economics. There's sort of a political side to it. There's a historical side to it. There's a philosophical dimension to it. But it's usually associated in the popular imagination or was when social credit was sort of a household phrase. It was associated with monetary reform in the main. So that's sort of what put Douglas on the map. And story, I should perhaps, before we get any further into it, I perhaps should clarify that when we talk about social credit, I'm, of course, talking about something very, very different from the Chinese totalitarian surveillance reward and punishment system, which the Chinese government has introduced in the last few years in which they have decided for some strange reason to call social credit. Well, they did it purposely. Well, one wonders. It's good to market it. It's marketing on their end. It's one wonders. And this has created a huge problem for us social creditors who are still about because the question arises, do we need to start calling this something else, come up with a completely different term because the Chinese now have usurped appropriated our term? Or is there some way that we can judo it and say, well, this is not Chinese social credit. This is Scottish social credit because Major Douglas was a Scotsman. You should call an investment credit. Everyone's a guest. I want investment. So, well, some people have suggested we should refer to it as a monetary UBI as opposed to a fiscal UBI. We'll get into that a little later. So, basically the story runs as follows. In 1916, Douglas was sent down to the Royal Aircraft Factory in Farmboro, England. He was a major in the army at the time. This is during the First World War. And he was tasked with the responsibility of investigating an accounting model that the factory had got itself caught up with. And he noticed as he was analyzing the books that the factory was generating costs and prices at a faster rate than it was distributing incomes to consumers in the form of wages, salaries, dividends, et cetera. He looked at 100 other British firms and found that the same pattern existed. They were all generating costs and prices at a faster rate than they were distributing incomes to consumers. So, he thought this is rather curious. I mean, if all these companies are in the process of production generating costs and prices at a faster rate than they're giving people money with which those prices can then be offset, the economy is essentially inherently unstable and something has to be done in order to provide additional purchasing power. And the existing system does, you know, in order to avoid recession, in order to avoid bankruptcies increasing unemployment, it does do something to fill this pricing gap. What it does is it basically relies on us as consumers and governments and businesses to go to the banking system and borrow additional money into existence to basically supplement the flow of consumer incomes. So, I suppose should point out also because it's something that a lot of people are not aware of even today that the bulk of the money supply exists in the form of bank credit, so it's its digital numbers, and this money is created by the banks every time they make a purchase. So every time they make a loan, every time they buy security every time they make any other type of purchase, they are simply creating credits on their books and that's like 95% of the money supply. So only 5% in your typical western country exists in the form of bills and coins created by the state usually. So we have a debt money system, right? And so if there's not enough consumer purchasing power being distributed through the regular channels of production, the way that the existing system can think of to balance out the flow of costs and prices with sufficient income is to get us to go and borrow more money into existence. So consumers go and get mortgages, car loans, student loans, lines of credit, you name it, in order to obtain more money. And because we borrow more money into existence at a faster rate than we pay any of it back, the total consumer debt tends to increase, the burden increases over time. And I think in Canada now there's something like $2 trillion that consumers owe. Now, in the same way that consumers are sort of required by the system to do that in order to keep the thing running, governments also borrow money, municipal governments, provincial governments, federal governments from the banking system in order to distribute additional consumer buying power maybe through make work projects, build an airport or a highway or whatever, amongst other ways. And this is another way of putting more money in people's pockets so that the existing flow of goods and services coming from the private sector can actually be sold in full. And we also have built into the system the necessity for growth. So, you know, when it comes to election time, politicians they always talk about jobs and growth, jobs and growth. And there's a very good reason for that because, again, one way of filling the recurring price income gap is to get businesses to initiate new production or to expand existing production. And that, again, will put more money into consumer pockets now with which past production can be purchased, costs can be met, and we can keep the economy running. So, this creates all sorts of problems. Well, we could start with the fact that if you're relying on constant debt increases to stabilize the economy what happens when you can't drive the debt up any further? So, it's sort of built into the system that when consumers or governments or businesses for that matter become too indebted they're not able that maybe they're not willing or they're not able to borrow additional money or the banks aren't willing or able to lend additional money. And then we have a credit crunch. And we have a recession, businesses go bankrupt, consumers go bankrupt, everyone's going bankrupt. Well, not everyone, but a lot of people. And they then can, you know, wipe that debt off the books and they can start the system over again when a better economic climate returns and we can all start increasing our debt loads all over again until there's the next crisis. Also, inflation is sort of tightly bound up with this as well according to Douglas's analysis because if you are constantly relying on debt money, additional debt money to maintain economic homeostasis you set up a situation where, you know, those debts eventually they've got to be serviced. So the debt servicing costs increase constantly over time. And that means that in order to maintain a standard of living consumers who are now paying maybe 20% of their income whereas they were paying 10% before they will go to their employer and say, I can't live off of what you're paying me. We need to have minimum wage increases or just general wage increases, salary increases. And of course wages and salaries are costs. So eventually those costs will filter through into the economic system's increased prices. You've got a wage price spiral and, you know, they say I think that the American dollar has lost about 95% of its value in the last 100 years. And so on the Douglas analysis debt and the necessity of having to service debt is a large part of why that's been occurring. There are, well, if you've got huge public debts and of course there's a reason for public taxation to cover the interest as well as payback some of the principal even though governments typically are borrowing more than they're paying back. So there's a connection there with increased taxation. And also, you know, in spite of the fact, I mean this sort of gets the heart of the matter. If you look at our economy simply from a physical point of view and one analogy that I like to use is sort of a computer analogy. If you think of the physical economy as hardware, let's say it's computer like computer hardware, you know, the raw materials, the machinery, the know-how, the labor, that's all raw material hardware. And if you look at what we possess, we have the physical capacity to meet everyone's needs. We could bury ourselves in goods if we wanted to. I'm not suggesting that we should, but we have the capacity to do that because the technology develops, that capacity increases all the time. And we have also physically, just looking at it from a physical standpoint, we also have the ability to do that with fewer and fewer people actually being employed in the formal economy. So I don't want to put an exact figure on it, but it's quite possible that we could, let's say in Canada, provide everyone with everything that they could sensibly require in terms of survival needs and what they need to flourish without, let's say, maybe only 25% of the available labor force actually working. So if the physical economy were arranged in such a way that it was actually efficient and we're getting the most for the least, then that would be the pattern, right? There'd be a tremendous amount of production with the minimum of labor input. But that's not what we have. Instead, we have a policy of full employment and beyond that we have a system where although we have the capacity to provide all these goods and services that fulfill or would fulfill people's needs, we have what Douglas referred to in the 1930s and it's not much different now, we have this phenomenon of poverty amidst plenty where we have the goods, it's not that they're just scarcity, they exist or if we don't have them, they could easily be brought into existence and there's no good reason for poverty in a first world country and yet poverty in various forms continues to plague us. So on Douglas's analysis, the problem isn't with the physical economic system, it's not a problem with the hardware, it's a problem with the software and the software is composed principally of the financial system. So if you think of the financial system as a type of program that we're all running our economic lives on, he says that the reason we have all these economic problems, whether they're sort of problems within the financial system like inflation or a periodic financial crisis like I was mentioning earlier, or problems on the physical level where the goods aren't getting to the people that need them, it's because the financial system that we have in place is not properly designed and I've said a lot, but I don't know if you want to ask any questions. No, I think we should, before we continue on, let's kind of touch base on the problems with the financial situation. When he speaks about that, what's he precisely referring to? Because I know a lot of our audience, they're familiar with, for example, Austrian economics versus Keynesian economics, where we're living in a Keynesian financial system and even now people talking about a new type of system like modern monetary theory, MMT theory and pretty much print as much money as I want. It doesn't really matter because I'm not really paying back anybody. That is debt, whatever. In his eyes, so in Douglas's eyes, what was his concern with the system? Well, at the broadest level, most general level, I would say that according to Douglas's analysis, the current financial system that we have is not an honest system. So it's not designed to provide us with an accurate picture of our potential to create wealth and it's not designed to provide us with an accurate picture of the real flow of wealth. So instead, money is treated by the system as a commodity that's kept in short supply and that serves the interests of those who own and operate the monetary system, but it's not in the public interest. Not in the interest of the common good. So why do we have all this dysfunction? It's because the system is not designed to reflect the physical potential and also the physical reality of what we do produce. On Douglas's view, money should just be like a neutral tool. It should just be an indicator that shows us what we can do and what we are doing and what we have done. It's not something that by being artificially limited and controlled and only being injected as debt has the capacity to basically control the economic system. So another sort of metaphor that I like to use to explain this better is that of a dog. So if you have a dog and he has a long tail, according to Douglas, if the financial system were properly designed and had the right sort of relationship with the physical economic hardware, then the physical hardware, let's say that would be represented by the body of the dog and the financial system would be the tail, and real people, real needs, and our real capacity to satisfy those needs would determine what we do with the financial system. So the dog would be wagging the tail when and where required, and that's the proper relationship. And the only way to implement that relationship is to get the financial system just to be a mirror, not to have an agenda, but just to be an accurate sort of presentation of what we can do and what we have done. As it stands, because money is treated as a commodity that's kept artificially scarce, the relationship is inverted. So the real economy, our real capacity to satisfy needs and the real people, both of those are subordinated to artificial financial exigencies. And so we have a situation where the financial tail is artificially limiting what we can do with the physical economy and is conditioning it, and even determining a lot of the things that we do. So we've got the tail wagging the dog. And so what did Douglas design to counteract that? Okay, so we'll go back, I think first to that whole notion that there's not enough income being distributed to offset prices. So Douglas said that there's this gap, there's this price income gap. A lot of economists and politicians or just common people assume that whenever we produce something, if it's gonna cost $100, we're putting $100 automatically in someone's pocket as income. And Douglas says this is not the case, right? So this is sort of the heart and guts of it. If we had an honest system, that is the way it would function, right? For every 100 units and costs coming onto the market, there would be $100 in someone's pocket as consumer income to balance that off. Douglas says, and this is just sort of an illustration, but he would say, for example, that for every 100 units of costs coming forward in prices, maybe we're only paid $50 in wages, salaries, and dividends automatically. And so his proposal was that what we need to do is to monetize the gap with debt-free credit instead of relying on economic agents, consumers, governments, businesses to go borrow more money, which they have to pay back from the private banks, just have an organ of the state call it a national credit authority, monetize the gap in the form of debt-free credit so that if there's only $50 being distributed in the normal flow of incomes, we'll add another $50 into the pot and distribute that to consumers that are on their behalf. And that therefore would transform the existing system into an honest system because, again, that would mean that for every 100 units coming forward in prices, we actually do now have $100 in real income, not debt money, but real income that we can use to cancel those costs and to sort of re-establish. Can we do like a modern-day example analogy? Like if we were to implement this, like let's say here in Toronto. Well, I do have Australian colleagues who have done quite a bit of research with the Federal Reserve numbers in the United States, and this isn't sort of a full measure of the extent of the gap or what could be done, but according to a very conservative estimate based on Fred data, there is every year, well, I shouldn't say every year, in 2014 there was about a $2.4 trillion gap in the United States, meaning that if you tally up all the goods and services that are produced, capital goods, as well as consumer goods and services, and then you look at how much was distributed in income according to the official numbers like wages, salaries, profits, rents, et cetera. There's a $2.4 trillion gap between what people were paid and not the total GDP, but just the consumer goods and services. So right there, there's some evidence for this gap that Douglas identified and sort of made the centre of his diagnosis. And yeah, instead of relying people, let's say as consumers to go to the bank and borrow additional money through consumer loans, instead of those debts, we actually could just inject that money in the form of a debt-free credit, a credit that wouldn't have to be paid back. And in the United States, according to these numbers, again this was a conservative estimate, it was something like $7,500 per person or $30,000 for a family of four. And that would make a big difference for many people if we were all receiving that. Now, so I don't want to put an exact figure on it, but I guess the idea is that if the financial system were honest and if it were just and we were actually as a community, as a body of consumers, we were paid enough to buy back and full whatever we produce, we all would be receiving directly or indirectly because Douglas had two mechanisms for injecting this compensatory debt-free credit. We all would be enjoying a certain amount of free quote-unquote free money. From one point of view, you could consider it a free gift. At least it's a free gift to the people who receive it because they don't have to pay it back. But it's money that the economy actually needs in order to function in a stable way and if we're not going to constantly rely on increased debt. From another point of view, it's not a free gift at all. All we're doing is simply recognizing the full value of what we've very produced that's there to be bought but we don't have the figures corresponding or mirroring what's there. Douglas' proposal, one of his proposals for balancing prices and incomes was what he called a national dividend. So this has some similarities with a UBI because it would be a payment that everyone would receive independently of employment status and so maybe every month let's say you might get a check for, I don't know, we'll be conservative and say $500. Rather you're employed or not, it wouldn't matter. That would be basically your share in the societal profit. So the idea is that we all should be regarded as shareholders in society and because society is profitable because we produce more in value than we are automatically given in income, we can monetize the difference, the profit and distribute it to the shareholders as a type of dividend. So the difference of course between the national dividend and say that many conventional UBI proposals is that it's being financed through monetary reform. We're changing the rules of the financial game. We're not going to rely on taxes or an increase in public indebtedness to finance it. So who would be issuing that? The dividend would be issued, it would be one of the responsibilities of that national credit authority which would be like a bureau of weights and measures. It would be independent of any political party. It would be like the post office. Yeah, but on the balance sheet who's actually issuing that money? Are they taking a loan from like the IMF, the central banks? No, they would just be creating it on the basis of the fact that there's a profit to distribute. So if you create like a profit and loss account for the whole society and we say, okay, this is what we've produced and this is what we've paid people and look, there's a gap, then we can monetize the gap and create it on that basis. It's not just money that we're adding willy-nilly into the system, it's because there's actually goods and services there that for which no money has been automatically distributed as income. Do you think this has caused any hyperinflation in the long run? According to Douglas's analysis, no, because the money that was going to be created and injected as a debt-free credit, it's calculated just to fill the gap. We're not talking about just creating any amount of money, whatever we feel like. It's got to be shown and demonstrated that the gap is on average so much and this is how much extra money the economy considers to be. They summarize, they look at national GDP, so they take all consumer real estate the whole nine yards, so let's say $2 trillion, and they look at all accounted tax receipts of people within the country to see their income. That's what you're saying right now? Right, basically. And then they see the delta, the difference between the two, so let's say it's $2 trillion that we produced, but then it's only $1 trillion of claimed, so then you're saying it's $1 trillion between the two, so we created $1 trillion of a social credit that we give to people. Right, right. See, another aspect of this too is it's important to understand that just as the banks create money, they also destroy money. So if a business is operating on, let's say, a revolving line of credit, the money that it receives from consumers, which then becomes business revenue, that's going to go, and if they've got a revolving line of credit, that will go to pay down that debt, and both the debt and the money cancel each other out of existence. If they don't have a debt, then they might use it to replace working capital or things like that, but even the working capital will not be reissued without creating another set of costs, you see. So, yeah, I mean, the inflation concern is one of the objections that is often raised, but I think Douglas would say that these debt-free credits, which are not created in an excessive amount, not only are not inflationary, they're anti-inflationary, and it's the current system that's relying on ever-increasing debt, which is the primary cause of inflation in the form of cost-push inflation. Yeah, like for me, my biggest fear with the modern-day system is print-on-demand. Like, you have quantitative easing happening. You have now even talks of negative interest rates, where if I keep money in the bank, they take my money. And it's happening in Europe. Japan had it. We can't raise interest rates. Like, literally money's free now tomorrow. Such a degree that you can't raise the subprime. You've got to keep on printing. And where's that going to head? And this is why people talk about the modern monetary theory, where, like, this system is so fractured, so broken, the only way that we can continue this Keynesian model is we literally have to keep on printing money. Or else this system will collapse. Printing at a stat. Yeah, oh yeah, it's all debt. Yeah, yeah, yeah. And the problem is, like, we're not the beneficiaries. That's it. We have the Catalinian effect, whereas, like, the beneficiaries are the bankers in Wall Street on the top. They get the first Virgin money. And then they do their thing. Pretty much they get billions of dollars free. They do stock buybacks. They put it their own pockets. And then, you know, they say, where are the recipients? We get shit. What do we get? What do I get? I get nothing from QE. I get an inflationary dollar that every year loses value. Yeah, loses value. Yeah, loses value. Yes. Yeah, that's right. And I think that, I object that this is a Keynesian system. I think Austrian economics has been kind of predominant, at least in US theory and politics since the mid-70s. And that's where inequality actually really started to begin. Maybe politics, but our economic system is 100% Keynesian. Yeah, sure. So I guess that, so what I wanted to say is that, I don't know a lot about social credit monetary system, but I think we can all see for the reasons you said that the current system is not working. And I think it was working for a time during the Golden Age of Capitalism when wages were actually going up a lot year on year, almost 3%, because before computing and robotics, you actually needed a lot of people in the production cycle of anything. But what do they consider the Golden Age? What was the decade for that? Between World War II and the mid-70s. Around the mid-70s, something happened and wages... Well, one birth control came in the mid-70s. So you have now a double workforce overnight. So you have now literally, back in the day it was men, you didn't have birth control as a game changer. Like game changer for the first time in human history, the female body or the female person had the choice to determine, do I want to reprocreate or not? So I popped this thing. Yeah, although, seen from the lens of wages, in some ways less people should mean more demand on wages because there's less people working. So we've seen the opposite. No, but more people enter the workforce. So that means wages go down. But there's also less children. Of course there's less children, yeah. So what we've seen since the rise of computing robotics in the mid-70s is wages stay flat while productivity goes up. As wages have been flattened, we see debt increasing. Actually, literally debt started increasing almost since the mid-70s on a personal level to unsustainable levels. I think what we're seeing is that this compact, the system that was working for a while stopped working when wages stopped going up. Well, when did we decouple from gold? Was it the 60s, 70s, was it then? In Canada? Yeah. Good question. Because I think it's around that time, too. Yeah. There's many theories. When I looked at various papers, a lot of them say in the footnotes, automation is probably a big part of it, but they don't know how to study it. And I think what we're seeing now is just the automation effects happening quick enough that we can actually see the impacts. But what are the biggest automation factors right now? What was it that caused the wages go down? Because people say automation, to me, it's like, okay, it's an open-ended terminology. Can you be very detailed and precise? Like what automation is it? Well, before the early 70s, even like mainframe computing entered corporate workforces in the late 60s and mainstream adoption in the early 70s. The spreadsheet didn't really exist in companies before the mid-70s. Personal computers started in the late 70s, early 80s. Robotics entered the scene in the early 70s. Anything like a global workforce has to do a role there. You go to India, you get one-tenth of the cost. Those are all factors. Those are all factors. But even without technology and a broad stroke, you couldn't have iPhones created in a global supply chain. You couldn't have globalization at the level we have without technology, without shipping, without email, without rapid communications. Without China. So I'm curious, I'll have a curiosity about social credit system because I think obviously the tie-in to UBI is there. But I think as wages decline more and more, especially on a regional basis, as automation and globalization continue to decimate incomes across generations, eventually it's going to reach a point where things are not going to work anymore. And they're already not working anymore now in some places. So I think we're not to have to be considering bolder new ideas. Can I use the social credits as Milton Friedman wanted to use the tax credit? Like I receive it as a token and I can do whatever I want with it? Well, there are different ways it could be implemented. Douglas was an engineer, so he was quite practical. And he said, as long as you respect certain basic principles, find a way to make it work. So he wasn't insisting it's got to be this way or that way, but it's got to work. We want something that works. One thing that I might add just in connection with what you were talking about, Floyd, as I haven't really touched on it yet, is that on Douglas's analysis the reason that costs and prices are greater than, say, wages, salaries, dividends has to do with the nature of capital costs. So as we have gone through the industrial revolution we've become more and more reliant on real capital as a factor in production. Capital costs have increased relative to labor costs. And a lot of those capital costs, you know, you have to sort of cover the financial costs of capital. You have to have depreciation so you can replace it. You've got to have maintenance. Basically, the cause of the gap, there are many other factors that Douglas discussed, but on his view the cause of the gap was basically grounded in all these capital costs, which companies rightly need to charge the consumer for so they can stay in business. But what that ends up meaning is that businesses basically are demanding more money from the consumer than they have simultaneously distributed to the consumer. That's going to get worse. Capital and technology converging like never before. You can see in all the stats capital income is displacing labor income. Where's that going to end? So if labor income keeps going down capital income keeps going up who's going to have to buy stuff? I think the current system was optimal before computing robotics and now with AI coming we have to think more broadly. And I don't know if social credit system is the answer but it seems to have a lot of components that are very interesting. Douglas would say that even before it wasn't optimal. He was writing in the 20s and the 30s of the available working force to actually run the economy and that. And this is another dimension which Douglas would say it then but it's even more the case now. He would say that a large proportion of existing jobs in the typical western country today are to a greater or lesser extent useless, witless, redundant and or destructive. And the people that are doing them would be better off if this is not too harsh. Attending their gardens or looking after their children. I'm downtown most of the day and there's skyscrapers everywhere and I look at them and I always ask myself like what the fuck are all these people doing in these houses? I really don't know. Like pressing a random button on a keyboard like I'm like you really need that I mean like you look at these big enterprises that have hundreds of thousands good if they're employing them like I always ask like you need that many people for the company? Like what are they doing? Yeah, that's right. And I'm not trying to insult anybody or disparage anybody and you know you can debate what's the useless job, what's a witless job what's a redundant job, what's a destructive job but you've got for example I won't mention any names but the last time I was unemployed I went to a private company that gets government funding to help people find jobs you've got unemployment counselors whose job it is supposedly to help people find jobs. Were they helpful? No. So that to me is a useless job. Yeah. There's a lot of talk now among UBI and futurists that it's not that we don't want people to work but the nature of work might change I think fundamentally every human being wants to be useful. Now usefulness may not be a market system job it may be some other kind of work but what fascinates me about what you talk about is that if there is the capacity the physical capacity to be productive then there must also be the currency and the money there in order to fulfill that transaction and I look at places like Haiti that is on the wrong side of globalization that has no way out especially with automation coming you know the latest predictions on automation are saying that developing economy labor forces are at a 77% risk of automation especially like in China because the simpler work is what moved there from North America so most of the world is going to be on the wrong side of automation just like Haiti right now is on the wrong side of globalization how do they get out of there how do you get out so I think some idea like this where where the money is created to facilitate the fact that there are people with working hands who can actually be productive and from the bottom up they can lift themselves out through their own means without being slaves on an international system this is very compelling and I don't understand enough about it but it just sounds very compelling. Yeah so yeah from Doug's point of view he's an engineer right so he looks at the economy and he says okay do we have the need for whatever the goods and services are yes we've got the need do we have the raw material the labor the technology to produce goods and services to meet those needs yes we do what do we not have and why does it not occur we don't have the money but money is just it's just a token it's just a representation if it were an accurate representation we would be able to produce as much money as is necessary to catalyze production so that those needs can be met in a place like Haiti so you know Haiti is probably not in a position to do this well certainly isn't in a position to do this but all the nations of the world nation states really need to move towards exercising sovereignty over their own financial systems and to ensure that the we don't have to nationalize the banks we just have to ensure that the sort of the policy that all the financial actors are forwarding is in the public interest that it serves the common good and it's not you know serving a small number of people at the very top sort of at the expense I don't see that changing to be honest with you like the narrative in the states is MMT theory which is to me the scariest economic theory ever I agree with you actually I don't like MMT because one of the differences between for those who don't know could you just reset from your point of view what it is and what you don't like about it modern monetary theory so their idea in essence is that the federal government can simply increase the debt and provide whatever additional liquidity the system needs and the thing is sort of the issue that we take with it from a social credit perspective is that we would rather see whatever extra purchasing power the economy needs and consumers need we'd prefer it to be given to people so they can spend it as they wish through let's say a national dividend or compensated discount prices which was another mechanism that Douglas had suggested whereas modern monetary theory proponents a lot of them and some of them even say this is a necessary part of MMT they'll say that what we need to do is have a job guarantee a federally guaranteed job work system so that means that instead of if there's a profit distributing the profit and letting people decide what they want to do if they want to start a business they can do that then they've got that sort of safeguard underneath them instead of doing that they want to make the federal government the employer of last resort and whatever extra money the economy needs sure but we will put people to work doing things that we think people should be doing that's called communism my parents escaped a country like that so did mine they literally put you to work and with the threat of increasing automation there are people saying by no means social creditors and they're only not social creditors because they don't know anything about it but there are many commentators futurists saying that within 20 years or less 50% of existing American jobs are going to be automated so if all this automation is coming artificial intelligence so on and so forth everyone must work in the formal economy and you have a federal job guarantee you can imagine that in 20, 75 70% of the available labor force is working on government mandated projects some of those things might be good might even be beneficial but given the track record of various governments and given the current political climate and social and cultural climate you can imagine what sort of things the government might have people doing and I my part I think a lot of those things probably will fall in the useless redundant destructive category so the fundamental choice from a social credit point of view is do we want freedom or do we want centralized control and the whole point of the monetary proposals of Douglas were to distribute decentralize as much power as possible you can't decentralize everything obviously you have to have a functioning society but to decentralize as much power as possible to the individual so that with his dividend and his compensated prices he could decide for himself how to profitably use his time and just to tie in with what you were saying about work yes okay I won't beat around the bush social credit theory supports the minimum employment necessary rather than a policy of full employment however leisure in social credit doesn't mean idleness so the idea is that people would be this is going to take a cultural shift it would take educational systems changing everything but the idea is that there are many meaningful things to do in the world some of those things are in the formal economy and some of those things are outside the formal economy and if we don't need everyone working in the formal economy then this frees up people to do meaningful work outside the formal economy which they may be able to monetize in some way through provision of personal services or whatever but this scares some people this idea that you're going to give people leisure what will they do if they can't don't have this expectation that they must go to work from nine to five until nine to five things a Victorian model but even that was fought for there are still countries in the world that don't have a five-day work week Henry Ford is the one that got the weekends off in the states his work force with the union he may have volunteered it but people were riding of course they were riding first to me the idea that we don't accept that technology is meant to create more leisure is ridiculous it's like having an open wound and not trying to heal it you have the technology for it you just leave it there why it doesn't make any sense I think it goes before you enter the marketplace like people are indoctrinated from high school then going to college university like this is the system right and it's also it takes a certain type of person because I work a bunch of companies that have my own and you know some of them I have no work schedule but it's performance based and it's not for everybody a lot of people can't handle that pressure I'm like listen I have one of those classes in high school it's my favorite class it's on you so I have the same thing the system with me it's this old KPI performance you got to hit this I don't care if you work 20 hours on Monday or if you work 2 hours on Tuesday I don't really give a shit I don't care where you were get it done that's all I care about but a lot of people can't handle that there's another thing that really bothers me is sort of that's what we're saying with technology displacing work there are already places in the world where there's not enough work oh yeah right so what happens there you have people who are capable who look around and there's nothing to do and what do they do they end up become hopeless so after 4 million manufacturing jobs were automated away in the United States me andrealing was showing that half of those people didn't go back to work not because they were lazy because they couldn't find it and the other half who didn't go back to work half of them went on disability insurance because they had no other choice that's a tragedy people have the means to be useful but we're in the system that judges them that the only usefulness is a market oriented job that's just wrong and in fact it's ignoring the fact that technological wealth I think is our common wealth we're building on the shoulders of giants we're building on the shoulders of past generations who have contributed money forward contributed knowledge that now entrepreneurs can use is the same way you use oil in the ground you can use the technology that's there Zuckerberg did not invent the internet is it right that he should have billions when there's so much so much poverty when the internet was created through public financing right so what interests me about social credit system and UBI in general is the idea that if there's money there then the work will follow and so will the production because there are small towns all over the place have former steel mills former paper mills that if there was just enough money present personal work, their own bakeries their own things to do their own personal growth life coaching whatever if money is there people will find ways to but the key is creating an economic policy that the value of the dollar stays you can't have a system where we have inflation Venezuela, Argentina or you name the average lifeline of a fiat currency is 27 years if you take all the currencies together and the United States obviously backed by the most powerful military in the world they're the standard hedge around the planet but still you mentioned earlier that I have a nice beautiful $1 picture on my computer of the sliding scale of the dollar since the 70s is 90% so you look at the dollar in the 70s look at the dollar now it's lost 90% of its value so what frightens me the most there's two things that frighten me the most number one I don't want political parties any of these tools as a means of puppet mastery we're like hey you have to keep on voting for us we're going to take it this way we have to create a system where this is a proximity where they can't touch or screw around with it like how you said the credit thing is like a post office it has to be independent we can't have political parties hanging this over people deciding what to do with it imagine a political party comes in that's really good really good we're going to take this away who the fuck is going to vote for them no one is going to vote for them it's a non-starter and then number two is we have to be we can't let the dollar keep on inflating so it's $10,000 a day then five years is $20,000 then 20 years is $40,000 then next thing you know we're like venezuelan it's like here's $300,000 a year for everybody although I heard an early Andrew Yang's campaign I was in his campaign office and I heard it was very interesting there are some other investor types in the room like VCs that inflation is actually worse for rich people than for poor people it's bad if you're in liquid cash it's not bad if you're in assets because your dollar is appreciating so it's losing value hence why wealthy people don't keep their money it depends but for the most part you don't keep your wealth in cash I just wanted to add on this whole question of inflation Douglas would say if we had a financial system that was designed properly where it's giving us an accurate picture of what's going on in the physical level things actually should be getting cheaper across the board so if it as technology improves we're able to produce more with fewer inputs less labor or what have you and that actually if we had an honest system things should be getting cheaper as time goes on some things are getting cheaper yeah but I like to look at okay we look at the society we look at Maslow hierarchy of needs and at the bottom is shelter and manja food that's not getting cheaper is it right and even like healthcare Canada has free but it's not free our taxes are increasing for this healthcare Canada has great emergency healthcare we have horrible preventive healthcare whatever at least we have emergency healthcare I break my arm or something happens I can go to the ER it's pretty widespread all across North America whether it's Toronto, San Francisco, New York Vancouver it's skyrocketing so the necessities of the Maslow hierarchy needs are skyrocketing so one thing for me I try to picture what Douglas was seeing is like the market dynamics are pretty the thing where real estate is like money flows in people are parking their money and real estate value goes up is supply and demand okay we always look at something where it's like the cost of living needs decrease now all this other stuff that we're talking about consumerism there's a subsidized because of Chinese labor a lot of stuff is subsidized because of certain governments even Tesla has been subsidized as well government grants and all that stuff these aren't necessities none of this stuff is necessities a roof over my head is a necessity food on the table is a necessity healthcare I want to say is a necessity but having access to almost cheap as possible healthcare is a necessity how do we create and this is why I have a thesis where I think I mentioned before we started talking about Timmins and having experiments I have a thesis where there's going to be exodus of people leaving cities in the future they're going to opt out for example consensus in Toronto 2017 the average household was $734,000 much more expensive now the average household income was $64,000 so you do the math it doesn't add up UBI would help to happen faster also propagate the price up too it would allow people to move to small towns and make the money go further so ideally what I'm seeing is why would I be killing myself 9-5 making household income this is combined this isn't an individual medium in Canada Toronto 64 when I can go live in Barrie or Timmins or wherever else I can live and I can buy a house there for $400,000 so I think we're going to see this happening where there's going to be an exodus so this gives us opportunity where it's like hyper loops that's one technology hyper loops in UBI and you'll see property values more you'll flatten you'll still have a bell curve high metropolitan but it won't be like this it'll be more like that hyper loops that one technology that benefits all factors of society super fast, cheap sustainable technology and vertical lift off taxis that plus hyper loops would change the game on real estate I wouldn't live in Toronto if there's a hyper loop in Burlington on the water I'll be there heartbeat you could be half an hour away from there and you get onto your local Uber vertical lift and it comes to Toronto, you're there in half an hour I'm sold and you're going to live in a nice rustic area I'm sold I have a cottage up north I don't live there because it's far away it's great, six acre lot, it's beautiful on the water but it's far I'm not going to drive two hours each way it's four hours of my day gone if you had a hyper loop I'm like this in Toronto for sure but the social credits is interesting where it's I always look at ways where can we implement something that we can get real examples from and so you mentioned earlier Alberta in which I never knew I'll tell you a little bit about that before we do that I just thought I'd add as well that the banking system is heavily implicated in the crazy real estate markets of course they are they're the ones giving out the mortgages as sort of the you asked about inflation before one of the corollaries of a social credit system where you are creating this debt free compensatory consumer purchasing power is that you'd have to prohibit the banks from creating money for the purposes of consumer consumption so going back to back dollars they can't just create money in the near well yes everything's got to be back there's got to be something in the physical universe an actual asset, yeah a correlated asset so we can't have banks saying what should I create and lend to this person or that person yeah it's supply and demand but the demand is so great because the banks are willing to lend so much money or have been and then once you have that debt if you own a house you're not going to want to sell it for something less it becomes part I've got to get at least 800,000 or whatever it was so yes and that's this creation of money for real estate is one of the ways that they've been surreptitiously indirectly compensating for the price income gap because some of that money comes out and people are able to spend it on goods and services it's one of the reasons it is the way it is too is because we talked about women going into the workforce in the 70s and so forth well if you've got two incomes per household and you're a bank you can lend so much more money and I don't know that anyone's actually done the study but it would be interesting to see whether or to what extent women and families are better off as a result of this push to have both let's say the husband and the wife in the workforce because if you've got you're getting two incomes and the banks are willing to lend so much more money as opposed to what they would have lent someone on one income what has that done to real estate prices what has it done to mortgage payments and is it a case that you're simply you know the woman or the man is going out into the workforce as the second earner and that money that they're earning they're just turning around and giving it to the bank to what extent is that to what extent if they've got childcare costs and all these other things the average Canadian has 400 bucks in their savings that's really bad it's been getting worse in the last few decades well because wages haven't been going up well there have also been people who have been sold a dream a fake dream too they've heard mentality buy a house get a car do this do that and I'm like why it's all debt on you as I've said to some people just because some let's say a bank wants to lend you money thinks you're credit worthy in your best interest to take on that that debt but again if people a lot of people refuse to go into debt we would you know the economy would suffer we wouldn't be able to sell as many goods and services, businesses would have a hard time unemployment would go up and so on and so forth so it's almost as though yes there's this consumerism but the system actually relies on people currently to go into debt to keep the thing running and if that stops right now it basically the way things are set up and this is another aspect of sort of the social credit diagnosis is that we're not, we haven't set the rules of the game in such a way that it's sort of a harmonious what's good for me is good for you we're all fighting each other to make sure I don't want to be the one that goes into debt or at least not unprofitable debt so people, there's all this conflict economic conflict and social conflict in society because we're all fighting over an insufficient flow of income you know and those of us who are in position that's key, I get alright you guys continue talking, I'll use a watch alright yeah you mentioned income crisis I actually find it a bit offensive that there's this assumption that the debt crisis is fueled by irresponsible spending or people getting drunk on debt because I've never seen this graph and Andrew McAfee was doing a talk I wrote the second machine age that personal credit card debts almost started growing literally in the late 70s and growing as productivity was rising and wages stopped growing that's when personal debt started growing so I think a lot of what we call the debt crisis is actually an income crisis it's an income crisis coming because productivity has been rising faster than wages or wages not rising at all and the gains from all that productivity are going to less and less people because the system is such that work is being displaced by technology so I think we have an income crisis and the income crisis is driving a debt crisis is driving a housing crisis is driving a health crisis is driving even an environmental crisis because when people's incomes are below their needs they're scared and they don't vote they don't vote with a long term perspective they can't think more progressively when they're afraid and they're just believing whatever fear-mongering politician goes out there and just keeps talking job, job, job needs income and raising the minimum wage to the infinitum is not going to solve it and that if I can say this what you just said that it's an income crisis properly understood that is the social credit diagnosis that's what Douglas has been saying since 1916, 1917 that there's this lack of cost liquidating purchasing power in the economy and we try to compensate for it by driving up the debt but you know it can't go on it's not sustainable long term and there's a tremendous cost there's an environmental cost there's a social cost, there's a personal cost I mean it's colossal just the waste, the inefficiency of the whole thing and that's why I think that now is the time that ideas like social credit might become more mainstream because the automation is driving the income crisis faster than could have been noticed in the 30 years after the end of the golden age of capitalism it's getting worse and worse and something's got to give something has to change this is why we need city-states to experiment you were mentioning Alberta trying to do something and they got the kibosh a lot of people aren't aware of this you talk to anyone in Canada under 60 you mention social credit they either don't know what you're talking about or they will assume that oh it's that Chinese thing which it's not, I mean if anything Douglas social credit is like the opposite of what the Chinese have called social credit because in Douglas social credit the idea is that you give the individual and families you give them the sanctions necessary to basically reward and punish bureaucrats reward and punish civil servants, reward and punish retailers reward and punish whoever is in sort of the hierarchy of service whereas the Chinese want to reward and punish the citizen to make them conform but the state thinks you should be doing so Alberta, so yes people don't know anything about social credit it's all sort of been sent down the Orwellian memory hole but social credit was very big in this country at one time, not that long ago really in 1935 in the height of the Great Depression there was a social credit government elected in the province of Alberta, William Aberhart was the premier and they were swept into power majority and every attempt which they made to implement social credit or some aspect of it was thwarted, sabotaged whatever word you want to use by the lieutenant governor general or by the federal government or by the privy council or by the courts or somebody with the explanation that according to the terms of the British North America Act Alberta was a province and it didn't have a jurisdiction over money and banking and that's probably all true you know there was a social so after that they tried and they weren't permitted to do anything and it's very important to stress this because sometimes people say oh social credit that was tried and Alberta and it failed and the reality is it was never implemented the experiment was never allowed to go forward with higher powers there was a social credit government as well in British Columbia I believe starting in the 50s with Bennett and they held power on and off until I think the late 80s or early 90s with Bill van der Zijm and both the Alberta social credit party government and the BC social credit party and government they when they saw that they didn't anywhere apart from having a revolution that they would just try to you know follow a conventional right wing sort of you know try to manage finances soundly and things like this and try to provide good government there were also at one time in 1962 the 1962 federal election there were 30 social credit MPs in the federal parliament social credit was very active in Quebec through the pilgrims of St. Michael and other and other groups so there's this whole history in Canada trying to push for substantial monetary reform getting the government to assume sovereignty, exercise its sovereignty over the financial system for the sake of serving the common good the public interest and nobody seems to know too much about it it's all sort of been sent down the Orwellian memory hole but I think you're quite right Floyd especially with things like automation and artificial intelligence and so forth all these things are forcing forcing the issue and forcing things like social credit to be reconsidered because we cannot you know there's no exit from this path that we're on something has to give, something has to adapt if we don't change the financial system and make it a servant right now it's sort of the master if we don't turn it into a servant by making it an honest system it's like a thermometer or a barometer it's just giving us accurate information but what's going on yeah we're going to be faced with an unprecedented social crisis I certainly don't want to be in Toronto when that happens so Mira was asking you how could this be tested in the small and the examples you gave is that the federal government didn't allow it so is it possible and if it's not possible then what if a federal government got elected that was for it how would it then be tested so there is a way that it can be attempted it's not full-blown social credit and it's something that actually I've only been introduced to recently it's called a unity dollar and it was up and running in Canada apparently it was working very well out in the Ottawa Valley, Pembroke area and basically the idea was that you would go to various businesses and ask them if they would be willing to accept a universal coupon if you know if they would let's say discount their prices by 5% or 10% or 20% whatever they wanted to do you know maybe 80% of the cost of whatever it was they were selling 80% in Canadian dollar and 20% in this unity coupon and that would be a coupon that would be universal could apply to any business that was in the system and it also could be reusable so the business could take that coupon if it was a restaurant they could take $2 of the coupon they got when they sold the burger for 10 and go to the supermarket bought into the same system and use 2 unity dollars to buy whatever raw material for the next production run so the idea there is that you can actually increase purchasing power and you could even distribute it to people as a kind of dividend and this is something you could do on a small scale I've got friends in Michigan who have talked about doing this sounds like analog crypto actually I got pitched last week by the founders of UBI Seed who were describing exactly what you're saying they've already built a back end and they want to test it in South Africa because the back end is using SMS so they have local businesses offering marketing budget to actually funds the UBI Seed dividend people can then go and spend it in those local businesses but what I don't quite understand is how does the value of the token increase but they said they had an idea but they built the infrastructure already so yeah I was suggesting to my friends in Michigan they're boomers so they're not terribly up to date with certain things I said really in this day and age it's got to be an app and it's got to be done electronically and you know it could involve what V.C. was saying that crypto is basically a coupon system well not all crypto like Bitcoin to me is the lots of what we talked about today Bitcoin represents Ethereum is interesting as well there's a lot of people trying to do UBI variations within the blockchain space there's a lot of people trying to do this I would say geographically proximity tokens like I know a team they're trying to I know a team in Toronto they just want to create a Toronto token where it only has value in Toronto so it's interesting ideas what about the other way so let's say a federal government got elected in some future that said okay we're going to test this in a certain region like how would they do it that is a good question I haven't given this as much thought as it deserves I'm wondering just off the top of my head whether you really could test it just in a certain region I think the more likely thing to do would be to introduce it system-wide on a scale so the federal government could say okay we're going to start depositing $100 debt-free credit every month in everyone's account and let's see how that goes if the sky doesn't fall then we can effectively is already that like a million families are getting $600 a month right now except that would be funded through taxation but this would be debt-free credit debt-free credit yeah so it's a new currency it's the Canadian dollar but it's just created without any necessity of having to repay it to anybody so it's quantitative easing for the people something like that so you could try it on a small scale that way and then say okay we're going to start to go to the next phase and now we have to maybe put certain regulations on certain other aspects of the financial system that are money about thanks for example don't go crazy and say we want to lend you all this additional money and then we have a crazy system I still think the easiest those implement Milton Friedman's tax credits the negative income tax yeah not just an income tax I want to give me $1000 credit not money credit IOU credit and that's $12,000 a year yeah that's a basic income you call it as a negative income tax so no money I don't get nothing I just get a token it's a credit that's all it and I can apply it to anything so let's say the year comes tax season's coming whatever it's like oh I own $4,000 house tax or I own $25,000 income tax or I own this tax or whatever tax I'm like okay I got my tax credits here I'm putting it against the right because they don't matter what it's like I always look at ways where it's like how one we want to reduce the current burden that you have and so Mazel Hierarchy needs what's the burden it could be income tax massive burden for everybody another burden could be it's like sales tax massive burden so it's like okay how do we reduce your actual cost of living so Friedman just for your followers for a more center right the negative income tax is an income floor basic income whether it's done on an annual tax rebate the way the carbon fee dividend is in Canada right now or whether it's more like a monthly check it's the same thing effectively and he was for it Friedrich Hayek was for it from Austrian economics because one thing I wish I could remind all right wing viewers about is that if you're a right wing you care about freedom and freedom means avoiding exploitation so Friedrich Hayek the icon of libertarian thinking was for it because he was more concerned about preventing exploitation of the vulnerable by the powerful in order to have a true free market dynamics work is it really free market if you're not free to turn down horrible tedious abusive work so he wanted to have an income floor a basic income effectively to ensure freedom so I want this chicken soup for the right wing or so basic income insurers freedom it's more in freedom to have options in life is more important the freedoms pay lower taxes on the whole in terms of the benefit and well-being of society well yeah a UBI international dividend one of the beautiful things about it is that if people receive that it would change the power dynamics so that you know if I feel that I'm not being paid decently for the work I'm doing or if my employer treats me badly I can say well I'll just see you you know I can live off my dividend and find somebody else it's like a it's a low regulation way to have the market serve people so what I mean by that is if people have the freedom to turn down crappy work well guess what those that work will have to pay more do we need to one tool is minimum wage another tool is freedom of choice and then allow businesses to just pay more to have bad jobs one of the that's a good thing one of the beautiful things about social credit though is that according to you know Douglas is remedial proposals if we we had debt-free compensatory consumer credits national dividends compensated prices Douglas thought that you could have that and actually lower the tax burden as well because providing people with all these things and simply monetizing the communal profit universalizing capitalism we're all capitalists we're all shareholders and we we all should have some minimum share in the in the profit then a lot of you know not all social programs but a lot of social programs could be eliminated or reduced because you know if I have a dividend and and I'm benefiting from compensated prices then I may not need welfare or I may not need unemployment I think everyone not need we mentioned welfare that's the worst program I want to ask something as an entrepreneur you mentioned communal profit so what is the role of entrepreneurship and private profits in a social credit system so social credit is actually very pro-business the idea as I mean as long as the business people are producing things that people actually independently want or not sort of forced to want you know but it serves some real need what if everyone wants diamond rings what if everyone wants diamond rings and someone in some town makes a way to make diamond rings for the trees well I think we'd have to look at the advertising industry why does everyone want diamond rings but we should what's the diamond ring thing I don't get it but under social credit businesses are still free to determine their own prices costs and to hire and fire and to make profits we're not against business in any way and that's another thing I should mention is that we have this confusion when we talk about social credit people think oh now they think Chinese social credit when you say communal profit I get nervous it sounds like anti-business no societal societal profit it just means that we're all shareholders and individual shareholders in society and we all deserve our own individual profit share of what's necessary of the money that's necessary to balance prices and incomes so it's I say collective but maybe that's not the best word or communal but it's sort of it's everything that everyone has their own individual share of and yeah so a confusion that we had before we'd still have it now if we were you know if social credit were to sort of be resurrected and become a thing is that it's got that word social in it yeah so certain people often times they're Americans will look at that and say social credit well that's socialism and you know if you read Douglas and if you look at what social credit actually is not only is social credit not socialism it is anti-socialism right it is a way it's not laissez faire capitalism either I got the name for you productivity credit productivity credit because you're creating it to balance production with consumption yes that's right and I like the narrative that it's technologies are common wealth and the more we can produce the more wealth we all can prosper with both through lower prices and through purchasing power and through leisure and productivity is going to be I mean 40 years has already been the wage killer if we weren't so productive wages would keep going up you need people to do things before computers every middle manager had a personal administrator typing what they'd say well what's the impact on the economy for no longer needing that talking about millions and millions of jobs eliminated the thing is really quite baffling when you go deeply into it because it's 2019 almost 2020 it should be easier now for people in at least in first world countries it should be easier now to live and to survive economically than ever before in human history right if you look at it from a physical point of view what we're physically capable of it should be easier now than ever before and yet because the financial system is not honest the picture that it paints and that governs our lives actually inverts this and it's financially it is more difficult now than it was say 30 years ago bottom line we have a horribly broken financial system and that's created modern day slavery that's right you have to get on the hedonistic hamster wheel and kill yourself every single day so you can earn your 90% reduced dollar to pay for your overinflated property value can you explain to address more of a mere centroid audience how does free market dynamics work in a social credit economy well as far as social credit is concerned the only justification for interfering with the free market is if some regulation is necessary to ensure that the economy fulfills its true purpose so according to Douglas and this is going to be very much at odds because he says the economy has a purpose there's a normative dimension here so does Nick Hower, he's my hero purpose of the economy is to uplift its people you want to organize the system so that people are uplifted and the profit incentive is a key part of that because entrepreneurs have ideas they want to create something they become wealthy, they become invested that's all true but we need some counter balancing forces to ensure that it's not concentrated too much or else you lose the utility power of money itself the purpose of the economy is to deliver the goods and services that people need to survive and flourish with the least amount of resource consumption and the least amount of human labor with the least amount of trouble to everybody so obviously regulation is necessary you can't just have a free for all I suppose the closest thing to a completely free market economy might be Somalia and I don't know Afghanistan so there has to be some regulation which is from a social credit perspective that if we fail to regulate properly the regulator of economic activity which is money if we fail to regulate the financial system properly the government will almost be forced to introduce all sorts of other regulations that are not really necessary which have become necessary but they're not inherently necessary and it creates all sorts of unnecessary inefficiency frustration and if you have a welfare system because you're not giving people dividends then you've got a higher bureaucracy to make sure that people aren't abusing it that they're reporting and that they're looking for work and they're doing all these things it's a lot of wasted effort Douglas called it the tragedy of human effort that's so much of what we do because we don't regulate properly what needs to be regulated we end up with this colossal sort of epic waste of economic activity it becomes necessary it does sort of serve a purpose but if we dealt with the problem at source these things wouldn't arise or wouldn't be nearly as difficult as they are and so it's sort of money is the thing that's not properly regulated because it's not regulated there's always a reason for the government to expand and try to come in and try to fix up all the problems that an improperly regulated money system causes when you combine that with a free market economy so if we another thing that I should mention is that on this topic you know social credit it's got the word social in it the conventional economic spectrum you've got socialism on the left laissez faire capitalism on the right some versions of the mixed economy in the middle mixed one extent or another if I were to position the social credit economy in relationship to the conventional paradigm I would say it's not on the conventional paradigm that it's not left it's not right it's not the conventional center it is the radical center because it does like you were saying it does recognize that yes we need to have the profit motive but at the same time we have to make sure that things like poverty don't exist when there's no good reason for them to exist in a highly technologically developed society and I think of it that way that it's the radical center and one of the horrible things about the existing political climate is that with our political system the way it's set up you've got parties also set up on a spectrum from left to right whatever real differences there are between them is another question but as long as you conceive of the range of options using the conventional spectrum socialism mixed economy laissez-faire capitalism you'll never be able to think beyond it and something like social credit is going to be you know we won't be able to think outside the box to actually even consider that maybe there's something that out there that if we implemented it we actually could transcend these false dichotomies with all these warring parties that are fighting each other and bring balance to the economy so that we don't have to have these different political parties and these different options that when they boil down to most they're these are my class interests I'm going to be a socialist because that's I'm going to be a capitalist because yeah and I'm not to help it too this may sound a bit contradictory but Douglas was actually opposed to the establishment of a social credit political party his followers evidently a certain of his followers did not pay any attention to that and they formed social credit political parties and actually you know achieved a certain amount of power but he actually thought that if you have a party and you label it social credit then you automatically put the other parties in a position where they have to be anti social credit and social credit is something that any and all parties should support because it's in the public interest the common good it should be a non-partisan platform and so he thought that you know it could be put it could be implemented by any political party we don't want to tie it to this or that political party and because again the minute you do that under the existing system you just you pit people against each other and we never come together to actually get anything accomplished so yeah like the carbon tax which really should be a Republican right oriented approach to the environment because you're just talking about market incentives right it's not targeted it's not it's not single anyone out but just because the liberals are for it then obviously the conservatives are against it but why should have plant more trees that actually does something the tax doesn't change anything plant more trees get more algae in the ocean well originally it's funny because here in Ontario the cap and trade system is the ultimate in a free market solution tax the bad producers and helps subsidize the innovation in green tech so like it was a market credit system where like buyers and sellers are buying from each other without government involvement so Doug Ford runs in, cancels the whole thing and now you cancelled the carbon tax? Yeah he pulled Ontario out of the cap and trade system which was like the ultimate market oriented way to move us to a greener future and then Trudill's like alright well we're just going to put this carbon tax in it's not as good but it's better than nothing because at the end of the day if carbon costs more certain businesses will have to like it'll optimize them addressing that in other ways so yeah I mean a market oriented way to bring us towards more well-being is tax things that are bad and subsidize things that are good as simple as that and it's not about government picking winners or losers it's about changing the rules of the game to favor humanity I mean government shouldn't be in the game shouldn't be operating in the game not socialism but changing the rules is ultimately what the role of government is so that the system operates with a long towards a long-term well-being yeah my view on government is smaller the better you know to protect our rights as a human citizen to protect our freedom of speech to protect our freedom of practicing whatever religion you want to practice and property rights that's kind of the foundation of a free society and the government should not be involved in the financial banking system yeah Douglas was was of the opinion that as I think I sort of alluded to before that one of the main reason we see this drift socialism yeah and this was even in his own lifetime you know he died in 1952 but I can't imagine what he would say now if you were to see how things have sort of devolved is the fact that yeah the financial system is fundamentally faulty and it creates problems you know problem reaction solution it creates problems and the government has to say well you have to give us more power and so that we can address these problems if we had an equitable efficient effective monetary system in place from the get go that again sort of linked economic destinies together so that when I achieve something it ricochets and you benefit vice versa then yeah income tax well he was against property tax Douglas was because he thought you know just because you own property doesn't mean you have the money to pay the tax I like this Douglas my type of guy and you know income tax is also sort of income tax to me is slavery my earned my labor I went out and I worked right I put in the sweat blood and tears and you come around like yeah well thanks a lot we'll take that especially as the future is moving less and less towards labor income and more towards capital I had a debate with an M.M.T. person did you? I'm like okay let's follow your train of thought why are you taxing me then if money is unlimited printing unlimited forget it we can go in debts 25 $2,000 trillion whatever that is that's your theory why bother to tax at all why bother why do you need my money if you can print on demand forever right I always tell people for me income tax is a big one I wanted to spend that like that is theft beyond theft that's you waking up every day working putting in the labor whatever labor it is you're putting in the labor and the government comes around depending on what kind of tax bracket you're in in Canada in the United States 100K is pretty much 50% of your salary gone right so it's like 48% so give me $50,000 yeah for you doing labor yeah and one of the effects if you can find some other way to pay for your free high school and other things why income shifts to something else anything else let me keep my income tax well if high schoolers got a dividend maybe they could pay for it that way pay for your own education with your dividend but sounds like the charter school system but but yeah apparently I think tax freedom day in Canada some like June the 10th middle of June according to the Fraser Institute anyway so according to that we spend in Canada we spend almost half the year and all the various taxes we pay we spend almost half the year working for the government you could make the argument that that would be fine as long as we got that value in goods and services people have that debate about whether they're getting their money's worth in publicly funded goods and services but the point I wanted to make in connection with the financial system is when someone does earn 100,000 and they got an income tax 50% what that does is it drives them into the arms of the banking system because now they don't have enough money so they have to go and borrow more money you see because maybe they can't meet the cost of this or that so it's sort of if they kept that money probably their need for debt would be much less so it's sort of it puts them in a position where they then become ripe for the picking as far as you took $50,000 away I need to get some of that back to the cost of things so now I've got to go running sort of to the banking system which is all more than willing to help out so a lot of people they don't see that end of it and yeah, if again if we had everyone had dividends and we had compensated prices you probably could slash the government bureaucracy substantially and it would be much smaller prices would be lower and yet it's not that people wouldn't have actually a dividend would be better than welfare because it's there it's always there I've got it from now until I'm not going to be told well if I start working three hours a week doing something they're going to start cutting it back I don't have to report George Carlin studies taxes one day what would they do put us all in jail like one thing that governments need to do it's not the fact that I'm opposed to tax like representation than taxation I need to be represented I'm not represented I could talk about democracy here I don't remember voting for the GST was it marooning back in the day I don't remember voting for that they were elected so I never voted for that policy did they campaign on it? you were like eight years old at the time so what? that was actually a very bold move that was a structural adjustment that needed to happen you can have manufacturers paying that tax sure you got the government here and they're sucking in taxes from all different forms of taxes income tax, sales tax, tax it's coming here and you and I as citizens paying within to this treasury I think a simple way to build also a better relationship with the government and its citizens is transparency we had the technology we have the technology now should all be available I want to see line items you can drill down as much as you want actually I was in China so I had a business in China that was recently sold and I was hanging out with the actually the general manager who ended up buying it off me that I kind of had trained into a career CEO than me he showed me this app where you can go on the app it was a government app built on APIs that the government provided you could drill down on any company anywhere in the country and see who owns it you could drill down into the holding company see who owns that the data was all made transparent the government owns all the companies it's just the data the government knows now we have registries of companies now at a governmental level people can build apps on it then we can hold people accountable I don't know what last year's tax collection was but let's say 100 billion dollars they collect 100 billion dollars it's there it's not easy to find I want to streamline where is this tax coming from where is it being allocated we have different sections of Canada I want to see a trail I want to see deficiencies of this because this is the problem where people especially on the left talk with socialist money doesn't solve problems for the most part if you have poor handlers same thing with a bad business you can dump 10 million dollars in the bad business I'm going to fix the business until you fix the operation managers of the business and the business model and so I want transparency that's how you build a better relationship I think the transparency is there people aren't looking there's a characterisation that left leading governments want more taxes they want to do things with it right leading parties campaign on lowering taxes but they're not being honest about what they're going to cut they should be honest government should not be involved in these sectors this is how much we'll cut taxes are treated as if it's its own thing it's not its own thing we should have an honest discussion what should we add everything should be transparent and once again we should revert back into city states there has to be more competition Alberta could have had its social credit system and you never know how that would have changed the course of Canada or the world history for that matter one of the things we were talking about before you arrived Floyd we were both lamenting the fact that the conservative government had contrary I believe to campaign promises ended the UBI trial in Ontario which is rather foolish because there's a lot of money and effort that was already put into it the data would have been important it would have had a significance not just in Ontario but elsewhere well I got my political I got my political theory for that nothing to do with saving money so I organised 120 CEOs saying don't cancel someone has to cancel I organised 120 CEOs who signed a letter asking Doug Ford to not cancel the pilot two weeks later he was in Thunder Bay doing some speech he never addressed us by name but he said we just cut it to save money but in fact probably more than four fifths of the budget was already spent and allocated and I think the real reason he was cut was to avoid all the good news stories coming out in the press that would have affected the next provincial election because I was actually surprised this is an experiment I was surprised to see so many stories in the media about people whose lives were changing and imagine a conservative well a progressive conservative government really progressive they should care about this because it is a fiscally responsible fiscally conservative approach to anti-poverty but imagine this particular climate of non-progressive conservative party actually seeing all these good news stories coming out in the star like every month for four years and then they run for re-election and they can't even conceive of running on a base income it would have worked against them I think that's the real reason it was cancelled was to avoid the propaganda machine being in favour of UBI over a four year period even though I think it is the most progressive conservative idea you could ever imagine it would only come back to haunt them eventually though because with automation trends and so forth some government in the future is going to have to do something yeah well it activated me it turned me into an activist I was really upset Tim it's like you could serve it as you cancelled the most conservative approach to poverty imaginable we can thank Ford for the fire underneath your ass now at least yeah and now there's someone running for provincial premier who's saying we should just go forward and do a basic income because it's it only costs a net cost of six billion dollars meanwhile the cost of poverty in Ontario is $33,000 yeah Alvin Tejo he's running right now he's been in two debates with liberal premieres he's saying we just go forward and do it because it's not expensive and I'm not sure you could have had that position if it wasn't cancelled it's created I have an idea I talked about this earlier so Mazzo Hacker needs like certain stuff should be granted free like water I needed to live and so you have these big billion dollar companies that have 100 year leases in Ontario that get water for pretty much free and they sell it to you why can't we have upside a commons approach well sure salad I don't care but give me upside it's not your water yeah so that's called one of the top world experts on base income his name is Guy Standings he's been doing this for 30 years he thinks the way we should pay for it is by what he calls tax Pagovian taxes which is taxing things that harm society and also taxing things that are extracting from the commons so what you're describing is the commons waters the commons, carbon is the commons the air is the commons that when you drive down the garden you see all these like signs you know disturbing your peace that's the commons so put a tax on those highway signs things that disturb the commons could be a source of tax for a UBI because the commons are conceptually owned by everyone and one leap that I make is to say the technology as a conceptually is also the commons because we're leveraging the contributions of past generations and Mark Zuckerberg did not invent the internet well Douglas talks about the cultural heritage right so all the inventions from like the wheel or fire, discovery of fire up to the present time they all belong to the cultural heritage of civilization and since technology on Douglas's analysis with the capital cost associated with it since that's what's causing or creating this price income gap it's only appropriate that we recognize that everyone has some kind of ownership a share, an individual share shared inheritance that's the key thesis in my TEDx talk technologies are shared inheritance and now you're giving me a language through this Douglas lens that it's this difference between income and production that is at the root of a lot of our problems today right that's right and why can't productivity benefit everyone I mean one of the last things Stephen Hawking said this is iconic statements is that if we share in the gains from all our technological ingenuity we can all have a life of leisure and a life of happiness and well-being but if we allow it to be concentrated away as it has been we're just creating a new he didn't say these exact words but we're allowing a new aristocracy to form that will think that they deserve all that wealth and while people are being left aside just like pre-revolution France where the aristocracy deserved all the land just because they were born into it and eventually humans will give themselves those powers and that kind of entitlement the entitlement of the wealthy I think wealthy entitlement problem is a social entitlement it's got to get the right kind of entitlement to figure out I saw an article on Facebook recently and they were saying that 44% of jobs in the United States the people with those jobs are making $18,000 or less I can see that some of them of course are taking home more money because they're working two or three jobs the average Canadian salary for men is 40k only hmm yeah that's minimum wage and now there's industrial humanoid robots that cost $20,000 and Amazon is almost increasing the robot workforce by almost 50% every year every time that happens you can imagine those are jobs that are being let go of in their competitors and main street retail human jobs being let go of where is that going to end that will continue this income productivity gap is just going to get worse and worse so it's amazing that Douglas would have noticed this then I wonder how big the gap is now I mean you can see the gap it's called the great decoupling when wages were going together with productivity before the invention of computing robotics maybe before the decoupling of the gold standard no one really knows why we can see it happening in fast motion now and see the impacts of it there's a multitude of reasons China entering the frame pretty much free cheap labor over there but without modern technology you couldn't ship that stuff over you couldn't coordinate, you couldn't send them designs but even that's going quickly eventually there's not going to be enough cheap labor around but China is actually changing a company is leaving to now to Vietnam the labor is too expensive over there and I believe Vietnam is in the CPTPP maybe the new agent deal which is actually actually one thing that no one actually gives credit for to something that Trudeau did with the CPTPP is he forced to be progressive there are labor standards in that agreement now there are environmental standards in that agreement now so there may be less people working in sweatshops in Vietnam because of Canada's involvement pushing progressive ideas onto a trade agreement which to me just seems like not a left or right issue I mean it's a human issue why would you agree to trade with a country that treats its people less than you would treat your own people that's not even Christian so like to me the CPTPP is it's like wow, it's amazing from a human level no one actually understands what happened there but I remember reading in the news how Japan and Australia were pissed off Canada almost torpedoed the deal because they were forcing these progressive values on it they even changed the name to include the word progressive the comprehensive and progressive TPP anyway, I went on a rant there but that's how trade should be done not what partners that share your values not what partners that treat their people like slaves because then you're an enabler you're an enabler if you give a garbage to someone else and they put it in their living room does that make you better off? maybe in the short term, not long term I think I'll wrap it up there Oliver, thank you so much if people want to get a hold of you and find out more about social credits what's the best resource for them so I've got a website which is www.socred.org so it's s-o-c-r-e-d dot org it's the website for the Clifford Hugh Douglas Institute for the Study and Promotion of Social Credit or they can just do a Google search but make sure that the social credit that they get taken to is the Douglas kind and not the Chinese kind I'll put it in the show notes so people don't make that mistake and just to sort of conclude, I would say I think Douglas had his finger on some pretty important insights and it's worthwhile I think to everyone to take a serious look at what he had to say and what he proposed to fix it because something eventually sooner rather than later will have to be done otherwise we're as a society not just Canada but the whole world is sort of headed towards shipwreck once again thank you for sharing your wisdom Floyd, thanks for coming on as well definitely do it again