Charles Moyer wrote,

"Finally, in your posting to thank Leon Surette you say you agree fully
and with no reservation with his statement part of which is that Social
Credit is an erroneous solution to problems. I also agree with you and
Surette on the rest of his statement, but question this assumption on Social
Credit. To my knowledge the few experiments in Social Credit had some
limited success. Even Keynes recognised that if money was off the gold
standard that it would need some type of regulation. Is the Federal Reserve
System any more democratic than social credit would be if this was the way
the Congress decided "to coin money and regulate the value thereof"?"

    There have been no applications of Social Credit economic policies
anywhere in the world. We have had provincial Social Credit governments for
long periods in two Canadian provinces, but neither province was able, or
willing to introduce the key Social Credit policy of the National Dividend.
The only outher country in which the movement had any success was New
Zealand, but so far as I know no Social Credit government was ever elected
in that country.
    The Federal Reserve is a consortium of private banks and not an agency
of the government. Hence credit issued by the Fed does not issue from
Congress. The Fed does not print money or stamp coin, but it does regulate
the supply of currency and credit--independently of Congress. Whether this
is a good or bad thing, I leave to another discussion, but it is a mistake
to suppose that Congress controls the issue of money in the USA at this
time. There have been only two occasions when Congress issued currency--at
the time of the Revolution and the Civil War. Both of these issues ended in
scandal. Finally ,the USA is the only advanced industrial nation not to have
a government owned bank issue currency. Britain was the other until 1946,
when it nationalized the Bank of England.
    Keynesian economics is not equivalent to Social Credit, nor is the
abandonment of the gold standard the key to either Keynesianism or Social
Credit.
    Once again I recommend that anyone interested in the question of Pound's
engagement with economic thought and political engagement should read, by
yours truly, POUND IN PURGATORY, out earlier this year from Illinois UP


Leon Surette
English Dept.
University of Western Ontario
London, Ont.
N6A 3K7