C. H. Douglas

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Major C. H. (Clifford Hugh) Douglas MIMechE, MIEE, (January 20 1879–September 29 1952) , was a British engineer and pioneer of the Social Credit economic reform movement.

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[edit] Education and engineering career

C. H. Douglas was born in either Edgeley or Manchester[1], the son of Hugh Douglas and Louisa Hordern. Few details are known about his early life and training; he probably served an engineering apprenticeship before building an engineering career that brought him to locations throughout the British Empire in the employ of electric companies, railroads, and other institutions.[2] He taught at Stockport Grammar School. After a period in industry he went to Cambridge University at the age of 31 but stayed only four terms and left without graduating.[3] He worked for the Westinghouse Electric Corporation of America and claimed to have been the Reconstruction Engineer for the British Westinghouse Company in India (the company has no record of him ever working there [3]), deputy Chief Engineer of the Buenos Aires and Pacific Railway Company, Railway Engineer of the London Post Office (Tube) Railway and Assistant Superintendent of the Royal Aircraft Factory Farnborough during World War I.

[edit] Social Credit

It was while he was reorganising the work of the RAE during World War I that Douglas noticed that the weekly total costs of goods produced was greater than the sums paid out to workers for wages, salaries and dividends. This seemed to contradict the theory put forth by classic Ricardian economics, that all costs are distributed simultaneously as purchasing power.

Troubled by the seeming disconnect between the way money flowed and the objectives of industry ("delivery of goods and services", in his view), Douglas set out to apply engineering methods to the economic system.

Douglas collected data from over a hundred large British businesses and found that in every case, except that of companies heading for bankruptcy, the sums paid out in salaries, wages and dividends were always less than the total costs of goods and services produced each week: the workers were not paid enough to buy back what they had made. He published his observations and conclusions in an article in the English Review where he suggested: "That we are living under a system of accountancy which renders the delivery of the nation's goods and services to itself a technical impossibility." [4] The reason, Douglas concluded, was that the economic system was organized to maximize profits for those with economic power by creating unnecessary scarcity.[5] Between 1916 and 1920, he developed his economic ideas, publishing two books in 1920 (Economic Democracy and Credit-Power and Democracy).

Freeing workers from this system by bringing purchasing power in line with production became the basis of Douglas's reform ideas that became known as Social Credit. There were two main elements to Douglas's reform program: a National Dividend to redistribute wealth to the lower classes, and a price adjustment mechanism to ensure that workers could purchase as much as they could produce. Individual freedom, primary economic freedom, was the central goal of Douglas's reform[6]

At the end of World War I, Douglas retired from engineering to promote his reform ideas full-time—which he would do for the rest of his life. His ideas inspired the Canadian social credit movement, the Douglas Credit Party in Australia and New Zealand's Social Credit Political League. Douglas also traveled and lectured on Social Credit in Canada, Japan, New Zealand and Norway.[7]

He appeared as a witness before the Canadian Banking Enquiry in 1923 and before the Macmillan Committee[8] in 1930. His 1933 edition of Social Credit made a reference to the Protocols of the Elders of Zion, which, while noting its dubious authenticity, wrote that what "is interesting about it, is the fidelity with which the methods by which such enslavement might be brought about can be seen reflected in the facts of everyday experience."[9]

Douglas died in his home in Fearnan, Scotland. Douglas and his theories are referred to several times (unsympathetically) in Lewis Grassic Gibbon's trilogy A Scots Quair.

[edit] Notes

  1. ^ Martin-Nielsen, "An Engineer's View of an Ideal Society", p. 97
  2. ^ Martin-Nielsen, "An Engineer's View of an Ideal Society", p. 97
  3. ^ a b Macpherson, C B (2004). "Bowler, William", Oxford Dictionary of National Biography. Oxford University Press. Retrieved on 2006-11-29. 
  4. ^ "The Delusion of Super-Production", C. H. Douglas, English Review, December 1918
  5. ^ Martin-Nielsen, "An Engineer's View of an Ideal Society", pp. 97-99
  6. ^ Martin-Nielsen, "An Engineer's View of an Ideal Society", pp. 99-100
  7. ^ Martin-Nielsen, "An Engineer's View of an Ideal Society", p. 100
  8. ^ Report in the JSTOR archive
  9. ^ Major Douglas rides again: The revival of currency crankism

[edit] References

[edit] Related books

  • Social Credit (1924, Revised 1933) new edition: December 1979; Institute of Economic Democracy, Canada; ISBN 0-920392-26-1
  • Economic Democracy (1920) new edition: December 1974; Bloomfield Books; ISBN 0-904656-06-3
  • The Monopoly of Credit (1931) new edition: 1979; Bloomfield Books; ISBN 0-904656-02-0
  • The Use of Money (1935)
  • The Alberta Experiment: An Interim Survey (1937)
  • The Brief for the Prosecution, Legion for the Survival of Freedom, Incorporated; (December 1986) ISBN 0-949667-80-3
  • Whose Service is Perfect Freedom?, Canada; Veritas Publishing Company; (June 1986) ISBN 0-949667-64-1
  • The Big Idea, Veritas Publishing Company, Canada; (June 1986) ISBN 0-88636-000-5
  • The Grip of Death, Jon Carpenter, UK; (May 1998) ISBN 1-89776-640-8

[edit] Further reading

[edit] External links