November 2023
Note: Social credit as referred to here is nothing to do with the Big-Brother Chinese social credit system
At a 2023 UK conference on artificial intelligence, visiting US multi-billionaire Elon Musk – owner of Tesla and X – put forward a good idea: universal high income. But it’s not original.
100 years ago the UK Social Credit movement said (in effect – there was some complex economic and religious theory) that technology could mean leisure if the state paid a ‘dividend’ to all.
The dividend wouldn’t have been a handout. It’s owed to the people for the underpaid contribution made by them and their ancestors to the current wealth. (That debt still hasn’t been paid.)
Back then, it never happened (apart from some half-baked Canadian experiments), and the movement all-but fizzled out.
However, the movement survived – as the UK Social Credit Secretariat. Also, currently trending, there’s a related but highly diluted version: universal basic income (UBI).
At the 2023 AI conference, Musk said artificial intelligence means no one will need to work, but only if they get a universal high income – a universal basic income would be insufficient.
Unusually for Musk, this makes sense: a state-provided universal high income (UHI) could replace wages, thereby allowing civilisation to continue without wage-slavery.
And there’s no need to hang it on the futuristic threat of mass job-losses caused by AI. We can do it right now.
But how can a UHI be funded? At, say, £20,000 a year for all adults, it’ll cost the UK over £1tn a year – which obviously can’t be tax-funded.
A UHI can only be funded by the state issuing money as social credit – meaning money issued as credit for the good of society – rather than banks issuing money as profit-making debt.
States currently – historically – outsource their legal responsibility for issuing money: they delegate it to banks. Almost all money is issued by banks as debt – and is then lent to the state! It’s legalised bank robbery: robbery by the banks.
But states can reclaim their responsibility for issuing money and end the environment-destroying debt economy by issuing all money as social credit.
Such social credit will replace income tax and state borrowing. It can fund a UHI and all social spending: green energy, transport, water, health, care, housing, justice, education, infrastructure, defence, etc.
All debt, personal and business, can be forgiven – it’s a new start.
£2tn a year should do it for the UK. The Bank of England can finally make itself useful and stop kowtowing to neoliberal ‘market forces’.
The £200bn or so a year currently invested in UK businesses can be given interest-free to monitored business accounts on receipt of sound business plans including green, social and inclusive considerations.
The UK stock market will reform to facilitate this. Savings accounts and pension funds can contribute to investment by trading in the reformed stock market and sharing the profits of successful companies.
However, the ‘growth’, consumerism and built-in obsolescence needed to service debt will no longer drive business policy.
Privatised utility shareholders can be paid off and utilities run as non-profits.
The unconditional UHI will replace benefits and the state pension. People will, of course, be free to take whatever work is available or to run businesses – for extra money or for personal fulfillment.
There’ll be no hyperinflation: the social credit money issued wil be spent into the economy in a virtuous cycle.
There there’s the pleasure of telling the international money market, the World Bank and the IMF to go fuck themselves. A nation’s social credit money will be intrinsically acceptable for international trading purposes.
One loss will be bankers’ bonuses. What a shame. (Deprived of their scam, banks will have to find a more useful – if less lucrative – role.)
(See also my post Robots could mean leisure.)
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soothfairy 