Douglas went on to propose that the production/consumption gap should be filled by distribution of a cash stipend called a National Dividend, which would actually be the proper share of individuals in the bounty of the nation’s economy and resources. I believe that Douglas’s ideas merge with those of a basic income guarantee as a measure of economic freedom and justice promoted by many economists and advocates today.

It is said that ideas from the 1930s of achieving full employment by government deficit spending, a policy which can only be achieved fully in a wartime economy, were invented to counter Douglas’s ideas, which fully supported economic democracy and also provided for the elusive “leisure divided” we all know should result from modern technology. Instead, this technology in the hands of finance capitalism, backed by the power of the military imperial police state, increasingly lays waste to the resources of the earth while binding a majority of people to ever-increasing debt slavery, unemployment, and ill health due to stress.

Douglas was the first in modern times to show how technology and economic know-how could serve rather than destroy humanity, without recourse to a totalitarian collectivist society. The Social Credit movement that Douglas founded remains a powerful force in the British Commonwealth but is only starting to be known in the U.S.