Salvation Through Inflation: The Economics of Social Credit (1993)
The Social Credit movement was launched in 1917 by an obscure British engineer, Major C. H. Douglas. He was a fiat money inflationist. John Maynard Keynes was a fan of Douglas.
The familiar anti-capitalism argument today is that the free market economy is flawed because the commercial banking system does not create sufficient money to enable consumers to buy the economy's total output. It is an old idea stretching back to John Law early in the 18th century and the French Revolution at the end. This idea undergirds modern Keynesianism but it also undergirds the teaching of the right wing "funny money" movement, from Gertrude Coogan to the Social Credit movement.
Douglas presented this idea in 1917. Keynes referred somewhat favorably to Douglas's basic idea in The General Theory. The Social Credit movement still exists in Canada, Australia, and New Zealand, and its ideas are still used to defend the creation of a State-controlled fiat money system totally divorced from gold and silver. These ideas are quite widely accepted in the fringe movements of the far right, including the Christian right. This book refutes this "shortage of money" idea, especially the supposedly Christian versions of it.
Defenders of Douglas' monetary reform scheme have offered arguments against free market money, private banking, and gold. Many of them have been fundamentalist Christians. In the 1930's, they captured the Canadian province of Alberta and kept control for a decade.
Social Credit ideas have spread from England to Canada, Australia, New Zealand, and South Africa. Its proposed reform resembles the reform proposals of the late nineteenth-century's "greenback" movement in the United States, which still exists in the "underground" of America's far right.
I gave a lecture on Social Credit to the Mises Institute in 2011.
My book, Salvation Through Inflation, provides a comprehensive but easy-to-read refutation of these ideas. It invokes the Bible and Austrian School economic analysis to challenge the economics of Social Credit. Download it here: