The financial system, that is, the banking, cost accounting, and tax systems, can either serve the common good, or else it will serve an oligarchic elite at the expense of the common good.

The present system serves, to a greater or lesser degree, an oligarchic elite. Ever-increasing indebtedness, the rising cost of living, heavy taxation, environmental damage and decay, lack of leisure, poverty and social unrest, physical and psychological ill-health, and incremental totalitarianism are the price we pay for running the financial system as a privately owned, self-serving monopoly.

In order to restore the financial system to its proper place as a humble servant of the genuine interests of the common citizens, it is not necessary to nationalize the banks nor to alter, in substance, the nature of their day-to-day operations.

All that is needed is to prohibit the banks from filling, as they do at present, the economy’s underlying price-income gap with additional debt-money and to fill that gap instead with ‘debt-free’ credit issued directly (in the form of a National Dividend distributed independently of work status) and indirectly (in the form of a National Discount on retail prices) for the benefit of each citizen.

To this end, Social Credit proposes the establishment of a National Credit Office, free from political manipulation, to monitor and regulate a country’s financial system in line with what would be a truly common and mutually supportive monetary policy.