[PEN-L:4044] Re: Re: local money

[Carrol Cox <cbcox@xxxxxxxxx>]

Jim Devine wrote:

> I'm told (I believe by US NPR) that Pound was under the influence of the
> monetary ideas of Major Douglas, a fringey economist (a monetary crank)
> that Keynes cites

Yes, as follows (from Canto 38):

"I have of course never said that the cash is constant
(Douglas) and in fact the population (Britain 1914)
was left with 800 million of "*deposits*"
after all the cash had been drawn, and
these deposits were satisfied by the
            printing of treasury notes.
A factory
has also another aspect, which we call the financial aspect
It gives people the power to buy (wages, dividends
which are power to buy) but it is also the cause of prices
or values, financial, I mean financial values
It pays workers, and pays *for* material.
What it pays in wages and dividends
stays fluid, as power to buy, and this power is less,
per forza, damn blast your intellect, is less
than the total payments made by the factory
(as wages, dividends, AND payments for raw material
bank charges etcetera
and all, that is the whole, that is the total
of these is added into the total of prices
caused by that factory, any damn factory
and there is and must be therefore a clog
and the power to purchase can never
(under the present system) catch up with
prices at large,

            and the light became so bright and so blindin'
in this layer of paradise
            that the mind of man was bewilered.
=========

Those last three lines, incidentally, at length link up not only with
Pound's infatuation with Mussolini, but with his complimenting
Wyndham Lewis for "discovering" Hitler before he (Pound) did.
Incidentally, Pound also thought it was the King's stamp that
gave a coin value, and that this disproved all materialisms. His
somewhat odd idea about dividends probably comes as much
from Dante and St. Thomas as from Douglas and Gesell (I can't
remember now who Gesell was, but Pound always couples his
name with Douglas).

Carrol