Welcome to Alternatives Exist
Official blog spot for www.thepeoplescredit.com.au interested in the decentralisation of everything starting with our dysfunctional and lying financial system.
It all started in December 1918 when a Scottish engineer, C.H. Douglas, wrote an article for The English Review called The Delusion of Super Production. It was the first public utterance of what would in the coming decades develop into an international movement.
The Delusion of Super Production made a vital observation that remains a central cause of economic and social dysfunction to this day. As production methods streamline and become more automated a decreasing part of production costs are made available to consumers as wages, salaries and profits.
On the one hand, wages, salaries and profits are a measure of human participation in the production of goods and services. On the other, prices are an accumulation of total costs, which, as human participation declines, are increasingly costs incurred by the development, use and replacement of machinery and technology. Since diminishing wages and profits cannot hope to cover the total cost of production, the consumer market is plagued by a shortage of purchasing power. Consumers must pay for all costs generated in the production process through prices charged for finished products, but they are only provided with the part of costs covered under wages, salaries and profits.
The result is that the market cannot clear. Prices must outrun our ability to pay them.
This problem of insufficient purchasing power means we are continually having to borrow money. Since nearly all money is loan credit, we find at every level our economic vitality sapped by absurd levels of debt obligations to banks. Surely it is time to seriously challenge the legitimacy of this convention.
Alternatives Exist believe the world’s most intractable difficulties are connected with these two inter-related problems.
Douglas’ writings stimulated an enormous literature including books, articles, pamphlets and speeches. For me personally it started with some of these old books and pamphlets on my parents’ shelves.
In my late teens when I started reading Douglas I could hardly grasp what I was looking at, but the ideas must have held some allure for me because I persisted. Gradually, I came to be able to critique economic and financial policy through a realistic lens that held the purpose of economic activity as the delivery of authentically demanded goods and services with a minimum of labour and resource expenditure. An economy designed to deliver human satisfaction rather than one orientated for the purpose of maximising output, statistical abstractions like GDP, debt and bullshit jobs.
The economy optimised for the provision of human satisfaction contrasts starkly with the kind of economics we find everywhere in the world today. National, business and personal debt has reached absurd proportions, the cost of living is out of control, automation promises a deepening of the employment crisis and the production system is always failing to produce the kind and quality of goods genuinely demanded by the community at a price we can afford.
The catalyst for our efforts at this time is the startling slap in the face that was the Covid response. I admit to being caught by surprise. I was aware of the lack of accountability in government and big business, but it would not have previously occurred to me that vaccine mandates, curfews, censorship, forced business closures, border checkpoints and the list goes on, were things that could just be switched on as they were. The reckless indifference of the controllers was shockingly brought home to many of us by the insistence that children be treated with an untried, unnecessary gene therapy.
Whatever the Corona Virus was, the response of political and corporate actors brought the existence of the design for global government into the open. Increasingly people are waking up to the dangers of a coordinated, centralising policy of international government, corporations and finance, and therein might lie an opportunity for resistance.
The purpose of Alternatives Exist is twofold. Firstly, we set our sights generally on all centralising power that seeks to remove choices that should properly rest with the individual. We have a preference for small government, small business, small farms and local production and distribution networks which provision and strengthen local communities and families. These small things are being dissolved into the big, and it isn’t good for people or the planet.
More specifically we contend that the problems with economics and finance identified by Douglas remain unresolved, which means that dysfunctional cost/price accounting and debt economics remains a threat to national and individual freedom. We aim to draw attention to these critical problems and propose solutions.
There may be a chance for redemption before we assume our status as disowned peasants in some sort of dystopian techno feudalism. We join the ranks of people and organisations coming forward to face down the myriad threats to freedom emerging from concentrated power.
William Waite Northern Rivers, July 2023
"The delivery of authentically demanded goods and services with a minimum of labour and resource expenditure. An economy designed to deliver human satisfaction rather than one orientated for the purpose of maximising output, statistical abstractions like GDP, debt and bullshit jobs." Let us resonate together on this theme! Please visit substack, https://substack.com/@emilypeytontruthrises and come on board we are planning a marvelous plan to deliver human(e) satisfaction.