So, at the simplest, it’s basically a stipend program, that creates a base income for people to get started? I mean, any system that tries to eliminate poverty, I’m skeptical of. I get some of my favorite authors liked this idea. T. S. Eliot, G. K. Chesterton, C. S. Lewis, J. R. R. Tolkien, Ray Bradbury, to name a few. And I have to admit, maybe they understand it better than I do.
But, from what I’m reading, creating a universal pool of capital for people to borrow from incurs debts. Debts don’t exist on paper, they exist as a means of distributing goods and services. So, you’re going to have to base your money on something. It can’t be based on nothing. As, at some point you’re going to run into problems with apportionment. And I think it’s pretty well proven that people need labor in order to… well… survive. People can’t live without work or occupation. That’s been proven.
Maybe as a means to, in a sense, borrow into the economy this would work. Like, you could borrow money for College Tuition, or a Business Loan, but let’s look at the primary problem with this. There’s only so much real estate on the planet. So, property, if it’s one of the things you can invest in, will naturally rise as more people are born. And you can take all segments of the economy to explain this. And I’m not being Malthusian… I think in that one instant it is pretty noticeable that there is only so much arable land and resources. So, I don’t think you’ve eliminated the problem of Scarcity to begin with.
It’s hard to say, but an economy built on the practice of lending unpayable debt… it’s assuming a surplus that did exist when this was becoming popular. But, it likely can’t exist in the future. So, the only way to create a surplus, is to have people employed. Which, some of the jobs that people are employed to do, are not really that safe, or glorious. Like, a lumberjack is endangered by the logs, a quarier is endangered by the stones. There’s some principles in the Bible that I think—even being derived from Biblical ideas that Christ preached—are forgetting other portions of the Bible. For instance, you cannot eliminate the poor from existing. Why that is is simply a few things, one of them being human corruption. There’s sin. In a world without any sin or covetousness, sure… you could possibly almost have it. But, then there’s issues with supply and demand.
I wrote about this sort of idea—it’s different in many ways—in my novel The Fifth Angel’s Trumpet. And I think one of the things I was cognizant about when writing it, was that the real estate couldn’t hold the demand for the increases in population. I knew that from the get go, and was trying to find a way around that situation. The best solution, is simply to give people work. And allow them to do their business. How you get them those resources, I think that’s what Social Capital is trying to solve. To have debts without the burden of debt. And that’s interesting, but resources aren’t created on demand. They’re not willed into existence, or come into existence by sheer wishful thinking, as much as we’d like that to be the case. There’s real processes that go into every resource, and every product we have. And to have a borrowing process that eliminates the demand for debt—it’s going to have to come from some very philanthropic lenders. Let’s just say that. There has to be some real capital behind the loans, that allows this to take place.
So, generally, in a philanthropic world, this could work if the Social Capital were lent by billionaires, but then you’re assuming King, and if there’s a king in this sort of economy, who generously lends his wealth out to people without expecting anything in return… I just don’t know if that’s better than simply having the system we have today. Especially with human fallibility. Generally, Governments don’t produce wealth. They’re not supposed to. They protect their citizens, they build roads and common infrastructure, and they don’t make a very good profit. You’re basically asking, with this system, for people like Bill Gates and Elon Musk and George Soros to lend their money to people for no interest, just on the sheer benefactory nature of it being right? As I don’t see the government turning a profit to where this would be possible. And frankly, I don’t want to be beholden to people like that for my loans. Like, banks exist for a reason, and they make money for a reason. They make money off of their interest. It’s not ex-nihilo. It’s explained pretty well in Fredrick Bastiat’s Essays on Political Economy.
My only place where I agree with this notion, is that there should be an easier way for people to make it in this world, without having to go into substantial debt. And that’s a fact, that it shouldn’t be necessary for someone to go into debt in order to make a good life for themselves. And I think that’s where I agree with this system, is in that point. It’s unethical to force people into attaining a burden of debt just to survive. And as another Bible Verse says, “The wicked nation is the borrower of another” while “The righteous nation is a lender.”
B. K. Neifert 