Some people seem to be a little alarmed by the phrase “consumer-credit,” as if it involved some vast and dangerous experiment along untried paths.

Don't be frightened at a word. “Consumer-credit” simply means “credit which is not producer-credit.”

Producer-credit consists of bank-overdrafts allowed to industry for production, or to Governments and Municipalities to carry on their work. Loans bearing interest, loans issued upon securities which will become the property of the lender if the loan is not repaid. That is producer-credit as it exists to-day. There is nothing specially Catholic or traditional about it. On the contrary, it is (or would be, if the lender were lending real money, which he isn’t) precisely what was always called sinful Usury in the old days; it is a modem kind of “money” which bears upon it the guilt and stain of debt from the first moment of its existence.

Of course, this producer-credit could be and ought to be controlled in the public welfare and issued free of interest; but even so it would still provide incomes only for those at work, not for the ever-increasing army of the dispossessed unemployed and their dependents, nor for the aged and incapacitated. These would still have to be supported grudgingly out of taxation levied on the working population.

Hence the idea of introducing credits into industry from the consumption-end of the process also. We affirm the possibility of “consumer-credit,” which would be nothing but ordinary sane means-of-exchange money, based upon the community’s credit or power of production and put into circulation by the Ruler. As its name indicates, it would be issued direct to consumers as such, and would give them a means of setting the producers as such to work. It might be issued to all consumers (national dividend) or only to some (old age pensions, children’s allowances, etc.).