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Ditch your Bank, And the Current Economy – Moses Coady Revisited

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I screwed up in my last post. After including the Moses Coady excerpt about the Great Default of the People I teased a follow-up post explaining the Great Default — I was very excited by the opportunity to revisit Coady’s ideas!

Here’s the excerpt I had in mind, the one that really reveals the underpinning of Coady’s conclusion of where our society went wrong:

“Every community in North America, even our greatest city, was once a cluster of log cabins surrounded by a blackened stumpland. While the rest of the pioneers were busy pulling and burning stumps, one who did not fancy such hard work foresaw the possibilities of supplying them with the necessities of life. With an eye to future real estate values, he chose the best corner and set up a small store. In every near-by community there was a similar bright fellow to do the same. The outcome was a wholesale, a bank, an insurance office, until the common man found himself surrounded by a host of agencies eager to service him, to do for him all the offices he had hitherto done for himself. Each, of course, wanted his price—a price usually determined by himself, in the setting of which the receiver of all this service had no say. The consumer paid what he was asked or was forced to deny himself when he could not pay.”

In those frontier times the great default was deviating from the common collaboration. In times where field-clearing, house building, barn raising, and harvesting were community joint-ventures, these communities defaulted on their right to oversee the fulfillment of the communities’ needs by indulging and accepting these entrepreneurships. The quick criticism of this perspective is the promise of competition within the capitalist system. Coady responds to this criticism here:

“If the early business men foresaw the possible consequences of what they had begun, they salved their consciences with a convenient theory—the theory of laissez faire. Competition, they virtuously declared, would take care of any irregularities that might arise. If one dealer charged excessive prices, someone else would go into the business and sell below him. The slogan was ‘Every man for himself and the devil take the hindmost!’ Could any theory be more crude or unscientific! As well try to fix a watch with a crowbar as to regulate the delicate economic machine with competition.”

As I wrote last week “the foundation of our society is still unsound; the truth is gaining wider acceptance that Civilization’s best programs cannot fix what is fundamentally flawed.” So long as we continue to indulge such private individual or corporate enterprise in favor of a co-operative economy, we will continue to suffer the ills of society.



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