Functional socialism

28 FUNCTIONAL SOCIALISM

currency its main asset is contrary to sound policy, is in restraint of trade, and might reasonably be treated as a criminal conspiracy. Function would not be slow to declare that currency must always be in an agreed ratio to production, and would inaugurate a new system of currency, which must not, of course, be mistaken for a new system of finance.

In like manner, our functional authority would promptly devise the national dividend, now advocated by the Social Creditors, but for a generation an item in the Socialist programme and _ historically deriving from Adam Smith. But, equally on functional grounds, it would reject any claims for social credit to be issued over and above the so-called “just price’.

Without labouring this point further, I hope it is clear that, in the application of the functional principle, we reach the true measure of all financial claims. There is an amazing passage in the Report of the Macmillan Committee which has been ominously ignored. ‘“‘One of our most valuable sources of income, indeed one of our most important export industries, is the practice of international banking and associated services. Along with our shipping and our staple export industries this has been for a long period past one of our main sources of wealth.” When we remember that over a long period of time, the Bank of England has been paying for our imports with gold, whilst our export trades and shipping were languishing, the enormity of this declaration by a body of men charged to enquire not only