Functional socialism

FUNCTION 39

is in the bone, muscle, brain, and character of our people. The Banks possess about ten thousand premises, half of them redundant, about a quarter of a million pieces of office furniture, one hundred tons of ledgers, ten tons of slips of paper with signatures scrawled upon them. Er voila tour! The Bank Directors do not lunch on gold or sip the thin wine of promissory notes; their food comes from the baker, the butcher, the fruiterer. They are clothed by the tailor; they travel on train or motor, the work of the engineer. They live in houses, the work of the builder; they sleep on beds, the work of the upholsterer. Function nurses them, supplies their needs and, in due course, buries them. If, as is supposed, all these industrial processes are kept alive by the banks, then we may be sure that the country is bankrupt or suffering from some malignant disease. When the moneylender comes in at the door, solvency flies out of the window. Yet this improvident condition is regarded by the mass of the population as a sure indication of wealth and prosperity. Our standard of value is financial and not functional. There is, of course, the usual snag in such simple reasoning. The banks have become possessed ofor at least control—that vast pool of financial credit which is the work of the community; which is valueless without the co-operation of the community. A functional society could drain that pool in a single day and then create another fifty times greater. There is a world of difference between credit measured by bank values and credits based on functional values.