Chapter 9
Dollarability
2Money was devised primarily as an abstract means by which man might convert his specific-work (energy conversion) into the acquisition of the work of others necessary to his completeness of growth.
3 The more industrialized man has become in harnessing his environment for mutual inter-service, protection, routine and growth, the more specialized—that is, the more scientifically cooperative—he has also become.
4 The main difference between the agrarian world, with its dominant animate slavery, and the industrial world, which is characterized by the inanimate servitude of abstract power, is that, in the former man could—and did—essentially consume and support himself out of the direct products of his work, whereas today’s industrial worker could not possibly survive by the consumption of the glass bulb turned out by the machine he tends, or of an electric winding.
5 In the agrarian era of local intercourse, man could barter his surplus product directly with the local producer of other necessities. Money, as an abstract interpolation medium, was unnecessary. Such money as was then in circulation functioned as a means of product conversion in the export, by the landlord, of the surplus products of his serfs. In foreign lands these were converted into tangible forms of intrinsic wealth for the landlord’s account.
6 In the current industrial era, the ‘‘dollar’’ is an utter necessity for the worker in the interpolation of his specialized work into essential goods and services; not, however, the metallic dollar, which is a relic from the buccaneering age when exporting landlords had little knowledge of the value of goods to be received in exchange for their produce. They were trading, as have, also, frontiersmen, even up to now, with unknown people and toward whom they had not by experience established credit. In the course of early trading, a metallic money was developed as a concentrate medium of exchange and a belief grew up as to its potentially direct value, which in due course was improperly termed ‘‘credit.’’ Money, metallically, was relatively the safest medium of temporary value maintenance, being almost non-corrosive and non-substitutable due to its rarity. Moreover, because of its high concentration it was easily stowable and defendable.
7 This metallic characteristic of money is no longer a primarily essential part of the internal U. S. dollar. Not only is the industrial worker of America willing to interpolate his work stint into a paper dollar—an intrinsically worthless medium—but actually prefers it to a metallic dollar, since he credits every worker in the United States with an understanding of, and belief in, the integrity of cooperation that obviates a metallic specie in favor of the far more efficiently transportable ‘‘greenback.’’ He goes even further. He writes his own dollars in the form of checks, signifying integrity in a still higher degree.
8 In the course of his employment by an industrial establishment, the American worker often receives a check for his services which says, in effect, that he has industrially done his stint on the basis of so many hours of precise energy conversion, the value of his length of service being at least theoretically amplified in direct proportion to the technical nicety of his precision-ability in the process of energy conversion.
9 This check, which represents an account of his work, is usually deposited in an accounting-storage for subsequent conversion into whatever services and goods he needs within the limits of this storage. Very often the check is immediately exchanged by the ‘‘bank’’ for dollar bills, for efficient reasons, a few of which we shall relate.
10 If a workers accounted total of work is small and his requirements minimal, the individual value of the goods and services of which he is in immediate need is low, the true value being basically determined by the quantum of converted energy involved in the product of service, despite popular misconceptions of value due to a ‘‘royalty’’-to-‘‘royalty’’ or ‘‘profit’’ superimposition.
11 Coins of small denomination represent a particularly useful work conversion medium for the individual in the interpolation of work into low value goods and services since cash sales minimize ‘‘overhead.’’ Such coins, however, seldom represent the real intrinsic, or open market, value of the metal out of which they are stamped; for instance, a dollar in pennies may be worth only about 150 as copper metal. Coins of small denomination are denominationally valid only by popular credit. As fractional units of paper dollars (by man’s habit of thinking) they are so quickly and therefore so efficiently handled that their use eliminates the costly accounting necessarily involved in the acquisition of minor goods and services through the medium of a paper check.
12 It costs the accounting agent (‘‘bank’’) approximately 50 to handle a check. This charge is now in process of being shifted directly to the accountee in various systems such as the ‘‘master checking account.’’ In these plans a balance need not be kept by the depositor, who simply pays 50 for every check or sum of cash deposited to, and 50 for every check drawn against his account. Should this practice become general the banking system’s necessity of making hidden-from-the-populace profit for existence would be eliminated.
13 Accounting is quite as definitely an energy conversion process as in any other physical work, involving our three ‘‘satisfaction’’ factors: Energy available, Time, and Precision. It may be accomplished efficiently in relation to large operations and highly complicated energy conversion problems, where there is an uniform sequence of events permitting the use of mechanical calculators, but it cannot be efficiently utilized in highly variable, small transactions in which the whimsy and opinions of men are involved.
14 Whim is most specifically involved at the present moment in the matter of WHERE and WHEN and into WHAT man is going to convert small portions of his time-energy credits, particularly in the field of low value products and services, for the acquisition of which empirical fractional metallic equivalents are efficiently essential. For instance, in the 50 and 100 store where, seeing a lamp shade or writing pad for only 100 which he ‘‘might’’ want he ‘‘whimsicalizes’’ his small credit of 100 for one or the other,—or for another beer.
15 The fact that exploitation of this naive, whimsical intercoursing and trans-acting of man, granted a job, or a ‘‘relief sense of any security still exists in ‘‘credit-storage-establishments,’’ does not minimize the importance of the factual trend from metallic specie to abstracted credit certificates—progressive ephemeralization of the expanding universe.
16 This exploitation confusion is due to the physical (though otherwise non-identical) relationship between metallic money—efficiently still necessary to ‘‘small changing’’—and the distinctly different international trading requirements for actual metal not only in ounces and pounds but often in tons of gold and silver buillion to be stored in continental banks as collateral in the international export-import trade.
17 Such export collateral is still necessitated by dissimilarity of languages, especially money languages (remembering that our definition of language involves sympathetic understanding), and the numerical and symbological variance of the accounting systems of various nations, just as in earliest trading days. The difference between Roman and Arabic numerals provided ‘‘cause’’ for profitable misunderstanding. None of the nations whose monetary policies are locally dominated by self-interested metallic bullion holders has, as yet, signified its willingness to standardize, or, as they call it, ‘‘stabilize’’ in relation to any other nation. Why? Because they do not as yet have to, by virtue of any laws of physics, except those of ballistics, and there are fortunes to be made overnight in the guessing game fluctuations developed by world-wide important ‘‘chance’’ events. Among such factors are obviously the vagaries of season, storms,—a million ‘‘Chinks’’ drowned by a flood—which make international stabilization almost impossible. Nationalism itself is the big ‘‘fly in the ointment.’’
18 There is still current a scarcity of rare metals with which to cover the volume of international export and import trade. This scarcity can be increased in any locality by shipment of the metals from any one country to another by those who own the dominant ‘‘units.’’ Wherefore the international money game is one of chess playing, bullion being the pawn. The great variable occurs through an admixture of interlocking directorates who have their hands in all four pockets, both sides and back and front, money and commerce, manufacture and transport. When one of these players finds that he has goods to sell and the buyer has too little bullion to handle the trade, the former is in the market to buy bullion. When both have made a profit through the transaction the bullion which they induced into the trade, provided either has no further goods immediately for sale, is put on the market, the collateralizer becoming a seller.
19 International metallic money traders are the direct descendants of the parasitic underwriters of the buccaneering might-makes-right fighting world of old. It is quite likely that none of its current representatives will succumb to stabilization without an actual fighting showdown. Searching analysis reveals that the current militaristic world activity is specifically fanned by, and indirectly originated by an intramural ‘‘big shot’’ fight over metallic money’s stabilization dominance among the advocates of divergent policies in the matter of exploitation of man’s needs by virtue of the legalized status of their intermediary.
20 The international metallic money group early usurped, through their feudal dominance of workers, the credit storage mechanisms (banks) of the workers. They are now fighting to retain their hold on these because there is an intrinsic-wealth turnover value in the utilization, for their own gain, of the workers’ credit while it remains stored with them. Bankers use people’s credit when entrusted to them with no more moral equity than a storage warehouse proprietor has to use for himself the automobiles and furniture of people stored with him.
21 The metallic money bankers have, by dint of the obscurity requisite to the pursuance of their legalized and tradition-‘‘honored’’
22 racket, blinded the populace to a true interpretation of the meaning and all-mighty power of their dollar or work unit equivalents. Given the opportunity to understand the truth, the populace will no longer be willing to have their banks run as they are at present, but will infinitely prefer that the government run them; i.e., they will run them themselves, emancipated entirely from management by metallic money racketeers who, as ‘‘compensation’’ for their services, assign to themselves a credit ‘‘take-out’’ of some 10% of all that the workers produce. In full consideration of these facts, the workers may insist on government management of their credit storage and credit interpolation with a fixed overhead charge through affixed stamps.
23 When government handling of personal credit accounts is incepted (it has already been willy-nillied into taking over the bulk of major utility, R.R., and realty credit handling) an efficient means for the elimination of ‘‘small change’’ transactions will unquestionably and inevitably have to be evolved, certainly at least for the conversion of an individual’s work into goods and services of immediate true necessity.
24 Irrespective of the myriad of trade names for specific food products that have won preferment through poetic and dramatic advertising, every man, woman and child can—and should—consume a specific average amount of standard foods per annum.
25 It would be an highly efficient move on the part of the government, as the representative of a specific number of people for whom goods and services in satisfaction of every essential need are now produced, and are continuously more abundantly producible, to accredit basic rations on Bureau of Standards classifications. This would obviate the multitudinous accounting intricacies of the present method, with a high supercharge for legal enforcement involved in the rightful acquisition by the people of essential goods and services produced by the one for the other. It would eliminate, also, the daily three trips to the grocer’s, if he is near, and the once-a-week trip if he is far away. This elimination could be accomplished by the bold stroke of automatically accrediting each and every human being with the acquisition-ability of those essentials of survival and growth which have attained ‘‘plenitudinous’’ status—grade ‘‘B’’ milk, for instance—just as the government has already accredited primary education with a bookkeeping system reduced to simple arithmetic. There is no problem in education of necessity to account for the high ‘‘take’’ of the student who is a glutton for knowledge against the child who eschews it. Similarly, the food balance would be maintained because no stomach is so big that it could upset the credit system.
26 Lest such an accounting efficiency provoke stagnation and retrogression, the government need only reserve the right of decision of placement of monthly, or other progressive time-unit contracts, with the industrial groups competing for the provision of staples. The basis of arriving at such decisions would be that of competitive bidding for the furnishing of the required goods and services, relative to an itemization of standards scientifically determined.
27 It would be even more preferable if the individuals of the populace, having been accredited at their central bank, be allowed to place their own contracts monthly at the local A. & P. or Reeves, et cetera, thus indicating an authentic vote as to the quality of service provided by the suppliers, whom the government will accredit centrally at their bank on the basis of per capita contract placement.
28 This credit of the people, by the people, and for the people, through the medium of government (themselves) could be inaugurated and maintained without changing the present industrial and banking systems. It would be necessary only to eliminate the monetary entrepreneurs from these inevitable basic functions.
29 It is not suggested that this method of accounting simplification should supersede the present procedure of credit-storaging by individuals of EXCESS credits EARNED by them from their industrial service by reason of ingenuity and super-to-minimum-stint activity.
30 This is not a new plan. The government already acts similarly in the matter of awarding monthly contracts for the furnishing of goods and services to government establishments, such as the Army, Navy, Panama Canal, et cetera. It does not do this, however, as a blanket United States contract. The awards are made locally by the supply officers at the Brooklyn Navy Yard, Boston, Pearl Harbor, and elsewhere, which allows for adjustment to local conditions and meritorious branch service. This system has not been confined simply to governmental contracting. It has been demonstrated in partial effect and to a high degree of efficiency in the great cooperatives of England and the Scandinavian countries, where the accounting efficiency, however, has been fouled by the fact that it is not an all people’s accounting, which would eliminate the actual mark-up of the individual item of every bill of goods currently adding 20 to every loaf of bread.
31 This system is not to be confused with the ‘‘bread lines’’ of the purely communistic meal ticket because, as advocated, this plan would apply in the first place only to basic food stuffs and not to the caviar of the scarcity category, and, secondly, it would promote competition among the purveyors. That there is a great surge toward such a system is demonstrated not only in the ever normal granary types of solution of mal-distributed products, but also in the several thousand cooperatives that have mushroomed up in the U. S. and which have been attempting to organize consumers, but which will never be highly effectual as compared to the efficiency involved in the foregoing governmental, all people’s, energy-credit interpolating procedure.
32 At present the value of super-to-stint service is appraised haphazardly by operating managers who are in a dilemma or ‘‘on the mat’’ between entrepreneuring-for-unearned-decrement directors, on the one hand, the workers on another, and, kicking them in the pants from behind, the engineers and scientists indicating increased efficiencies of operation to be obtained by the continual change of process, instrument, management and distribution.
33 These ‘‘on the mat’’ industrial operating managers are controlled, through fear of job loss, by the ‘‘directors’’ of profit extraction and are dealt with, by the latter, also on an OPINION basis. ‘‘Directors’’ are continually of the OPINION that greater profits should be produced, and no improvements instituted. This attitude makes it generally impossible for managers to listen to the scientific rationalization of ingenious and willing-to-work, super-to-minimum-stint people. It is impossible for them to listen to and rationalize (ratio-analyze) the efficiencies urged upon them in the name of science or equity of worker-credit.
34 The fact remains, however, that improvements of service and product ARE reducible to a specific energy conversion terminology. Furthermore, it is not only possible but highly efficient and facile to determine, in advance, the precise energy and time-saving involved in any improvement of industrial operation. This is already being done, in a degree, by industry in the flow sheets of its research departments.
35 Were managers relieved of the necessity of justifying their decisions to the OPINION of directors, they could calculate scientifically, in terms of precise time and energy saving, the specific value of the ideas evolved by any person, whether or not the latter is fortified by an academic diploma.
36 In this connection, the therblig studies of the Link Belt Company are important. A therblig is the lowest common denominator of human mechanical motion, the therbligs are now actually in use for basic ‘‘cost’’ determination in many scientifically managed industrial establishments.
37 A mechanical study was made of the human structure (somewhat as in our phantom captain analysis). So many ‘‘cranes,’’ et cetera, were catalogued, together with the limiting swings and balance of the cranes, for checking up, turning, addressing work to external machines for forming, polishing, et cetera. Slow motion camera studies showed whether the total energy available was being efficiently articulated or whether the ‘‘crane’’ under consideration was describing an inefficient arc further complicated by interspersed unnecessary muscular contractions and expansions.
38 It was thus possible to determine what the simplest crane motion could be and how much energy it would require. Consequently it was possible to demonstrate the efficient motion to the worker in such a manner that any worker, after two days of learning, irrespective of educational advantage (provided he was not deformed), could perform the operation within the specific energy and time equation indicated by the advanced theoretical analysis. It was found that, after two days’ experience, there was virtually no variation between the performance by a worker who had been skilled in one of various arts and the man of no tutoring or skill, when reduced to this ‘‘simplest’’ operation. The flow of work was then composed of these completely segregated simplest motions.
39 This system, which was developed for simplification, for the safety of the worker, and to provide every physical worker with an EQUAL ADVANTAGE to any other, involved the employment, if properly followed, of a vast number of workers, due to the multiple segregation. It has never been widely applied, however, as it was ‘‘too theoretical’’ for profit directed management. It did not constitute a ‘‘speed up’’ of the individual, but was a natural, rhythmic and safe motion that did not deplete the worker’s energy storage or mental balance.
40 A further purpose of the therblig studies was the idea that such a system, if carried out in full, would make it possible to inter-account work activity, not only between departments of an industry but between whole industries, with the same accuracy that costs can be determined where inanimate electric power and machines alone are concerned. The cost could be determined with the accuracy with which power production itself is now determined: to the millionth of a cent. Such a system would automatically provide a yardstick of basic energy conversion for every worker and every product cost throughout the world, and furthermore would completely segregate his super-to-stint activity which emanates individually from his abstract or initiative and rationalizing activity.
41 These therblig studies are of true scientific determination and are in no way to be confused with the Bedauxor ‘‘B’’ (B-damned) system or any other of the speed-up or piece-work schemes that have been promoted for the specific purpose of higher profit. The therblig unit is a basic motion unit beyond which no speed-up can be made. It is something like Einstein’s ‘‘c2,’’ i.e., TOP efficient speed. Therefore no speed-up system could be imposed upon the therblig studies. The latter bring us to the determination of a basic physical work unit, involving no invention or mental resourcefulness. These units make up into a yardstick or basic rate in the terms of which the worker’s TRUE dollar is interpolated: ‘‘A dollar an hour’’ for basic energy conversion into work without recourse to initiative, which anyone can perform if scientifically instrumented and instructed.
42 No legislative peg of minimum wages and maximum hours, even on an annual pay basis, can be of any value to the worker until his dollar is standardized upon this unit physical energy conversion rate, instead of upon a basic metal unit, which unit in turn is subject to scarcity manipulation and to monopoly. Individual ‘‘work’’ belongs to all men, is in the plenitudinous category, and cannot be taken from them except by a political system that countenances slavery in one form or another. The democratic theory is the only political theory thus far advanced that does not, on the one hand, countenance ‘‘slavery’’ and yet, on the other, is complementary to ‘‘industry.’’
43 Once this basic rate of conversion-of-energy to products is established, then super-to-stint activity of the individual with initiative can come into account to be reckoned and rewarded very specifically as mechanical inventions that may be demonstrated to convert energy by inanimate mechanics into work in a more efficient manner than already demonstrated in the particular field involved.
44 Compensation for such activities as acting or playwriting, seemingly foreign to the production of essentials, will always be determined on the basis of pure demand and supply, or by acclaim.
45 When the basic pure physical energy activity, as above related, is compared with the supplying of man’s basic survival essentials, a balance sheet can easily be taken off which will certify the opportunity of work to all healthy people. It is sheer guess to estimate what the basic annual stint requirements to pay off annual basic supply would be, but it may be reasonably hazarded to be in the nature of a month’s service per annum.
46 This area of man’s occupation in production and consumption IS socializable, but only by straight engineering and science. All other activities of man are super-to-stint, to be rewarded, either
47 by mechanical analysis or by popular acclaim. If you happen to be Mrs. Gotrocks, and think you have plenty of dollars to avoid basic stint, okay. This is not a social system involving tearing the top down. If you have enough dollars to last the rest of your life, fine! This system does, however, allow the nomination of a dollar on which all people of the world can be self-supporting—a basic rate to which all other service is not only relative, but relative-plus.
48 Now, what is our true dollar?
49 We have already determined that a worker can develop .13 k.w.h. a day. What is the electrical production industry’s charge for a k.w.h.? It has been charging all that the traffic will bear. But the k.w.h. costs the electrical industry delivered within a 150 mile radius of the dynamo approximately $.006, when produced from fuels, and approximately $.003, when produced hydraulically.
50 In view of the fact that the 30 watts per hour maximum life average energy-conversion-to-work by man from sun and stars, direct and indirect, is worth, on the basis of 1938 U. S. hydraulic power cost ($.003 per k.w.h.) but $.000906 per hour, and his day’s work $.00039, year’s work $.1425, and his total lifetime’s work $4.30, it is obvious that an hourly wage rate must be established, which, in addition to man’s energy output, will compensate him for self and mechanical extension control ability, responsibility of parenthood, and for his legacy of literacy, knowledge in general, and civilized attitude toward voluntary cooperation.
51 If we adhere to today’s intuitively integrated ‘‘dollar’’ value as a unit, in order to evolute instead of revolute, we find, after calculating the total cost of man’s arriving at the age of mature service and of maintaining himself during his 30 years of social usefulness, that, in order to ‘‘break even’’ man must receive a $ 1 an hour BASE-WAGE. How do we arrive at this?
52 We will make an appraisal of all work and time-energy conversion cost involved in
spontaneous family continuity based not only on work done for others for money, which
is all that is now legally accounted in U. S. ‘‘income,’’ but upon home duties,
farm
activities, voluntary direct prosocial activity, and self preparation for greater
service.
53 It now costs U. S. society approximately $10,000 to nurture and educate the average child until the age of 18. This not only includes his education, but all other costs, direct or indirect, as, for example, food, clothing, shelter, as well as the paving of the streets the child walks to and from school upon and the policing and lighting of the same. On reaching maturity the average U. S. human will, at present writing, have 30 years’ expectancy in which to refund society for this investment in him. Each average individual, therefore, must amortize himself at $333 per annum. (Succeed by intelligent design in increasing ‘‘expectancy’’ and the rate will decrease proportionately.)
54 The amortization for two parents is currently
55 Cost of maturing 2 children, at the ‘‘now’’ rate of $10,000 each for 18 years (This figure might be greatly reduced with increased efficiency of end result by television education)
56 Maintenance of the parents, including shelter, food, clothing, industrial and government services in general, at $1500 each (decency standard)
57 The average American family consists of the parents and two children. In accounting the work of the family, the mother’s labor in the home must be included, as equal to the father working either at home or for someone else, in the pertinent aspects of energy, ingenuity, time, and precision involved, as must also that of the children as helpers during non-educational and play periods, the work of the two latter being assumed to be the equivalent of one adult. This makes a total of three adult equivalents. The average energy-work of an adult per day in a life-time’s span, as we have previously determined, is 4.3 hours a day, 365 days to the year, a total of 1570 hours each per annum. Three adults would represent 4710 hours of work a year. If we will acknowledge that man’s TRUE CAPITAL is his TIME and that his true dollarability is an objectivized hour of that time and not a chip of metal in somebody else’s pocket or in a Kentucky mountain vault, then a true hour accounting of average intelligent effort, farm, factory, or fireside, would adequately balance ‘‘costs’’ as now determined by our abstracted fear-longing-and-credit poised dollars which total up to $4710 minimum annual family output.
58 $666.00 per annum
59 1110.00 per annum
60 3000.00 per annum
61 $4776.00
62 If Murph or his wife work ‘‘out’’ on a 40 hour-week basis, they can accomplish their 1570 hour social-stint in 39 weeks and take a 3 months annual vacation; if they work on a 30 hour-week basis 52 weeks will be consumed, ergo no vacation. If they use their ‘‘bean’’ a bit one or two months a year of ‘‘out work’’ might get them ‘‘by.’’
63 There are many $50,000 a year executives in the U. S. If they were paid at the hydraulic power rate, they would have to develop an efficient energy-management-ability of 16,500,000 k.w.h. per annum, or the equivalent of a 2000 k.w. hydroelectric turbo-generator, running 24 hours a day for a year, or a 20,000 k.w. generator on the basis of the present running time of power equipment. Our $50,000 executive, granted he is worth this, is the equivalent, as an energyarticulation-motor, of the 4 combined 1000 horse power motors of the Boeing ‘‘Flying Fortress’’ when turning-up at full roaring speed, hypothetically engaged in a non-stop flight of 110 trips around the world at the equator within one year. ‘‘Some’’ executive! Yet Mr. Ford is probably demonstrating 10 times this power management ability (’Tho, allowing it to compound, he has never ‘‘cashed in’’).
64 Compare this power interpretation with our overall-accounted $4710 a year by-guess-by-God-and-by-love work of the average family, or with the $1569 of the man of the family if he is hiring out at the rate of $ 1 an hour for ‘‘pickanshovel, passthebuck labor.’’ At that rate of pay, as an energy articulating mechanism, he is at least equivalent to an 80 h.p. Ford motor running 24 hours a day for a year; while as a moron-prime-mover he or the executive would be but the equivalent of a 1/2 candle power flash light bulb glimming for a year.
65 10 million unemployed American workers considered only as tread-mill power producers, Roman galley slaves, or pyramid stone elevators, sum totally as a team of 10 million, are but the mechanical power equivalent of a 67 h.p. or ‘‘little Ford’’ motor running 24 hours a day for a year. En masse, as pure might, the 10 million are worth less than one man at our base rate of a dollar-hour—to such a dominant equation has right progressed over might. We have indeed developed a long way from slave days in actual mechanical, energy, and brain fact, and it is either to be:—man’s hour yardsticks the dollar; or the metallic dollar will have to be deflated 99.999% to have tactical meaning. Gamblers who have set their traps for the ‘‘great inflation’’ might well apprentice in stenography while waiting.
66 The overage momentarily in favor of that relay of executives who really earn $50,000 a year, represents compensation for the latter’s investment in self-training, time speculation, and the mastery of knowledge which brought them to the point of proven and accredited compositional ability of the activities of man with his mammoth mutual mechanical extensions and inanimate power harnessings to a total equivalent of 16!4 million k.w.h. per annum harmonic group articulation.
67 In view of the $4.30 life-time energy conversion value of men as moron-prime-movers, we understand clearly why evolution spontaneously banished animate slavery throughout the British Empire, the U. S. and elsewhere within the immediate 10 years which simultaneously broadcast the invention of the dynamo and production steel.
68 Many are the ‘‘economics’’ professors who have told us with a grin or a smirk that CAPITAL IS, after all, TIME, but now we, involuntarily born into time, perceive, through mechanical attainment, that conversely TIME IS CAPITAL, to be articulated by us individually after our own progressive evaluations, at least cost to society on minimum-standard relief, or as often and as broadly amplified as we self-controlledly and all-inclusively may comprehend the phenomenon.
69 In an improved system of industry, freed from non-scientific director control the inventor responsible for work-saving equivalents—not only for one but indirectly for all, since industry is so highly integrated that the slightest ripple of improvement reaches the farthest shore—would be accredited on the basis of his precise energy-time-saving contribution. If he saved 1/3 of a million k.w. per annum (this would be ‘‘some’’ invention) he would be accredited with $1,000. This would be payable, however, only as the time-saving accrues, thus allowing for adjustment of the inventions contiguous aptitudes. The invention per se might theoretically save time, but it must be logically synchronized with contiguous inventions and conditions before the inventor can be accredited in accurate terms. If the credit were $1000, the inventor would be free to convert this sum into goods and services super to those of prime necessity, with which he would already have been automatically accredited.
70 In such manner, wealth—which should be pure credit for prosocial ability super-to-minimum-stint—would become the specific utility of the articulator, not at the cost of any human but through super-specific benefit to all humans. In this scientific economy, wealth would not have the characteristics of feudal intrinsic wealth. That kind of wealth was based on a you-or-me survival philosophy, and, being material, was theoretically bequeathable in perpetuity through an extension of the principle of the ‘‘divine right of kings,’’ as finite property for the privilege of the heirs of the original feudal profiteer. But its values were physical and anything physical ‘‘wears out’’ relative to TIME. Time does not ‘‘wear out’’ so long as there is life. Time is directly available to all. Controlled time is our true wealth.
71 The degree to which we control and are masters of our time and have harnessed our environment to our will and weal, by our time use, determines our numerically specific relative wealth as individuals, or as a social unit comprised of individuals of any number.
72 No one in our proposed economy of scientific service and efficiency could justifiably resent vast amplifications of individual credit as directly proportional to pro-social service entailing in no way deprivation of others’ time-control wealth, but, contrariwise, signifying the provision of greater time-control means for others. The amplification of individual credit for thoughtful-service would obtain during and only for the life of the individual. Such credit is specifically individual and abstract, though readily able to render puny by comparison the fortunes of today, or of any time in the past.
73 If a man were so scientifically able as to evolve a practical thought that would eliminate cancer forever from the human mechanism, surely none would resent his interpolation of his popularly accrued credit for such thoughtful and beneficial service in the acquisition of the most able boat to sail the seven seas, or of an aeroplane to fly to Mars. Indeed, the individual evolving so able a thought might possibly be expected, through enlarged perspective and contemplation, in his aeroplane flying to Mars, or in his boat on the Indian Ocean, or in his private laboratory at the North Pole if that were his preference, to evolve further vastly efficient pro-social thought. If a thousand guests on his yacht would accelerate such thought, then let him have a thousand guests if they are spontaneously willing. It is certain that his yacht would not be run by coal-slinging slaves.
74 How would the saving to humanity be accounted?
75 In terms of government-collected figures, which, in the present hypothetical instance, would compare the aggregate previous number of cancer victims and numerical value energy depletion caused by the disease with the subsequent dwindling average loss. Although assumed averages would have to be used at first, these would continually be corrected by census findings, the system becoming progressively more equitable with increasing uniform, universal knowledge. A vast amount of data already exists in the actuarial departments of the great quasi-cooperative insurance corporations upon which the original postulates of every saving by cancer or analogous cures may be determined.
76 Today in the accounting branches of an industrial establishment, the simplest over-all annual accounting system is employed. No moneys are exchanged—not even dollar bills. This is true not only intramurally in a single industry, but obtains between many corporate entities in industry.
77 In the economy herein proposed it would be unnecessary for Mr. Murphy to deposit his work-representative checks. The work performed by him could be automatically and more simply industrially inter-accounted and, consequently, far more efficiently.
78 Workers would not be able to overdraw their accounts, for the check-up on the accrued excess of credit of the super-to-minimum stint of any individual would be but a matter of seconds’ determination. The one desiring goods and services, super to automatically accredited essentials, need only signify his desire at some point of distribution contact, where facilities would exist to determine, possibly by telegraphic exchange to a central bureau, the dollarability of the acquirer in proportion to the energy conversion value of the product or service desired.
79 There would be no place, in such an economy, for an opinionated appraisal of the purchaser by any salesman, that unfortunate being of today. This would obviate current risks on either side of a transaction, growing out of opinionated personality perquisites of the purchaser or equally opinionated ‘‘claims’’ for the product. The elimination of opinion would be succeeded by true scientific appraisal and credit of both product and purchaser. No more ‘‘bad account’’ merchants,—no more process servers.
80 With such an improved system would come the welcome elimination of an infinity of traditional stupidities regarding dress and all the fallaleries of ‘‘keeping up with the Jones’s’’ essential to opinionated credit ‘‘build-up.’’ Gone would be the temptation to stretch the opinionated and, therefore, unknown quantity credit of individuals either by themselves or by others. No ‘‘overdrawn’’ accounts, indeed.
81 At present Mr. Murphy’s opinion that he has given freely and well of his thought and acts to society has to be articulated by ‘‘finger-in- the-fire’’ or trial-and-error wanderings.
82 Despite his inability, under our current scarcity-and-profit economy, to convert his ‘‘gifts’’ from himself to society into dollars that he considers commensurate with his service, this failure does not preclude his continuing to believe that he does contribute goods and services beyond the dollars he receives. He assumes that he has that much credit, and often seeks to interpolate it into goods and services for his own consumption. If he over-accredits himself by his opinion, he finds himself in ‘‘hot water’’ even though his erroneous appraisal was sincerely attempted.
83 This self-opinion accrediting leads, in the aggregate, to threats and claims beyond all calculation and provokes continuous woeful court proceedings, and wide nervous debility, all of which would vanish in a system of truly scientific credit.
84 The ‘‘dollar’’ is already practically employed as a measure of energy conversion despite this fact’s obscurity at the hands of the profit-manipulation system. This impending time-energy based economy is precisely the eruptive force against which ‘‘manipulation’’ is today aggressively articulating.
85 How is this known?
86 If it were not so, the financier would not still be fighting for ‘‘recovery’’ and would not be resistant to every step toward socialization of the obvious plenitudes. Neither would he be fighting his ‘‘partners-in-crime’’ for a division of what is left of the spoils of the old racket. Such a conflict would no longer be necessary because the financier and the ‘‘boys’’ would, under the new economy, be getting ‘‘plenty’’ out of the people in full measure of their worth. Albeit many astonishing salaries might be drastically reduced if service were scientifically appraised.
87 The ‘‘attractiveness’’ of war to Finance would diminish. There would be no war in China or in Spain. Wars are an ‘‘out’’ and ‘‘out’’ manifestation of the resistance of the old profit system to the rise of worker well being and the world-wide demand by the workers to be heard effectively in politics.
88 The old profit system has too little imagination to foresee universal wealth and comfort implicit in the trends which the ‘‘new’’ deal has allowed to become popularly visible. Equally unimaginative must the workers also be who scare off the profit system operators from any possibility of envisionment of the mutually delightful commonwealth now looming up, by their suppression-born subversiveness which infers pulling down the top and the revolutionary guillotine for all financial aristocracy. To such a perverted frame of mind have many active so-called ‘‘Communists’’ arrived that, indeed, they would refuse an open gate to the promised land and would only enter through a bombed breech in the wall. Fortunately, the over-all chronology of industrial scientific history indicates that, despite the extreme hostility of these extreme out-camps, the commonwealth of ‘‘you AND me’’ is willy nilly approaching. The speed of the approach is thrilling.
89 Technocracy? No. Technocracy failed because it made no allowance for passion, fashion, chance, change, intuition, the mysticism of harmony, and, most important of all, for—‘‘it happens.’’
90 Technocracy called for an autocracy of engineers to fulfill its scheme. Political movements that call for an autocracy of a special viewpoint are ever doomed to failure as the trend indicates segregation of issues and a recomposed balance of all-time forces. SPECULATION and INITIATIVE in the acceleration of CHANGE, are ALL-TIME FORCES, and are as essential in a scheme of realism as suffrage and the socialization of essentials and plenitudes.
91 Superstition is another important all-time force, but it was derisively dismissed by the technocrats as mystic pish posh, allowing man to fall into the piteous pathologic condition that they sneeringly considered engulfs so many men. Many worldwide superstitions, however, are scientifically rationalizable and sustainable as of high importance.
92 The superstition that singing too early in the morning is a forerunner of tears in the evening is universally current in primitives and among supposedly highly developed, socially cultured people. This superstition is actually—in view of the wave phenomenon and unit of energy output clearly measured and charted in emotional attitudes—an indication of man’s ultimate anticipation of the necessary balancing of lows and highs. In it, therefore, is a distinctly scientific proclivity. Yet emotion, so essential to selective growth and survival, was denied by technocracy as a social factor.
93 As power systems become integrated and the network pool becomes more balanced by invention in the matter of greater distance transmission we shall eventually come to a point where there is attained a balanced power pool available at equal cost at any point in the land. Then man, eschewing any ‘‘brain work’’ and working only as a ‘‘prime power,’’ will be able to earn but $4.30 in a life time, on the basis, as stated above, of present hydro-power cost. Not until this continentally pooled power condition has arrived, however, will the system of integration of man’s energy conversion rate on a basis of time dollarability be possible.
94 Until that time, granted raw materials for conversion to end product and the fabricating machinery for that conversion, the dollar rate of the worker as a simple animated energy conversion medium for activation of the fabricating machinery will be directly proportional in amount to the ratio of the distance-cost increase of the inanimate, potentially competitive, power source from the specific factory under consideration.
95 A worker’s time-energy-dollar credit is not representative merely of his maximum limit of personal physical servitude, i.e., .13 k.w. hours a day. It also represents a compound of. 13 k.w. hours’ serviceability to others, and the precise application of this serviceability (with understanding and credit of its original significance) to the management of his 21 inanimate, electrical slaves, the work of which is articulated with varying efficiency by means of man’s self-extension.
96 These machines have amplified the ability of the inanimate electrical slaves somewhere near a thousandfold above the original caveman’s precision and leverage ability. The progression is geometrical. The choice of machines and the place consideration—that is, where man will have them work-serve him—are thought-occupation-necessities of each and every individual, as a result of which one is able to arrive at a preferential ‘‘contact’’ for maximum relative efficiency of individual specific service to the whole of the human family.
97 This last consideration immediately brings to the fore the vital role of EDUCATION and complete unbe-tampered news dissemination as a primary means for society’s egress from exploitation to active self-captaincy. It emphasizes the importance of maintaining a teleologic attitude when acquiring an education for one’s self and when educating others.
98 An example of teleologic rationalization has been given in the presentation of this new concept of a scientific economy. It began with a consideration of the starry universe and ended with an analysis of the time-energy conversion dollarability of the individual.
99 Einstein’s equation ‘‘E=MC2’’ may now be teleologically translated to Energy [XI Man X Intellect, the latter being true rate maker of energy conversion. Thus Einstein has served us, by providing, through his simple statement of the meaning of the physical universe, a formula for developing uncompromisable and untaintable dollarability.