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Planned Investment for Balanced Growth
CPS Election Analysis 2008 - Week 7
Tim Buck – Put Monopoly Under Control – Progress Books 1964
To make possible a rising standard of living and expanding opportunities the people must insist upon state responsibility for guaranteeing that the over-all rate of investment shall be to some extent higher than the rate of the growth of the population.
The use of the surplus produced every year over and above what is consumed, and the proportions in which it should be invested in the expansion of one or other section of the economy, is basic to the welfare of the people and the country’s future. This is admitted now even by the apologists for monopoly capital.
The capitalist political parties pretend to be dealing with this when they talk labour ‘cyclical budgeting’ and ‘expanding public works in periods of depression.’ The truth is that such proposals mean that the party putting them forward accepts the irrational fluctuations that are caused in the economy by the anarchistic investment of funds according to how the whims of individuals and the rapacity of the monopolies are influenced by passing events. Capitalist ‘cyclical budgeting’ doesn’t affect this anarchy, it even fosters it.
With nationalization of key sectors of production, banking and credit, a planned expansion of the economy through a central authority regulating the distribution of public investment will be able to influence the flow of investment as a whole, while maintaining its over-all rate at the required level.
The greater part of the funds that are administered by the banks, trust and insurance companies, the private custodians of the credit resources of this country, are the savings of the community, entrusted to them.
The aim of a new economic policy should include provision for the rational investment of an appropriate portion of the savings of the community in the dynamic development of the country. One of the main reasons why the production of goods actually declined in proportion to the population by an average of $36 per person between 1956 and 1960 is because there was no provision for such a planned investment.
The scale and variety of the fields of such investment are illustrated by the following examples taken from the Submission of the Communist Party to the Royal Commission on Banking and Finance in 1960.
a) Long-term investment planning to determine the needed scope, timing and location of public investment
b) Public investment in housing (expanded Central Mortgage and Housing Corporation)
c) Public investment in resource and regional development (e.g. an all-Canadian power grid; hydro power developments; uranium enrichment; at remote power sites; Chignetco Canal in New Brunswick, etc.)
d) Public investment in new manufacturing where private investment fails to go (e.g. coal-based chemical industry in the Maritimes; industrial components like transistors, tightly controlled by foreign parent companies, steel industries, basic and fabricating, near ore sites); possibly the Industrial Development Bank should be put under this department.
e) Public investment in social facilities (expanded public works, hospitals, schools, highway, roads, etc.)
Public investment is so important and the forms of activity through which funds are mobilized adn the credit upon them re-distributed, are related so intimately to the flow of investment that there should be effective co-ordination of all branches, and with the government’s policy on taxation. Such co-ordination is called for by the fact that the changes that we propose in the organization of the economy and the ownership of important sectors of it will change the relationship of the functions of credit, control and investment to the government. Because of this the government should establish a Department of National Investment, headed by a senior cabinet minister who would be responsible for the direction of planned economic development.
One of the important results of planning, increased productivity and a larger share of the national income going to workers and farmers, will be the maintenance of purchasing power of the Canadian dollar.
For the average man and woman the test of whether the government’s economic policy is serving the real interests of the country and its people is the effect of that policy on the internal purchasing power of the dollar. During the past thirty- file years its effect has been calamitous. A new economic policy will enable us to change this.
The enormous credit resources which now are used without regard to the real interests of Canada and her people must be used to finance useful production, orderly growth of Canadian economy, expansion of our exports and the home market. Export of capital for investment in foreign monopolies or other possibilities for profit must be replaced by investment in Canada.
A thorough revision of the tax system, basing it on ability to pay and redistribution of the national income in favour of the “have-nots”, eliminating the enormous waste of public funds through bureaucracy and overlapping authorities, helping the under-developed areas of our country would be an essential part of a democratic economic policy. |