A Cavalry of Accountants

By Charles Pinwill


 

This essay’s title is not suggesting a collective term whereby an assembly of numerous accountants might be known. The expressions a gang of thieves, a murder of crows, a parliament of baboons or a melancholia of economists are expressions giving an indication of       what might normally be expected from them given the nature of these beings.

One would not, in everyday experience, expect to see mounted accountants waving their abaci and electronic calculators and brandishing their books of account, as they rode fearlessly to confront the enemies of sound statistical data. But this is very much needed as we shall see.

Accountants spend most of their working lives associating with people who like facts, like knowing what is going on, and who want things to be measured and understood. Directors of companies large and small, and even such as the treasurer of the local tennis club, like to know something of what they are doing. They ask their accountants to tell them whether they are making a profit or a loss, and to list their assets and liabilities.

Politicians on the other hand, only ever ask for a guess as to what may happen next year (The Budget), and a summation of the total turnover last year (The GDP).

The whole world over, company directors and association officers universally want the facts relevant to the entities they manage. Whether more value is being consumed during their productive efforts than is delivered by it, is knowledge of importance to company directors. They also have an interest in whether their assets have increased or decreased, one against the other, in any period of time.

All this is in contradistinction to the really important leadership in the world. Politicians never do or seek National Profit and Loss Accounts, or comprehensive Balance Sheets either, and economists of course, never suggest them. This is because they instinctively have and know this data subconsciously and accurately, as the brilliance with which national economies are managed makes evident. 

The politicians of Canada and Australia have made some efforts to cover their embarrassment by doing limited national balance sheets a few times in the past. Neither country bothered to include their largest asset or their largest liability, so they were only pretending to want to know. 

Apparently, what is spent on the vocational training of their people to produce doctors, bricklayers, engineers and bakers is completely worthless, as they didn’t think to give it value as an asset in their national balance sheets. The largest claim upon a country’s assets, which is what a liability is, and therefore the largest national liability, didn’t rate a mention either. So therefore, many politicians to this day do not know that the money supply is a claim upon our economy, and therefore a liability.

Profit and Loss Accounts measure the value of what is produced by an entity, against the value of what is consumed and used up in that productive effort, and this from the perspective       of shareholders.

The purpose of a human economy is the delivery of consumer goods. Important though the production of factories, giant oil tankers and electric power stations may be, they are only       important in their assistance to the production of consumer goods. The health and profitability of a human economy can only, in the end, be measured by the value of consumer goods produced, and comparing it to the value of the recompense paid out to induce this to be done. In other words, the total consumer production compared to total personal incomes paid to do it, determines a human economy’s profitability.

This was done for the first time for the USA for the year 2014 and showed that consumer production both produced and sold was $12.5 trillion, and total personal incomes were only $10.1 trillion. The profit per American was $7,500. The account which evidences this is at http://www.socialcredit.com.au/uploads/NationalAccountsPrototype.pdf  Because of this       unacknowledged profit, the American debt had to increase by $2.3 trillion to allow the       American people to augment their incomes sufficiently to consume the entire national product.

While such accounts are not done or even requested by politicians and economists, it has never occurred to them that society may be profitable; nor have any of the opportunities which may arise from national profitability ever been considered. Company directors are interested in whether their organisations are profitable and what might be done with the profit. Strangely, our parliaments of baboons and melancholia of economists exhibit no such interest.

What is needed is indeed a Cavalry of Accountants to ride into the public domain with calibrated, measured and authenticated facts about the human economy to relieve the politicians and economists of the stress of divination in managing the economy.

Perhaps we should not say “Come forth, ye brave and fierce Accountants and to a blast of trumpets and a roll of drums, triumphantly impose the needful data on our bewildered and routed economists and politicians, subject them to the gravitas of fact, run them through with statistical truth, vanquish their interminable economic muddle, cast down and subdue their monetary ignorance’s folly and open up the whole world to a consideration at some remote time, and in some very timorous way, to such ideas as the teeniest tidbits of a National Dividend being paid to all in lieu of increasing the national debt”?

Never! Never will any data be tolerated, accepted or acknowledged which will enlighten us to any national profitability. The very thought of it! Indeed! What would become of us?