Upton Sinclair, the famous "muckraker", socialist, and prolific author of cries for social change such as "The Jungle", "Metropolis", and "Oil!", ran for governor of California in 1934, in the worst of the depression, on a unique platform. Due to intensive red-baiting, negative advertising, and the largest sums of money spent to defeat a candidate for that office until at least the 1960s, he did not win. Nevertheless, he loosed a tide of support so strong that he swept the Democratic Party primary, turned California from its traditional 3-to-1 Republican lead in voter registration to a strong Democratic lead, and "scared the California business community half to death".

Conceived as a solution to the socio-economic inequities which lie at the root of depressions, Upton Sinclair's EPIC idea is still a valid answer to today's problems; clothed in the proper contemporary raiment, it continues to provide a framework for constructively addressing recessions, and also recovers that spark of excitement that is ignited when real fundamental changes are being explored.
The EPIC idea was strikingly simple. Sinclair himself said that he got it from the Self-Help Cooperatives, ingenious groups formed in the thirties "whereby several thousand [unemployed] men managed to make something out of nothing," through trading and pooling whatever skills and goods were available. Sinclair was impressed to find that the Self-Help Co-ops managed to maintain thousands of members with government help of less than one-sixth of a cent per person per day, while the state of California was paying out as much as four to five cents per person per day, to 270 times as much, to unemployed persons who were not part of a co-op.
The idea of a government dole was brand new in the 1930s, a creation of U. S. President Franklin Delano Roosevelt's New Deal. It boggled the mind of Upton Sinclair just as much as it should no when we contemplate the federal debt and the withholding tax from our paychecks. How long could those who were working continue to carry those who were "in surplus" to the industrial economic system on their backs without going broke themselves?

So evolved the EPIC plan, the name of which came from the first letters of the slogan "End Poverty in California". Sinclair wrote, "We have plenty of idle factories and plenty of idle land, and plenty of idle people to work in the idle factories and on the idle land, producing their own food, clothing and shelter for their own use and benefit. Take them off the taxpayers back."
Sinclair proposed to take the unemployed completely out of the system by setting up a separate system wherein the unemployed could provide for themselves and barter their surplus produce to each other, so that they were out of the industrial money economy forever, or for as long as they wanted to be. To get this started, Sinclair proposed to take idle land, and land which was being sold to the state for unpaid taxes or was up for bid under foreclosure proceedings and put the unemployed (many of them farmworkers) on that land to raise crops.

Simultaneously, the state would acquire factories such as bakeries, canneries, clothing and shoe factories, cement brickyards, and lumber-yards, and hire more unemployed to go to work in them. Workers would be placed in these factories according to their various skills, and would be required to meet certain standards of production in order to remain. Their products, which they themselves would own, would enable them to build homes, clothe themselves, and take care of their other basic needs. Whatever was produced in surplus on the farms and in the factories would be exchanged between the various producers and farmers as needed.

Sinclair came to refer to this type of arrangement as "Production for Use," as opposed to production for profit. With Production for Use, he argued, there would never again be overproduction (which had caused the 1930s depression) which was due to consumers not having the money to buy the goods they needed, because since the workers would own the products of their labor, they would have money to exchange for the equivalent of their products. "There can be no overproduction in such a system; when the system produces a surplus, the people will be on vacation instead of out of a job," Sinclair explained. "They will own the surplus."

How to finance these inovative proposals was of course one of the big questions, and Upton and his fellow EPIC supporters proposed that the government would at first rent the land and the factories from their owners for this use. After three years, when the EPIC plan had proved its worth to all, bonds would be issued to enable the land and factories to be bought, and the amount of these would be slowly paid off by the workers of the farms and factories from the sale of their surplus goods and food products to the public, so that eventually the workers themselves would own the farms and factories and be totally off the government dole.

Meanwhile, to raise the immediate money to put the plan into operation,
Sinclair proposed to institute a state income tax heavily taxing the very wealthy, and taxes on public utilities, large inheritances, and high-valued property. Land which was sitting idle because it was being held for future development by speculators would also be taxed (a ring of such land surrounded nearly all the major cities, as it does in many areas now). Conversely, Sinclair planned to repeal the state sales tax that had been enacted under his predecessor, which he felt reduced consuming power and worsened the condition it was supposed to remedy (lack of buying power).

Sinclair argued that the EPIC plan would help not only those out of work, but those in the money economy as well. He saw the crisis facing the country as caused not by lack of wealth (plenty of crops were rotting in the fields), but by lack of buying power for that wealth. If the unemployed could be put back to work, they would soon produce surpluses the sale of which would enable them to buy from the money economy again; they would no longer be draining the taxpayers' and government's reserves; and being out of the labor market, they would enable those who already had jobs to better their working conditions and wages.