INCENTIVES TO SERVICE

Ashburton Guardian, Volume 70, Issue 71, 5 January 1950, Page 5

INCENTIVES TO SERVICE

ECONOMIC NEEDS IN BRITAIN WELL-KNOWN AUTHORITY’S VIEW (N.Z.P. A.—Copyright) LONDON, January 4. “There can he no prosperity without profits, which are the reward of good service and proof of a proper economy,” says Sir Ernest Benn, a well-known writer on economics, in a letter to the “Daily Telegraph” on Britain’s prospects in 1950. “With the end of 1949, Britain completed 10 full years of artificial economics and finance, five years of wartime inflation • and manipulation, under which millions imagined themselves to be enriched by world-wide waste, and five years of the same destructive processes performed in the name of socialism, but supported by a very general belief that what a nation has done in war, it can also do in peace. “We start 1950 sadder, wiser, and much poorer. The dream of a planners’ paradise has passed, and *Tve wake to wholly new conditions. "Our credit is gone, our pound despised, the sellers’ market ended, American assistance frittered away, and our meagre rations scraped together by clumsy, primitive barter. In such circumstances it is childish to continue to talk the economic nonsense thought, as I believe wrongly, to be part of the essential strategy of war.

“The difficulty is supposed to be votes. It is assumed that the worker will vote only for those who will lead him further along the road to ruin. If that insulting view is true of our fine people, then indeed our end is at hand.

“The onlv hope of survival is the rehabilitation of the active business class, encouraged to lead us forward to prizes commensurate with the personal risks and sti’ains involved. Taxation at the higher levels must be so reduced as to leave prizes within reach of the runners.”