PROTECTION OR FREE TRADE.

Auckland Star, Volume LIV, Issue 295, 11 December 1923, Page 3

PROTECTION OR FREE TRADE.

(To the Editor.) Sir, —I hope the lesson of the British elections will be taken to heart by local protectionists who accept protection at its face value without troubling to study the underlying principles of international trade. They think because the Australasian colonies have protection and are, on the whole, prosperous, that the one is the cause and the other the effect. The British nation is too well schooled in the economics of the case to be fooled with bunkum about more work and better wages;, and are well aware that tariffs mean restricted trade, impaired ability to compete and higher living costs. Here in New Zealand people in high positions accept without question the alleged fact that tariffs are beneficial and we have them talking at public gatherings as though there was no question at all about it, and they are always prepared to iback up any industry which thinks.it is entitled to state assistance. I hope, therefore, that the verdict of the electors of Britain may give them pause. The most eminent economist* of the world declare unequivocally that protection is a sham, and there is overwhelming evidence supplied by eminent writers and others who have no axe to grind, ehowing in detail the fallacies of the tariff policy, and the soundness of the principles of freedom of trade. Do our local protectionists never read the opinions of such men? Then again we have the local protagonists of a tariff policy deploring the "drift to the I cities," seemingly quite oblivious of the l fact that their fiscal policy, if it does what they aseume it does, is a potent factor in that "drift." I, myself, do not believe that protection inevitably takes people from the rural to th<» urban districts, but when applied to countries like Xew Zealand and Australia in their present stage of development, it must accelerate the drift in proportion as it achieves it 3 object of J promoting eelf-containedness. It is also a strange thing that Liberals here support tariff protection. Free trade i* of the very essence of liberalism, and in the home of liberalism has always had the support of the progressives. If there ever was a time in England when protection might have been expected to oibtain a hearing it was the period following the war when thp full effect of the same was making itaelf felt, but the verdict of December 6, seems to have routed this fiscal, fetish for all time.—T am etc.. G.H.X.