CONSCRIPTION OF WEALTH.

Auckland Star, Volume LIX, Issue 249, 20 October 1928, Page 8

CONSCRIPTION OF WEALTH.

As "Liberal" suggests, it is probable that more wealth than human life, proportionately, was used up during the last war. The pant: is that the conscription of wealth was doaamore or less indirectly, and without syatea, with the result that the mass of the poorer people and the wealthy aristocracy suffered, while the profiteers waxed fat. It seems te me that a capital levy is quite fair mri»r war conditions. A man with a bank balance of ten thousand pounds has a hundred times aa~ much at stake, materially speaking, as the man with a hundred pounds, and it is rigbt that he should give something like proportionate support to the protection of the general wealth. So the "most willing and noMe elements" of our community can hardly he' said to have been "doubly punished"—unlem-' your correspondent means that they bore-the profiteers' share of the expense as well as their own. If life is conscripted, it is right-that wealth should be. That is to say, that as l soon as all adaptable man power "is declared to be the property of the State for use m carrying on warfare, all wealth which, * adaptable to the same purpose should also he commandeered by the State for the duratHft of the war. True, this is a difficult problem in its application. But the conscription of life is not without its inconveniences, either. DIVES.