THE GOVERNMENT'S FISCAL POLICY.

Auckland Star, Volume LIX, Issue 266, 9 November 1928, Page 6

THE GOVERNMENT'S FISCAL POLICY.

. - j"" Coates says he will protect secondary industries where established and reduce cost ree trade on manufactures not established in New Zealand. Now the most menace the wool grower has to face is artificial silk. It may be two or three year* before the full danger of this product is realised by the farmer, but its use is extending and its manufacture increasing by leaps and bounds. Our Government in a country dependent on primary products for its life, in effect, taxes wool users heavily and frees its deadly competitor to do its worst. To follow out its action to full logical sequence it should tax butter and allow margarine in free. Because we have woollen factories and no silk factories users must pay extra on woollen articles. The whole system is wrong. Any wea thy individual capable of spending a hundred thousand pounds can levy a tax of ten thousand a year or over on his fellow citizens by establishing a silk factory and demanding protection. He would probably do good, moreover, and give woollen goods some chance against silks. Our avenues of free action are gradually closing up with over-pro-tection and Government monopolies and transport boards, etc., and those of us who cannot get into the warm and sheltered fold where rewards are independent of production find the overcrowded gates and overflowing markets struggle more intensified every vear. If we are all protected, protection will kill "itself, so jit behoves New Zealanders to vote for a Government which has some idea of freedom and individual rights and is not obsessed !>v the idea that Orders-in-Council can fill oar I every want. t.tritpat.