MONEY FOR MAN.

Auckland Star, Volume LXV, Issue 69, 22 March 1934, Page 27

MONEY FOR MAN.

PROGRESS WITHOUT DEBT,

"To make money serve man, not man serve money," was the text of the reforms placed before the Monetary Committee by Mr. W. J. Gatenby, of Auckland, who claimed that his authorities were men who had no personal interests to serve in recommending the abolition of trading bank inflation or deflation of the currency.

Mr. Gatenby quoted Falconer Larkworthy's recommendations for the abolition of interest on new money, the provision by the State of paper money in quantity determined and paid for by the community, a disinterested Currency Board with a Comptroller of the Currency, the use of gold only as a commodity like other metals, and the fullest use rather than any restriction of sufficient paper money on the principle that whatever a people could do, it could pay for. Paying was doing, not owing.

Mr. Gatenby also quoted in support. Professor Irvine, a retired teacher of economics, Sydney University, who showed that progress without debt was not only possible but imperative if civilisation were to endure.

To implement the ideas of Larkwortliy and Irvine, Mr. Gatenby placed before the committee the scheme devised by Professor Frederick Soddy, M.A., Nobel Laureate in Chemistry, for requiring trading banks to purchase State notes from the currency authority (by surrende2 - ing national debt securities or handing over other value), and forbidding any bank lending money it did not actually possess. In this way, it was claimed, both inflation or deflation would be prevented, and the national debt would, gradually be replaced by national money. Public works would be financed by public money, not by money privately created as a debt to the banking system, and no money would be destroyed except by the currency authority.