SOMETHING WRONG

Auckland Star, Volume LXVI, Issue 234, 3 October 1935, Page 6

SOMETHING WRONG

From the conditions that exist in the world to-day it is evident that somewhere something is radically wrong. Most of us agree- that reform is needed, but we disagree considerably as to what needs reforming or the actual cause of our troubles. Capitalism to many is a rational and stable system of society. Perhaps the poverty and war and destitution are traceable to the violation of the system and not the system itself. Some look for the cause of our troubles in the class relationships of present-day society; others attribute it to a shortage of credit. Speaking of credit, we learn that between 1800 and 1928 the totql British capital expanded from '£1,500.000,000 to £24,000,000,000; that was an average rate of over £0 a second, £300 a minute, £2hooo an hour, £518,000 a day for each second of each minute of each hour of each day in each of the 128 years under review. Bank deposits, namely, Barclay's and Lloyd's, the Midland, the W cstminster and the National Provincial banks, arc piling up at the rate of £200,000.000 a year, and the deposits of these huge concerns have now reached the sum of £2,000,000,000, while their advances to customers are le.-s than £1.000,000,000. In my humble opinion, our troubles arc traceable in the main to (1) hostile tariffs which prevent the free movement of goods; (2) the contradictions of capitalism in the sphere of commodity circulation traceable to a faulty monetary mechanism; (3) the intense fostering of a spirit of nationalism, which centralises activities down to a single nation. HARRY WOODRUFFE.