SAVING AND SPENDING.

Auckland Star, Volume LXIX, Issue 180, 2 August 1938, Page 8

SAVING AND SPENDING.

It st» hardly necessary to answer Jb. MacLeod's letter of July 23 to obtain clarify on a clouded subject, for the issue is quite plain: whether it is in the national intenst for people to spend and otherwise dissipate the -whole of their earnings, or to save a goal part of the same. If he thinks that a niA surplus production or earnings do not Toy eoon materialise in the form of the tangjhlt asset* I suggested—roads, bridges, bufldisfi and other, private and public "real things ,, that Mr. Fitzherbert mentions—but remain in tac strongrooms of the banks in the form of fisti deposits, then he should tell w how three 4* come into being. Even Mr. Fitzherbert is not etrictly correct in imagining that roads ail railways are merely made by workers who an fed by agriculture and clothed by industry, for there wonld fee neither of these if somebody had not saved in the first instance to ferf and maintain the latter while they were producing to feed the said paid workers. Tail is not only the orthodox idea, but it ie aim in accordance with facts, eo we would ht interested to know how your correspondents suppose that any Government could "proeeeft with these works at full gallop" withont recourse to the eavinge of the people, which he incorrectly describes as rights, implying that they have no tangible "exfetence. * 3f» i country in tKeTrorld, and certainly not tie present Government in Xew Zealand, hae d»;covered a way to reform the present economic methods to produce »• means of providing maintenance for workers, as a substitute for using the accumulated private and pnbße savings of the"thrifty section of the community. That kto say, if there had been no savings, unlimited bank notes would have still left us living in caves for shelter, in epite of all the sophistry of those who seek to wreck security, for there -would nave been no accumulated food and materials, nothing to tax, and no security on which we could luwe borrowed to assist in providing those real things. FDCAXCIAL.