SOCIALISM AND PRIVATE PROPERTY

Press, Volume LXXIII, Issue 22245, 9 November 1937, Page 7

SOCIALISM AND PRIVATE PROPERTY

TO THE EDITOR Of THE PRESS. c; r Your correspondent, Wm. L. Robertson, is doing a good service in providing a free substitute for a correspondence course in Socialism. Intended, no doubt, to be edifying, it may prove to be disastrously disillusioning. He is saying in bald detail what the Government is . afraid to divulge to voters, except in vaguest generalities, as to its ultimate aim— the ownership of the means, of production. distribution, and exchange. Private ownership is to be limited to food, clothing, housing, .travel, and all the prerequisites of civilised living on a scale hitherto but remotely approximated.” Spell-binding, all except the “how.” which is left to the _ unagination. We are asked to believe that in some mysterious way run under “public ownership,” all the factories, the transport, and an ampler system of payment for all work done will be necessarily in better hands if run by State executives, bearing the lapel, “Appointed under public ownership , and that, somehow, men with tnis magic label will do infinitely better than others without it. Does public ownership” magically endow its Government appointees with special capacity and genius? Present performance hardly suggests it—-rather the reverse. And there is all this upset of the present system of private enterprise to get over the imaginary peril of "private profit.” . . The Socialist doctor is mistaking the sticking plaster for the sore. "Planned production” is the socialist’s remedial fetish, overlooking the more obvious necessity of "planned consumption. The world is now groaning under the surplus of production. How are consumers, without money, to consume it? Baking a million loaves does not make a single new farthing with which to purchase them. Money and production are not related. The train, so to speak, can carry a thousand passengers, but there are only a hundred tickets. Will Wm. L. Robertson tell us, more to the point, about the other nine hundred tickets, and how they are to be created? That is our present problem, teeming production alongside so much abject poverty, waiting for “planned conspmption.” not planned production Present surplus output has produced the world’s unemployed millions. Can olanned production, by any stretch of the imagination, reabsorb them? Where is the extra purchasing power to come from? By taxation, loans, credit creation (debt free)? Are the numberless unemployed- machines -to be put to work as well as the idle workers? Will not this put more millions out of work, as 'mechanised mass production always does? , We can reduce working hours, of course, to an hour a day if necessary. But then we will have some interesting anomalies; eight bands playing in sequence an hour each.' at a nionir; eight architects in sequence planning a rail station: eight locomotive drivers taking the express to Dunedin, etc. Let us have the facts about how to bridge the gap between meagre purchasing cower and surplus unpurchaseable production, to supplement the pretty Socialist effect, frf which your corresnondent provides no adequate cause.—Yours, etc.. SEZ YOU. November 8. 1937.