THE FARMERS' REJECTED AMENDMENTS

Press, Volume LXXV, Issue 22768, 21 July 1939, Page 15

THE FARMERS' REJECTED AMENDMENTS

SO TUB EJDITOa OT TUB PEESS. Sir, —The amendment (defeated by 40 to 23 by the Farmers’ Union conference) which embodied the principle of debt-free money to the producing side of the primary industry, marks a' splendid advance in economic thought oif recent days. The time was, and not so long ago, when that august body, at the very suggestion of such a proposal, would have outrivalled Major Bagstock in facial colour and indignation swelling. The supporters of the amendment will yet see the leaven of debtless money leaven the whole economic meal. Professor Keynes and the Premier of New South Wales (Mr Stevens) favour interest-free money "in special circumstances.” For orthodoxy that is in itself a significant advance. International Rotary, in a fine booklet entitled, “Can .Prosperity Return?” suggests the payments of pensions and army and navy with debtfree money. Why not? PTofessor Cole of Oxford advocates the augmentation of consumer capital by means of nonrepayable gifts of money. A Liverpool professor of economics, whose name escapes my memory, said much the same thing, while Professor Soddy declared he wanted to. see people with sufficient to buy the good and beautiful things—not the cheap and nasty.

I have yet to learn that these advocates of debtless money are “have nots.” The something for nothing objectors belong to the school of thought sponsored by the first Governor of the Bank of England, and perpetuated to the present day by successors, “The bank hath Interests of the credit it creates out of nothing.” The conservation of that “nothing” is more and more becoming apparent to every thinking primary, producer, from the very attitude of those who would at all costs conserve it. The daily round of unremunerative labour, full of anxious care, blisters home the query, why? And that query is pregnant with demand. The 23 who voted for the amendment know that they represent a great army of “have nots" daily growing in strength, whose daily round' la not rewarded with the “Labqurer is worthy of his hire” but with'“ Consider the lilies” of sound finance, “they toil not, neither do they spin, yet Solomon”—but Solomon was an ass; he made gold not only plentiful in his palace, but as stones in the streets of Jerusalem. Certainly he was not ass enough to abolish “the fleet” and leave the door of every avenue wide open to default, repudiation, or expropriation. If ddfault be a hall-mark of respectability, 30 per cent, of humanity is in fact and deed “the salt of the earth.” —Yours, etc., T. POWELL, Albury, July 19, 1939.