Free enterprise

Press, 11 August 1980, Page 16

Free enterprise

Sir, — Frank A. Smith (August 8) made me pause to think. "Technological evolution” is replacing the labourer, he says. Such evolution is also replacing service workers, even up to managerial levels, for _ that matter. But my question is, when the employment structures no longer require persons, whatever' their employment background, what (legal) channels should be provided for them both .to gain their livelihood, and continue to buy the goods turned out by. the free enterprise system? I ask this question, as a question that the public, and free .enterprisers in particular, are not always ready to face up to — vet. — Yours, etc,, JOHN B GALLAGHER. August 8, 1980.

Sir, —One cannot resist a conviction that when Hank Goom cites “the excessively bureaucratic nature” of the Soviet system (August 5), he is • not speaking . from any first-hand knowledge or experience of .the Soviet system,

but is merely parroting the hackneyed cliches of official Western anti-Soviet propaganda. The hand-tooled: Zil limousine in which Mr Brezhnev is driven about the business of the Soviet State, is provided by, and is the property of the Soviet State, too flimsy a wisp of evidence to sustain the weight of Hank Goom’s claim that there is an elitist class in the Soviet Union. His odd complaint that “the Russians have no Watergate” says a great deal about the extraordinarily curious criteria which Hank Goorn brings to bear in assessing the relative merits of the Soviet and.. United States social and political systems.—Yours, etc., M. CREEL. August 5, 1980.