COUNCIL OF BRAINS

Dominion, Volume 26, Issue 87, 6 January 1933, Page 10

COUNCIL OF BRAINS

To Solve Present Ills LORD MELCHETT’S IDEA (Reuter —Special to “Dominion.”) The creation of a supreme economic (Reuter. —Special to “The Dominion.”) council to deal with industrial problems was suggested by Lord Melchett when he addressed the League of Indifetry at Leamington. "If this conjunction of brain, power is inadequate to solve our industrial problems.” he said, “then nothing can save us but the dictatorship of a genius. Is it not possible that the whole system under which we are trying to operate is. wrong? You have been* told that the politician is fat-headed, and so he “We are not getting what.we want. We hear the bankers express the views that probably something ought to be done, that something new ought to be conceived, something new planned. But the same old plan goes on, the same old Bank Act passed nearly a century ago is still in operation. Is it not possible that something fundamental is wrong?” Lord Melchett explained that tlie great majority of the human race was engaged in the processes of production, yet in every country power was wielded, not by tlie producer, but by the politician, the financier, and the speculator. "Tlie economic and financial policy of the country is controlled not by the mass of industrial voters, but by the obscure and secretive forces > which emanate from the environs of Threadneedle Street,” he continued. "The division that exists in this country is not a division between tlie working men and the employers, or between the rich and the poor, but between the producers of goods ami the managers of money.” Then Lord Melchett developed his argument that the producers of Great Britain must control the country’s economic policy. Surely, he said, it was not too much to ask that tlie men whose life work was to create and to produce should be allowed —in conjunction with economists and experts—to determine the soundest human policy for tlie conduct of our affairs.