The Fallacies Of Mr. Nash

Dominion, Volume 31, Issue 278, 20 August 1938, Page 13

The Fallacies Of Mr. Nash

Sir, —The Minister of Finance is reported in your Wednesday’s columns to have quoted figures in Parliament illustrating the increased value of our exports during the past forty years. These, he says, have risen from £9,300,000 in ISOG to in 1937, with a rise in the per capita rate from £l2/9/- to £4l/19/-: further, that the value of our production had nearly trebled since 1900, the increase being 193 per cent. Had Mr. Nash, when quoting the steady rise in the currency value of our primary products; accompanied his illustration with a table showing the depreciation of our currency during the same period, it would have disclosed a very different position, for the intrinsic value of our present exports valued on a gold standard does not attain half the alleged increase, the balance of Mr. Nash’s pleasant story being represented partly by the artificial depreciation of our currency. and partly bv what may be termed the general average world-wide increase of commodity values' —commodity values which, while increasing the receipts from our primary productions, also increase the cost of our necessary purchases from abroad. So that examination will show that the purchasing power of the New Zealand pound forty years ago was more than double that of the present day pound, and to prove this it is only necessary to examine internal values of standard articles of consumption such as bread, meat, butter and clothing.

Yet Mr. Nash, while cheerfully prophesying a similar proportionate increase in the price of our products during the next forty years, omits to say that if there is such a proportionate increase the purchasing power of the New Zealand pound sterling will diminish correspondingly. What then becomes of Mr. Nash’s grandiloquent social services scheme? The present boy forced to subscribe his shilling or two every week will know that although this shilling will at the present tilin' purchase two loaves of bread, two packets of cigarettes, two Bibles or two pints of beer, as his inclinations direct, yet in forty years his more or less good shilling of to-day will represent in purchasing power only the less good sixpence of to-morrow —forty years’ hence, so that the social security pensioners who are unfortunate enough to be then alive will benefit by les commodity purchasing power than the present day old-age pensioner. It is amusing to think that forty years hence there will be a universal old-age pension for which the present living victims will have paid but that actually the commodity value of his pension will be less than the old-age pens.ion of to-day. It seems strange that .hitherto no attention on either side of the House has been drawn to these falacies, and while it is understandable that the docile occupants of the Government benches remain obediently acquiescent what is there to stop the Opposition from exposing the real position?-—I am. etc., .. ANNE ECHO. Wellington, August 18.