STATE ECONOMICS

Ellesmere Guardian, Volume LIX, Issue 88, 4 November 1938, Page 4

STATE ECONOMICS

The average citizen thinks—in Russia as in England or Germany— that his taxes, or hours, or falling quantity and quality of consumable goods and pleasures, merely pay the upkeep of the Cabinet, the fighting and civil services, and the whole administration of the State, says the Economist. What he has not yet realised is that to an overwhelming extent in" Russia, to an extent rapidly approaching it in Italy and Germany, and to a less extent in England, France, Sweden, or North America, a steadily and rapidly increasing proportion of his money income, that income stabilised for him by the State, has been statutorily earmarked for expenditure upon definite and State-decreed objects; and this, after all direct taxes have been paid. He pays, by order of the State, and quite apart from his indirect taxes, more for his bread, milk, sugar, alcohol, meat, potatoes, eggs, butter, cheese, etc., than he need. He has to do so because, in industrial Belgium as in agricultural Hungary, in Socialist Russia as in Fascist Germany or in democratic England, the Government for almost a generation has been primarily concerned to produce, not the greatest amount of consumable goods and services, but (as hunters preserve game to pursue it) the largest volume of work for idle hands to do. In this way, security of jobs and stability of money incomes have been bought at the price of foregoing some of the progress in standards of living, which the phenomenal advance in productive technique since 1914 would otherwise have permitted. The Western peoples have not perceived the exaction of this cost by their Government; it has been spread, all but imperceptibly, over the nations as a whole. Governments, in acting- in this way, have been responding to a very clear call from their peoples. The old ideas of economics, and the old ideas of economic policy, were at fault in failing to recognise that, in the ordinary man's mind, security at the expense of progress is at least as attractive as progress at the expense of security. But we have now swung far too violently to the other extreme, and the time is overdue for a re-

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