LESSONS OF UNEMPLOYMENT

Evening Post, Volume CV, Issue 126, 30 May 1928, Page 8

LESSONS OF UNEMPLOYMENT

STATE INTERFERENCE SOME OF THE FRUITS (By "Taxpayer.") It would be a poor soul indeed that ' did not' sympathise' sincerely with the hale man in distress unable to find honest work. Even Browning, who so rarely is intelligible save to the elect, lays open the consolation's of labour for all of us to read. He writes: —. Get leave to work, In this .world—'tis;the best you get at all. The leaders of the Labour Party, however, have not set out in the right way to secure the , consummation of their ideals in this respect. At their meetiDg in the Queen's Theatre on Sunday evening they concentrated their attack upon the. Government, scarcely offering a suggestion as to how the evil of unemploy- . ment might bo alleviated, and numbers of their audience must have carried away the impression that they had been attending an -election rally with the sore troubles of the workers thrown in as a fillip to the proceedings. Mr. A. Cook, who presided at the meeting, declared that the policy of the Gov'eminent seemed to be to get as many aspossible unemployed in order to re-eugage them at the last moment at starvation wages. Mr. J. Roberts stated that the Government's action in . reducing the wages of the unemployed wag simply a lever to reduce tiie wages of all workers, and, finally, Mr. R. Semple insisted that the Government had striven to create a permanent army of unemployed.. It is perfectly safe to say that not one of these gentlemen believed what he asked the audience to believe. It is equally'safe to say that not a dozen members of the " audience were persuaded that the Prime Minister and his colleagues were deliberately inflicting cruel .hardships upon children, women, and men, in order that the standard rate of wages might be reduced. Ministers of the Crown are no. more capable iof barbarity of that kind .■'. than are the leaders of the Labour Party.FACTORS AGAINST (DEVELOPMENT. That the Government has committed errors of omission and commission in the administration of the affairs of the Dominion, however, must be admitted by every frank 'observer, and that some of these errors have gravely aggravated the unemployed difficulty is a fact easily de- ' 4)iced. The Government's persistent interference .with 'private enterprise; for. instance, has closed many avenues of employment and prevented the expansion of many others. The very retention of the Board of Trade Act on the Statute Book, for years after any legitimate excuse ior its existence had disappeared, may well have' kept millions of capital out of the country.- The Government's attempt to make the State railways "pay" by keep- N ing .motor competition off the roads; its subsidising this industry and that in- ■ dustry at the expense of other industries; its unfair competition with private enterprise that had served the community satisfactorily for years, and its inequitable system of levying {he income tax, all have operated against the interests and welfare of the workers in particular, as every v obstacle to national development along sound and comprehensive lines must do. But the leaders of the Labour Party so far from sharing this view would go even further than the Government has gone in "socialising" the means of production, transport, and exchange. In .his policy , speech "at Greymouth on1 Monday evening, Mr. H. E. Holland, tho Leader •of the Labour Opposition, announced that. when the party had the opportunity it would establish a State Bank, with the sole right of note issue;, would make fire and accident insurance a State monopoly; would establish a, basic wage' and an' increased family allowance; and would hold fast to'all the, socialistic measures previous Governments had conceded. A programme of this description^ is bound to appeal to numbers of people', who, having no .knowledge of economics,;nor the teachings of history, imagine the arrival of the millennium may be hastened by the suppression of the individual, ~a"nd the exaltation of the State, the surest way of reaching the most disastrous form of despotism. The time has arrived for the \ public to be taking serious heed. ,