VARIOUS REMEDIES

Evening Post, Issue 20, 23 July 1935, Page 8

VARIOUS REMEDIES

(To the Editor.)

Sir, —With many others I was much interested in your account on July 18 of the meeting of the Unemployment Research Association; but surely much of the talk was both wild and wide of the mark. One speaker advocated "the taking of land and capital goods." Very well! That means revolution without a doubt. Does the speaker mean revolution? Does he imagine that the present holders of land and capital will tamely submit to the confiscation of all their property without a fight? Another speaker suggested getting down to fundamental causes and stated that the individual worker was the slave of the machine, which in turn was privately owned. How can any human being be the slave of an inanimate thing? The statement is absurd. You might just as well say that the slaves of the Southern States were the slaves of the spades and hoes which they used to till the ground.

Another speaker stated that he was not concerned with the ownership of the land or the means of production; and yet another stated that he was in favour of the unemployed being given "the. right to work for full time at full wages on economically sound undertakings." I should like to ask where the latter conditions are to be found except by taking some of the land of the large landowners (compensation to be fixed later), letting it at a fair rental to any persons able to till it profitably. I believe this would open up avenues of employment for many of the unemployed. But to take the whole of the land and capital at once without compensation seems to me a foolish and dangerous proposal.—l am, etc., LAND FOR THE PEOPLE. (To the Editor.) Sir,—ln Thursday's "Evening Post" the Rev. D. W. Martin is reported as charging the Government with "playing the fool" because it has not cured unemployment. The only solution he offers is "taking the ownership of land and capital goods out of the hands of private owners and vesting them in the State"—otherwise, the socialisation of all means of production, distribution, and exchange. I am open to conviction, Sir, but at present I am of the strong opinion that the "foci" is emphatically not the statesman who declines to engage in such wholesale confiscation. Why, even the Labour Party is not so silly as to have the socialisation of all means of production, distribution, and exchange on its programme. "In the sweet by* and by," perhaps, but not just now.—l am, etc., J.C.M.