GOODS AND MONEY

Evening Post, Volume CXX, Issue 124, 21 November 1935, Page 8

GOODS AND MONEY

(To the Editor.) Sir,—Your correspondent "H.C.J.," who lacks the courage of his convictions to disclose his identity, and whose self-estimation of mental infallibility has prompted him to "assert" (which means "free from obscurity or doubt") that my statement in a previous letter, that "any country wherein the stream of goods produced for use and thej stream of money to buy those goods for consumption are equal," there can be no inflation of either goods or money, "means nothing at all." (j It is unfortunate that a person of "H.J.C.'s" calibre and mental superiority should have befooled himself to attack "nothing at all," and with that certainty of mind that it was nothing at all whilst preparing and delivering the attack. The fact of the matter is "H.J.C." has failed to understand the extension of the subject as dealt with m the letter, from which he tore a paragraph from the context. Otherwise he would have understood the meaning of the words used by quotation from banking authorities given in that letter, that a balanced national economy cannot permit of inflation. The two main factors in commercial trading other than human service is money and goods. Goods are changed into money and money into goods systematically. If the system does not allow sufficient money to circulate from hand to hand in the country to buy at economic prices the goods produced; that form of disequilibrium must create unemployment and proportionately lessen production.

When we see nations and empires unbalanced in the monetary exchanges of the world, and men and women verging on starvation amid plenty, we wonder why this tragedy is permitted and what its cause. But when we read the epistles of men like "H.J.C* who can see "nothing at all" in a balanced economy for New Zealand or any other part of the world,'there is no wonder. Instead of "asserting" my inability to explain thevfaith that is withm me, which I challenge him to prove, he should have offered fair criticism against my belie! and reasons for defence of the continuance of the present monetary system.—l am, etc., JOHN TUCKER. Trades Hall, Wellington.