STOPPING SLUMPS

Evening Post, Volume CXXXVI, Issue 74, 24 September 1943, Page 6

STOPPING SLUMPS

Sir, —The Labour Party's election propaganda assumes very limited intelligence among the electors. An advertisement claiming that freedom of private enterprise resulted in evictions, | foreclosures, unemployment, and' riots, i for example, ignores the fact that these things were not due to an internal j collapse, but to a drastic- fall in overseas prices. Labour has been quick to wash its hands of responsibility for price rises which, it has said, "are due to overseas conditions over which we have no control." Will it tell the electorate how it proposes to control a fall in overseas prices when it cannot control a rise? Mr. Nash returns to the attack in his statement that a slump is inevitable if "we" return to the old supply and demand ideas of the past. Has Mr. Nash read Dr. Belshaw's study of insulation in a dependent economy? Can he explain how he proposes to free New Zealand from the influence of the foreign market when this country has the biggest per capita export trade in the world—one four times as great as the United States? Finally, has the Labour Party ever considered -who pays the taxes which make its plans work? Do they come from State Departments—or from private enterprise? And what happens if private enterprise is frozen out? —I am, etc LET'S HAVE FACTS. ' Sir, —To the unbiased onlooker it is rather. amazing to observe the way in which the various Labour candidates play upon the credulity and insularity of the average New Zealander when they blame the results of the 1930-34 depression upon the National Government. It is surprising to think that New Zealand, with only the population of a decent-sized town in one of the larger countries, could produce men who were able to create a worldwide depression. I was resident in the American continent during the whole of this period, and from comparisons ,can assure the reader that conditions over tfiere were much worse.

The Labour Government claimed it can insulate New Zealand from any further depressions, and yet Mr. Nash, in his speech at Petone, said that we can only live by our exports. How can we export if other countries are in the throes of a depression and unable to buy our exports, even if we do coax them with a 25 per cent, reduction in the exchange, which, by the way, the Labour Government most emphatically promised to adjust. Just why haven't they removed the 25 per cent, when they claim to have made New Zealand so prosperous? Just another politician's empty promise.—lam, etc., THE .TRUTH HURTS.