COST AND PRODUCTION.

Evening Star, Issue 20687, 9 January 1931, Page 9

COST AND PRODUCTION.

TO THE EDITOR. Sir, —No wonder Mr Harrison was disappointed with the Welfare League’s reply to his letter on cost and production, as it was no reply at all. That august body says it is not conceited enough to suggest a remedy. I think it has the conceit all right, but by no means has it got the ability. If wages are too high what about the propertyholders and the inflated values they have put on without any effort to themselves, but simply taking advantage of the fact that their betters were busily engaged in Franco and elsewhere for four years? I suppose when wages come down I shall still have to pay tho same instalments on my house, for which I contracted seven years ago, increased rates as per susual, same price for school hooks, but to offset those drawbacks there will be tho intense joy of sitting up till 13 a.m. watching the wife whom I promised to love and cherish sing the song of tho shirt, while making new clothes for tho kiddies out of old ones I have managed to cadge, or had given to me, not by the Chamber of Commerce, but usually by people as poor as myself. It is a good thing that some people don’t suffer from hardening of the heart simultaneously with ago and hardening of tho a' tories. I am conceited enough to supply a remedy, and.that is for the powers that be to repudiate their debt to inanco with tho same facility they did tho returned soldier. The Chamber of Commerce advocates reduced wages, and yet these are the gentlemen who, sixteen years ago, promised a better land and homes for heroes. Another remedy, although no kill-joy, I would suggest is for the menfolk onco in a while to forget Phar Lap, the All Blacks, and Don Bradman, and just put themselves in the housewife’s place, whom the present conditions are making a slave who is quite entitled to quote the lines “ Sewing at once with a double thread a shroud as well as a shirt.” I see Mr Harrison mentions tho \Velf are League’s advocacy of a Mussolini dictatorship, but that body and its contemporary, tho Chamber of Commerce, like the 'Bourbons, learn nothing and forget nothing.—l am, etc., PorOFFSKI. January 7.