INDUSTRIAL REVIVAL

Greymouth Evening Star, 12 September 1931, Page 3

INDUSTRIAL REVIVAL

U.S.A’S TEN-YEAR PLAN. Americans are proposing a Ten-Year Plan on the assumption that what they were able to accomplish during the War they can succeed in doing during o. distressful peace. What the War Industries Board really did, argues Stuart Chase in “Harper’s Magazine,” was to organise the nation that two men did the work of three, and did it better: "This is the kind of thing a master plan can do if it has a chance to function,” he writes. ‘‘Business surrendered to the War Industries Board primarily on the plea and psychology of patriotism. Tho flags, were flying, the drums beating, and a band was playing ‘Over There.’ To-day no flags flj' and no bands play, but seven million workless men upon the streets are a greater menace than w r erc the Germans in Lorraine. “With the outline clearly before us, suppose we draft a Peace Industries Board to function in the present crisis —and hopefully for decades to come. Its job shall be to draft a Ten-Year Plan for the United States and to supervise the execution of the Plan when accepted. To make the target more concrete, let us say a minimum family wage of five thousand dollars (£1000) by 1943. We already have the physical plant to provide this figure. ft is a figure, furthermore, to give our friends in Russia pause. These Slavs seem to think that they discovered national planning; that unless one knows Papa Marx backward he cannot locate an industry near its source of raw material or untangle a problem in cross-hauling. “With tho highest respect, it would do these gentlemen in smocks no harm to take a look round this attic. They would find machinery which we created in 1917 and put to use which they have not yet thought about, and

which might prove of the highest use to them. The objectives here to be achieved are physically simpler—if psychologically more complicated—than in 1917. Ft is easier to make a dwelling-house than a tank, a plough than a field-gun. The old Board had to create the vast paraphernalia of the wastes of war, both in man power and materials, while at the same time raising the standard of living. The' new Board need concentrate only upon the latter.”