THE Hauraki Plains Gazette With which is incorporated THE OHINEMURI GAZETTE MONDAY, WEDNESDAY, FRIDAY. Motto : Public Service. Birth Notice. FRIDAY, SEPTEMBER 10, 1937. MOTORISTS AND TAXATION.

Hauraki Plains Gazette, Volume 47, Issue 2668, 10 September 1937, Page 4

THE Hauraki Plains Gazette With which is incorporated THE OHINEMURI GAZETTE MONDAY, WEDNESDAY, FRIDAY. Motto : Public Service. Birth Notice.

FRIDAY, SEPTEMBER 10, 1937. MOTORISTS AND TAXATION.

WEBB—On September 3, at Arohanui, to Mr and Mrs Chas. C. Webb, Miller avenue, Paeroa, a son (Robert Andrew). —Both well.

ALTHOUGH a good case, wellargued, for a reduction of taxation was presented to the Minister of Finance by the deputation representing the North and South Island Motor Unions last week, it came away emptyhanded. The Minister indicated that the Government’s commitments made it impossible for him to hold out any hope of relief. His words, in fact, implied that taxpayers in general need not look for reductions in taxation in any direction whatever. The deputation reminded Mr Nash of the promise made by the previous Government that the emergency tax on petrol would be removed when conditions improved. It also reminded him of the temporary nature of the emergency arrangement by which the motorists allowed a large slice of the specially ear-marked taxation for roads improvement to be diverted during the slump to the general State fund. These were promises made on behalf of the State to a numerically large proportion of it.

There were at the end of March last 255,748 licensed motor vehicles in the country—as the Statistical Department points out, “161 vehicles per 1000 of the population, a little short of one to every six persons.” It is fair, therefore, to say, that the deputation’s appeal for a reduction of taxation may be taken as a reflex of the feeling of a very large section of the public that the Government' should concentrate on ways and means of easing the burden. Its first duty, if the country is really as prosperous as it claims it has become as the result of its legislation, is to remove the taxes which the slump made necessary, and which should no longer be needed now that the emergency has passed. But the Minister of Finance seems to entertain the belief that the people’s money can be more profitably spent by the Government than by themselves. That, of course, is the Socialist ideal, to turn the State into a huge nursery and treat the people like babies, to be tended by regulations and spoon-fed accordingly. The fact of the matter is that the Government as the result of its Socialist policy needs every penny it can raise by taxation. The Prime Minister has indicated that the incidence of taxation is to be reviewed. He has said nothing, in his latest statement on the subject, about reducing taxation. What the Government no doubt has in mind is a method of taxation aimed at what Socialist policy is pleased to describe a “redistribution of the wealth of the country.” Actually it means that more of the country’s resources will be appropriated by the Government, as its Finance Minister evidently believes to be the proper thing to do, and less will be available to the private citizen for his own benefit and his own enterprises, less for the development of trade and commerce, and less for primary and secondary industries to expand. This can only lead in the long run to stagnation. Glad-

stone’s maxim of taxation, that the less is taken from the people by taxation, and the more is left to fructify in their pockets, the better for the State, is perfectly sound. Socialism has inverted the principle, and wherever Socialism has been tried, it has ignominiously failed.