FARMING AND ECONOMICS

Hauraki Plains Gazette, Volume 51, Issue 3126, 3 June 1942, Page 5

FARMING AND ECONOMICS

(To the Editor.) Sir, —Having replied to certain critics in Auckland in connection with Mr Langstone’s appointment •to the Canadian High Commissionership, might I be permitted to endorse the remarks of Mr W. H. Taylor. He is quite right when he says that it is not necessary for a Minister of Lands to be a farmer. Farming has nothing to do with economics. Conceding that a farmer is qualified to produce and understands the technique of his work, the most important thing in any nation is, who owns the land and what is the nature., of the laws governing the ownership of land. Henry George gave us “Progress and Poverty,”—a work that has been translated into twenty-four languages and created a new era in economic thought. It contains more economic knowledge in one chapter than the whole of the “orthodox” economists have written in the last hundred years,. Yet the gifted economist was hot a farmer, and. knew very little about farming. Yet the work refared to dei-’f ** s » !utely Wlth the reforth of land owne* course ) I notice (with exceptions in. _ that farmers have an impresSloff 1 the freehold is sacrosanct. If the early legislators Who laid the foundation of, our Dominion’s land [policy had had enough vision to have held the whole of the land for the people, i.e., (no private ownership), what a prosperous condition would our little country be in to-day. Our land is our common heritage, like the atmosphere. Private owners have not commandeered the air; to do so would be a physical impossibility. I would like to remind Mr A. S. Sutherland that it was private ownership of land, in the Old Country, that drove millions of the “best” people overseas because they had no access to the land.

It may interest Mr Sutherland to know that to-day, in New Zealand one-tenth of oui’ population owns nine-tenths of our whole wealth. There have been many causes for this anomaly, but the chief is private ownership in land. No one would benefit more than the farmer, by the abolition of private ownership. He has been exploited by land sharks, financiers and. others. There should be no “juggling” allowed in land. The land system is the Alpha and Omega of political economy. For the land is the reservoir of all wealth. Without it there would have been no human life. It is in the last analysis, our only asset. And its value is enhanced, not by the farmer alone; the existence of every man and woman and child, gives an increased value to land. Private ownership in land is as unjust as private ownership of human beings. And it is not necessary to be farmers to know this. I realised it when I was a schoolboy. I am, etc.,

HERBERT MULVIHILL, 113 Hobson St., Auckland..