ECONOMIC FREEDOM.

Manawatu Standard, Volume LV, Issue 234, 31 August 1935, Page 6

ECONOMIC FREEDOM.

(To the Editor.)

Sir, —In his reply to nfy question as to whether a Labour Government controlling the economic life of the country would give us freedom or economy, Mr Christensen assumes that it would provide both and argues on that assumption. He lias not, 1 submit, answered the question. He claims that the present system stifles individualism, but under present conditions it is the business, farm, or other industrial undertaking that is the economic individual, not the persons comprising the staffs of those economic units. Individualism was destroyed, I think, when men first formed a community—a very long time ago —and in their political constitution abandoned the individualism which was the natural state of man. It seems to me to be very likely, also, that their reason for doing so was the same as that which will cause us to abandon our economic individualism, namely, the danger to which the individual was exposed. Economically expressed the danger is now “insecurity of tenure,” and it applies to tho economic individual —the business, farm, or other enterprise which “dies” when it tries to stand on its own feet, and fails.

With most of Mr Christensen’s first paragraph I agree. We should work to live —not live to work —and I think that we are doing at least three times as much labour a 3 is necessary to get the present results in production. I also agree that a social economic system is better than an individualist system. "Where Mr Christensen and I disagree is in the method of bringing in a social economic system. He (and other supporters of Labour's Socialist programme) desire to place the economic control of the State in the hands of a democratic Parliament. I want to take it into the hands of an industrial government representing primary industry, business, labour, and finance anil leave Parliament alone. There was great need of social reform hundreds of years ago, but it was a different need from ours. The trouble was at that time demonstrated by secret trials of accnsed people who were tortured to make them confess to crimes which as often as not they had not committed, imprisonment without a trial, the burning alive of people who read the Bible without the Church's authority, tho iron collar round the neck of the serf, and so on. The Parliament has done away with these things. We have instead equality in law, toleration of all religious sects, and so on; and we also have a state of economic chaos; and I maintain that this state of economic chaos arises out of the combination of a democratic political system, which frees the economic individual from the restraint of the oppressive autocratic system and allows it to develop rapidly, and an individualist economic system which leaves these units separate from each other. The autocratic system is a central control system which gave us unity We needed freedom. The democratic system gave us freedom — we control the Parliament. "We need economy, which is a central control system and we get it as we got freeaom —by reversing the governing principle of the existing social system, and applying the new principle to the weakness of the system only through an entirely new constitution incorporating an entirely new governing body, quite separate from, and in addition to. the existing constitution and existing governing body. The new governing body becomes the active government because economic government is what we want. The older governing body becomes passive because we have got our freedom. Can’t you see that, Mr Christensen? The Ballance-Seddon Government is not a precedent for a government that wants to . “abandon individualism in business and socialise the means of production, distribution. and exchange.” There is is as much chance of economy by way of an altered Parliamentary policy as there is of freedom by way of altering the policy of a dictator. I apologise for the length of this letter, Mr Editor, but I am really leaving a lot unwritten. —I am. etc., P. V. KOEHLER.