“COUNT YOUR BLESSINGS.”

Manawatu Standard, Volume LV, Issue 302, 19 November 1935, Page 6

“COUNT YOUR BLESSINGS.”

(To the Editor.)

Sir, —Being of a naturally lethargic nature, physically and mentally,, 1 am a rare contributor to the correspondence columns of the daily papers, but occasionally, driven by irritation (which scientists tell us even an amoeba is capable of experiencing), 1 am driven to reply to the arrant and blatant nonsense of egotistical contributors. In your issue of Saturday is such an epistle over the signature of W. Archer. Having, like the Labour Party, had a “mild flirtation” with Douglas Credit, 1 believe it to have been a genuine though misguided attempt on the part of its originator to bridge that undoubted chasm between producer and potential consumer (and the producer is himself so often a potential consumer). Letters like that of Mr Archer, however, have the effect of alienating the sympathies of the thinking from a scheme advocated by one who looks foolish trying to explain it. Mr Archer blames the financial system for causing “poverty and misery” to hundreds of thousands of people in this country. Surely Mr Archer can never have travelled overseas and seen poverty. The poorest in this country lives in comparative affluence compared with millions overseas. As Lord Snowden said during his visit to this country some years ago, our trouble is not tlje high cost of living but the cost of high living. Me may thank the financial system not for our poverty but for our comparative affluence. I make no claim that the system is perfect, but by wise and sane adaptation to changing conditions 1 believe it can be made eventually to fulfil all the demands that can be made upon it. Mr Archer states that the system has plunged New Zealand into lnuidreds of millions of debt and that the interest thereon will eventually, absorb the proceeds of all production. Tut 1 tut 1 (Please encore my irritation.) Does Mr Archer ever pause to consider that without the “hundreds of millions,” excluding, of course, the cost of the war, New Zealand would still be in a stale of primeval virginity, a perhaps not undesirable state, for she would also be without egotistical financial reformers ? Does Mr Archer imagine that without borrowed capital, that is without the present financial system, New Zealand could have provided herself in one hundred years with all the amenities of civilisation that have taken older countries thousands of years to attain? And would Mr Archer after accepting these benefits, and incidentally the highest standard of living of almost any country in the world “doom” the system that provided them ? Count your blessings, Mr Archer! —I am, etc., A. F. McKENZIE. Bunnythorpe, Nov. 17, 1935.