Economic Inequality

Northern Advocate, 7 March 1947, Page 4

Economic Inequality

Nash Warns Against

(1 p.m.) LAKE SUCCESS, March 6 Warning that extreme economic inequality between nations led to war. Mr Walter Nash told the Economic and Social Council that the United Nations must approach the problems of full employment on a world plane and reminded delegates that the Charter enjoined all nations to achieve for all the world the objects which each had striven io achieve for themselves. Mr Nash invited the council to look at the problem of full employment from the angle of what it really meant to the people. He suggested that it meant that people all over the world should have sufficient income to enable them to buy the things they could produce when fully employed. The assumption of responsibility of seeing that low living standards were raised by the utilisation of all the world's resources did not mean that individual countries had to abandon their own living standards. Poor peoples must be enabled to get the things they needed without prejudicing the standards of those who were better off. FREE EXCHANGE

Mr Nash suggested that in the long run free immigration, free passage of goods and free exchange of ideas across national frontiers would be needed to achieve these objectives.

.He recognised that in the present circumstances such freedoms were impossible, but as a first step action should be taken to encourage international action for development and distribution of manpower and material resources.

To talk of employment alone was valueless unless it meant the organisation of a pattern of production and services designed to ensure high levels of employment. He therefore moved that the economic and employment commission investigate and report as early as practicable upon measures necessary to organise world resources of manpower and materials as would promote higher world living'standards full employment and social progress while safeguarding the living standards of individual nations.