DOORS CLOSED TO SERVICEMEN

Nelson Evening Mail, Volume 80, 7 August 1945, Page 2

DOORS CLOSED TO SERVICEMEN

EFFECT OF BUREAUCRACY “The law of the jungle,” about which Socialists clamour, and which they claim they are protecting the people against by their prohibitions and restrictions. is a strange phrase to use when one considers the jungle of bureaucracy with which our fighting men returning from overseas are being confronted to-day. There is the case of a returned man, whose situation we can vouch for. who has spent a considerable time going through New Zealand trying to discover a motor business or a petrol station into ‘which he can invest the £4OOO in cash which he possesses. But he finds himself in the impenetrable jungle of State restrictions in the field oftransport. That field is a protected one, owing to State control and regulation, and he cannot find an enterprise in which to put his money and start off in business on his own account, as a free man. He has had some licenses offered him, but in every case it is because the owner wants to get rid of it, due to its unprofitableness. The Stale planners and 'controllers want to save him and his money; He does not want to be saved; he wants to be free to choose, to put his money into what he wants to, and to call his business his own. But State regulation forbids. There was also the case, not so long ago, of a disabled returned serviceman, who applied to be granted a taxi license. in Dunedin. Despite the fact that he had actually operated a taxi license before he went, away to the war. his application was turned down. Not because the public did not want him: but because the planners and regulators decided in their wisdom that there was no place for him. Are returned men to be denied freedom of choice, and the right to choose their own calling in whatever direction? Is your son affected? The objective of State ownership and restriction is to order and control the lives of all the people. The self-same object lies behind the proposed nationalisation of banking, and the airways. Go where you are put and like it—that is the authority and power that the Socialist extremists are increasingly acquiring, and the process will go on till the freedom of all is completely stifled by State dictatorships. Protests from the people can help to bring our legislators to their senses.*