This Money Business!

Northland Age, Volume 1, Issue 3, 23 October 1931, Page 6

This Money Business!

My dear Nephew, I am glad, my dear Jack, that you are anxious to get the hang of this money business, and a good deal flattered that you should turn to your old uncle for some light on the matter. In the course of a pretty long business life a good deal of money has passed through my hands (though very little has remained there for any time), and having seen a good deal of the working of our monetary system, you naturally think I can explain its principles to you, and especially why it seems to be working so badly just now, at least so far as you primary producers are concerned. Well, I’m sorry to spoil your illusions but that does not necessarily follow. If you want the principles of banking explained the last man you should go to is the average bank manager. It is not only his professional dislike to explain the mysteries of his craft to outsiders, it is often his blank ignorance of the inner workings of it. How the machine operates he knows usually in minute detail, and he will be delighted to explain that to you. But the principles underlying the working of the machine, its real controlling and manipulating power, that is a mysterious region given over to ex-

perts, to whom he is content to leave it. ' And we business men not only know less but care less. We are too intent usually in the effort to keep down our overdrafts to have either

the leisure or the inclination to study the question as to why it is necessary to have overdrafts at all. We accept that, as the old Scotswoman accepted her landlord, as “a mysterious dispensation of providence,” a fundamental fact of the Universe, like the weather or the age-long rule that the people who feed the world by their labour should be the last to come to the table and be thankful for what is left to them there. The fact is that we business men have our noses kept too close to the grindstone to have much time to look beyond the grindstone, or much inclination to do any constructive thinking outside our own affairs. And yet we are clamouring at present to be put in charge of the country’s affairs, as practical business men, confident that every Chamber of Commerce could produce a Mussolini who would put our country on the road to prosperity in short order, and (heaven help you!) some of you farmers even are taken in by our windy talk. It would be safer to put the lad who starts your oil engine in charge of an aeroplane—he’d only break his own neck and not ours as well.

Our monetary system, Jack, is a very wonderful and a very intricate machine laboriously built up as the fruit of thousands of years of trading between men and nations, it is the pillars on which our world-wide system of commerce is built, the blood circulation that feeds every part of the body politic. Whether these pillars are now secure enough to bear the weight of the superstructure, and whether the financial heart is strong enough and healthy enough to maintain that continuous well-regulated circulation necessary to national health, is a question that is troubling us at present, with too much reason.

Now I am going to deal with this subject, not so much as a business man, but as one who has devoted a good deal of his leisure time for many years to the study of political economy with an open mind, and checked what he has read from his own business observations. And let me tell you, Jack, though political economy is called “the dismal science”

yet when one has gone through the necessary preliminary drudgery that is demanded by the study of any science, there is no subject more fascinating, and certainly none more useful and necessary at present, than to study the working of the wonderful machine modern civilisation has evolved to turn the world into one huge market, and link up mankind into a kind of brotherhood, even if it is of a somewhat limited, shortsighted and in consequence selfish kind! If the machine is grinding down our producers at present, as we know to our cost it is; and if, as we have too much

reason to suspect, this is due not only to defects in the machine itself, but to the fact that it is being manipulat-

Letters on the Monetary Question to My Nephew in the Country . .

ed in certain class interests, the first step to bettering matters is to know the construction of the machine and its working. For the financial troubles of yourself and your neighbour are simply one result of a great economic revolution through which the world is passing, and of which the political and revolutionary upheavals are only minor phases. As to what the outcome of that revolution will be, that depends largely on you and the many millions like you in whose hands all political power has been placed. If you and they have knowledge enough to recognise the true path of progress, wisdom enough to choose real leaders men not only with ability and courage, but with the far-seeing view of the statesman, and the unflinching integrity to resist very powerful temptations and if you follow them with loyalty and courage in the grim fight with the powerful forces whose victory means the reduction of the vast majority of the world’s people to economic slavery, then it will be well with you. No, Jack, this isn’t wild Red talk, but the sober belief forced on me as the outcome of nearly half a century of study and observation. Thus the need for knowledge and action is great, and your duty plain. It is of no use protesting you have neither the time to study these matters or the brain to understand them. You can’t put your spare time to more profitable use (and a man can always spare time for what he wants to do), and as for your ability—well, Jack, I don’t want to be rude, but at times the brain power of you and your neighbours strongly reminds me of that piece of Maori land you bought three years ago to round off your farm. Then it was covered with gorse and scrub, good land growing nothing but rubbish. Tomorrow morning when you round up your Jerseys for milking look at that paddock for a moment, not only as a fine piece of pasture but as an allegory ; reflect on the change effected by some well-directed labour, and take the lesson to heart. For—listen to the garnered wisdom of your old uncle —not one man in a thousand even utilises half his natural brain power, however long he lives or however hard he works. The intellectual differences between men are not so much natural ability as diligent cultivation. You and your neighbours, Jack, are naturally capable of becoming better men—intellectually, morally and spiritually than you have ever dreamed in your vainest youthful moments. All you need is clearing and cultivation.

So all I want to do in these letters is to set you thinking about the matter for yourself and come to your own conclusions. Then you will not be so easily fooled by plausable advocates of powerful interests (who are in the market today to buy the best brains prepared .to advocate their cause) or the equally plausable advocates of political and economic nostrums warranted to cure all your social ills. To that end lam going to send the letters to the “Northland Age” for publication. By this I, at least, will profit by them, seeing the editor will send me money in exchange, which you must admit will be very appropriate to the subject. Now we will roll up our sleeves and plunge in.

Believe me, your well-wisher, UNCLE JOE [To Be Continued]