Notes of the Week

Northland Age, Volume 1, Issue 5, 6 November 1931, Page 10

Notes of the Week

a help to solving the unemployment problem the Government is running a series of advertisements in the daily newspapers urging the people to buy Dominionmade goods. It is urged, very sensibly, that the only cure for unemployment is work, and that our duty to our neighbour involves dealing with him in preference to outsiders. The loss caused by compulsory idleness does not end with the loss to the unemployed man and his family. A large part of the workless are a direct charge on the community and every taxpayer, and when weighing costs between home-made and imported goods, that has to be taken into consideration. Then the effect of unemployment is cumulative, the workless with no income to spend have perforce to cease buying, and thus causes others to be thrown out of work, until the vicious circle is broken in some way. Every man put back into employment provides more employment for others, and they again for still more, until all are employed. To buy in the cheapest market is often gross extravagance. v H* •!» H* JjWERY patriotic man at this crisis will thus give preference in his buying to home-made goods whenever it is possible to do so, even if prices are higher. It is not a time to discuss whether some of our secondary industries should ever have been established, the fact is that they are there and if we buy thir products local labour will be employed to everyone’s benefit. When times are more prosperous and employment more plentiful, we can examine the whole question of our industrial system and decide what policy we are to follow in future. On that there is at present little agreement. At one extreme is the advocates of rigid protection, that we should import nothing we can manufacture here for ourselves, blind to the fact that America is painfully finding out that you cannot sell to people unless you take their goods in exchange. At the opposite pole is the people who advocate absolute free trade—that we should make nothing here that we can import cheaper from anywhere else—a policy equally foolish and short-sighted. One hears the plea seriously made that we should be content to be Britain’s dairy farm and sheep run—be content in fact to be a farming suburb to London. We could supply Britain with food and raw materials and take her manufactured goods in payment. This was the dream of the Manchester Free Traders to make Britain “the workshop of the world,” a dream now perforce abandoned for ever. Every nation now aims at being economically self-sufficient as far as possible—and most are rushing into the most extreme forms of protection in the effort. The overseas Dominions share to a certain extent the same feeling, and act upon it. It is a fact we must recognise, whether we approve of the sentiment or not. Our feeling towards. Britain is more and more every year becoming that of a grown-up son to his parents, affectionate and respectful, but determined to shape his own life after his own ideas. We are a nation in the making, and we hanker after the equipment of a full-blown nation, even before we can afford it. ****** \\IHAT we should do, and so far have largely failed to do, is to recognise that if our first duty is to our local people our second is to our British kinsfolk. Our prosperity is wrapped up in theirs, the more we buy from them the more they are able to buy from us. Our interest as well as our duty lies in buying British goods in preference to foreign, even if they cost a little more. We buy from foreign countries and pay them from our British credits. To mention a small matter, we buy butter boxes from Sweden who buys.,nothing from us. Nominally we save by the transaction, actually we, as a nation, lose. If we used our own timber we would save some of the money now being spent in finding unprofitable work for unemployed timber workers, which comes out of the pockets of factory suppliers as well as that of the rest of the community. There is an outcry against the threatened introduction of Russian petrol into the Dominion. Yet Russia is not only willing to supply us with petrol at a cheaper rate than our present suppliers, but to take payment in wool and other of our products. We are spending millions with America for petrol and America claps a prohibitive impost on our goods.. That sort of thing cannot continue. All trade is barter—we can only trade with people who trade with us, and the same principles, apply to all—to our neighbours, to our kinsfolk, and to foreigners. This is the free trade we should aim at —-a fair exchange of goods among equals.