MORE PAP FOR THE WORKERS. A Commission to Fix Rents.

Free Lance, Volume II, Issue 95, 26 April 1902, Page 8

MORE PAP FOR THE WORKERS. A Commission to Fix Rents.

AT the conclusion of the meeting of unemployed, at the Basin Reserve on Saturday afternoon, the Rev. W. Thomson came to light and mounted the stump. He had a cure for the unemployed difficulty in his pocket, or rather, two cures. One was to nationalise the land. We fancy we have heard of it somewhere before. * • * It has a familiar look about it that warrants us in doubting whether Mr. Thomson is aged and venerable enough to be its original discoverer. The nationalisation of the land is a very pretty theory, but judging by the preference manifested in New Zealand for the freehold, Mr. Thomson has a solid contract ahead of him if he is setting out to convert the community to his way of thinking. At any rate, the unemployed will feel a bit tired if they wait for land nationalisation to help them. * • • There remains Mr. Thomson's other cure. He thinks a Rent Commission ought to be appointed to fix up rents so that the working man may not be over-burdened. Good enough for those of the working men who don't own houses. It is always an acceptable thing for the people who want to buy, hire or borrow to fix their own terms. If the citizens who by thrift, hard work, or lucky chance have amassed money to build houses are no longer to have liberty to decide what rent they shall charge for them, the chances are that that form of investment will go out of fashion, and the State will have to enter wholesale into the landlord business itself. * ♦ ♦ But the State interference with freedom of contract can't be allowed to stop here. There will be ample work for Mr. Thomson's Commissioners after they have fixed up the landlords and posted up their cast-iron scale of rents. In justice to the great wageearning and rent-paying class, the State must regulate the profits which any man shall be permitted by trade, industrial enterprise, or professional calling, to make in this happy, spoonfed country. The Commissioners can be employed with a horde of Inspectors under them — Government billets, you know, will then be plentiful as leaves in Vallombrosa — to audit every business man's books, assess his profits, and, after leaving him the regulation margin of profit — which must not be

Luge enough to en courage luxury — divide the rest between the State and hi -5 employee-,. Then there aie the giocers, the hatchers, the bakers, the tailors and all the rest ot the people who feed and clothe the woiking man. Another Commission will be needed to deal with them and catalogue the prices at v*hich it shall be lawful for them to sell thengoods. In tact, once you start with the landlords and depme them ot any say in fixing the rent of their own houses, m order to carry out Mr. Thomson's brilliant idea to its logical conclusion you must comert the State into a -\ast bureaucracy poking its nose into everybody's business and taking one that no man makes a copper more than his neighbour. In that blissful time the highest ambition of every man will be to become a Go\ernment official, and blest avill he be who climbs to the giddy height; of a Rent Commissioner.