IMPORTED GOODS.

New Zealand Herald, Volume LXVII, Issue 20482, 6 February 1930, Page 14

IMPORTED GOODS.

Sir,—" Free Trade" asserts that " people who buy imported goods save the exporter from extinction." He also declares that if wo exported nothing wo should fall into a very parlous state. Certainly all the economic troubles of the world are attributed chiefly to the difficulty of finding markets for exports. But, from the other point of view, all exports are imports, so that " Free Trade " cannot be right in his suggestion that imports are essential and exports a secondary consideration. Is it not possible for a country to be wholly independent, satisfying its requirements entirely from its own resources ? In the approach to that condition, people who buy goods of local manufacture provide (ho best- and most reliable market, to which access is cheapest and easiest, for goods that would otherwise have to b« exported. Perhaps all our ideas about external trade are fallacious and mankind may eventually be forced to reduce international commerce to the interchange of commodities the production of which is limited by climatic or seasonal and other conditions. The free traders tell us that, the world is an economic unit; it has no trade external to itself. Why should it bo absolutely necessary for such a country as New Zealand, as physically isolated from the rest of the world as" the earth is from other planets, to engage in overseas trade of such enormous volume? And if it got to tho stage of exporting nothing, as " Free Trade" suggests, tho cost of production and th® cost of living, being subject entirely to domestic conditions, would most certainly; be harmonised. Scrutineer