CONTROL AND ITS PENALTIES

New Zealand Herald, Volume LXXI, Issue 21782, 23 April 1934, Page 8

CONTROL AND ITS PENALTIES

An American tailor has been sent to gaol for 30 days for charging 35 cents for pressing a suit instead of 40 cents, the minimum prescribed by the N.R.A. code. An English farmer was recently fined £IOO for a breach of control regulations in connection with field produce. In Auckland there is now in operation a milk council under the authority of an Act which provides penalties. All over the control-ridden world a new class of offences, for which all sorts of penalties are provided, is being introduced into the statutes. Powers are never given without the means of enforcing them. Those who so eagerly clutch at control as an expedient in a time of economic stress, and Governments which so readily respond to their cries, fail to realise the gravity of legislation which turns an age-old system of trading into a crime. It was remarked by Lord Astor not long ago, when discussing the potato control scheme, under which the board is authorised to prohibit the sale of small potatoes in the event of a too bountiful crop, that the 42,000,000 consumers of Great Britain might be as ready to break regulations which infringed unreasonably their liberty of choice and standard of living as American citizens had been to ignore the Eighteenth Amendment. There would be plenty of fanners and distributors able and willing to evade regulations in order to get customers, which, incidentally, was the crime of the American tailor who dropped the price of suit cleaning five cents. If, said Lord Astor, farmers had to choose between official prices for surplus produce and disposing of their surplus illegally at a profit, they might break the law and risk the odium of conviction for the. crime of selling cheap milk or small potatoes. The country might witness a growing disrespect for and disregard of law. and the undermining of public morality. It is a statement that requires emphasis wherever control enthusiasts are to be found. Even if such laws are not generally defied, the fact remains that every punishable offence that is created in the name of economic planning, of price regulation, of restriction of output, makes inroads upon the liberty which people have exercised from time immemorial. "There must be compulsion," say the planners, and many of those in temporary distress say "Yes, compulsion by all means/' But as certain as the sun rises there will- come a day of reckoning. Every shackle will become irksome in time.