MR. NASH'S REMEDY

New Zealand Herald, Volume LXXIV, Issue 22864, 20 October 1937, Page 19

MR. NASH'S REMEDY

Sir, —Every civilised community, just as civilised individuals do, .sells service or commodities to others and with the proceeds purchases other services and other commodities. Thus we all depend on markets and our markets, constantly changing, give us vastly different returns at different times. After long years of waiting we now have revealed to us by Mr. Nash how Labour would have displayed its superior wisdom in dealing with the depression that great changes in the world's markets recently inflicted on us. The depression, it will be remembered, struck £-20,000,000 from the value of our exports, while giving us only trifling relief in the cost of our imports and no relief at all in the cost of our debt. Through these changes in markets outside the Dominion we suffered a loss of 33.6 per cent in the .volume of goods available for our own consumption. How would Labour have replaced that vast volume of goods? It would have been done, Mr. Nash tells us, by "insulating" ourselves from the world's markets. That is to say we should, "as far as possible," have substituted production for oTirselves for production for export. New Zealand, to the extent of 6.'5 per cent, is organised for farming and our farming, to the extent of 69 per cent, is organised for production for external markets. To have substituted production for ourselves for production for external markets would have meant abandoning two-thirds of our farming, and transferring twothirds of our farmers and their employees to the manufacture of the commodities we previously imported. Innumerable new factories would have had to be built to replace the abandoned farms that were already in going order, new machinery in vast quantities woifld have had to be manufactured and vastly greater power would have had to he made available. All this would have meant years of utterly unproductive work with the loss of all the goods and services our abandoned exports would have purchased, and when the brilliant policy had at last, with the profitless toil of half our population, been brought to yield its fruit the new production would, with the utmost certainty, have been found to he far less profitable, far less useful to our population, than the production that had been abandoned. We could, in fact, cure a depression in New Zealand by tlie method advised by Labour about as effectually as we could cure a man suffering from concussion of the brain by dealing him a, staggering blow on tiie head. J. Johnstone. Manurewa.