THE CAUSE OF THE DEPRESSION

Otago Daily Times, Issue 21645, 16 May 1932, Page 8

THE CAUSE OF THE DEPRESSION

TO THE EDITOIi. Silt,—“ Humble Citizen ” admits that, ignorant greed is the cause of the depression, but maintains that the evil is due essentially, not to the intensity of the greed, but to the fact that the greed has for its object not real money, but fictitious money. I wonder why people are greedy for fictitious wealth—it sound like a perversion of appetite! But it is not the form of wealth that is desired by the

greedy tlmt matters; it is when greed is intensified to the point at which it becomes anti-social that evil results. A large section of the community today openly asserts that all nations, all employers, all employed—in fact, all of use—have made unrestrained greed an ideal. They assert that to grab all they can without regard to service is the right of every man because every man has been injured by the other fellow's greed. Mv letters are not sermons; they have nothing to do with religion, but are statements of facts and truisms that are being ignored, and logical deducttions—e.g., greed when it becomes sufficiently antisocial and sufficiently widespread inevitably must produce economic disaster-, tor society and all members of it. The practical deduction from this is that no manipulation of the currency will prevent depressions and slumps while all the world idealises greed without service, freedom without responsibility. This ideal is logically impossible of attainment without disaster. What to aim at is efficiency of administration of relief funds and provision of productive works. Let each man, worker or employer, ask, “In what respect, if any, is my greed responsible tor preventing the unemployed from producing from our raw materials the necessities for existence for the unemployed? i am, etc., Stuart Moore.