UNEMPLOYED YOUTH

Otago Daily Times, Issue 21736, 30 August 1932, Page 7

UNEMPLOYED YOUTH

TO THE EDITOR

Sir, —The column of information under the above title in to-day's issue of your paper makes sad reading. While the gentlemen concerned deserve the community s thanks for the efforts they are making to find employment for the growing number of unemployed boys, the sadness is in the thought that those efforts must be largely futile. , , Suggestions arc made that more boys must be employed on the land, presumably to help to increase production, and in the same issue of your paper the hint is again thrown out- that England will be

unable to take a greater quantity of our products. Therefore, what use is it, under present conditions, to produce more? Is it that we may endeavour vainly to increase exports to countries other than England, while our own people suffer increasing want?The tact, so patent that anyone in only the kindergarten of common sense should be able to see it, is simply this, that the people's power to consume is not keeping pace with, their power to produce—a fact chiefly due to a flaw in the present economic system. Try as men will to get round that fact—and they are trying desperately hard —they cannot do so. Why, then, continue the present frantic efforts to achieve the impossible? Is it that the leaders have not yet arrived at the first stage of common sense, or is it that for unstated reasons they prefer to behave like frightened ostriches and imagine that because they choose to disregard facts, therefore, they cannot be facts ? —I am, etc., Ivan E. Sutherland. Dunedin, August 25.