COMMON SENSE

Otago Daily Times, Issue 21994, 1 July 1933, Page 10

COMMON SENSE

Interest in the monetary system is a sign of the times, and seems to have kinship with the interest that is ever manifested in mysteries and revelations. If, in his earnest exposition on the subject at the Town Hall on Thursday night, Mr H. M. Rushworth, M.P., was able to lift the veil sufficiently to enable his audience to grasp thoroughly the defects of the monetary system under which we groan, and the merits of the proposals, of which he is an ardent advocate, for its reform to fit the national requirements, his hearers will doubtless be grateful, as wiser and, we hope, happier people should be. But since, as he says, the community has been feeding on popular fallacies for the past three years, the state of its digestive organs cannot be altogether encouraging to a hope of its successful assimilation of fresh and strange pabulum. Its powers of incorporation may by this time be a trifle impaired. But it is very comforting to be told that all the nightmares of finance so conducive to dyspepsia can be dismissed - and the great problem itself of the gap between costs of production and purchasing power can be disposed of in a very simple way by the application of common sense. For, after all, there js nothing like common sense. It comes perenially to the rescue in all the troubled avenues of life like a fresh breeze that sweeps away obscuring fogs. Unfortunately common sense, though so universally admired, is not always immediately recognisable. So many different brands of it are proclaimed by those who would guide public opinion that the genuine commodity tends to become a sort of ignis fatuus —a will o’ the wisp. The common sense which Mr Rushworth produces with all impressiveness, to solve all our problems, resolves itself into the Douglas credit system. Major Douglas’s discovery of a method of closing the gap between costs and purchasing power constitutes the great panacea, the only one that will serve. The acceptance and adoption of it yet hang fire, it is true, for of course none is so blind as those who will not sec, and wilful blindness and obduracy born of ignoble motives must always be standing in the way of progress. But there is a ray of sunshine, says Mr Rushworth, and of all assurances one that comes in that guise is surely most cheering. The beneficent ray consists, it appears, m the fact that throughout New Zealand there has been a great awakening of

public opinion and conscience, and « people will no longer stand the abuse of common - sense.” That being so, those who do abuse common sense should take heed that their hour is at hand. The question concerning who they are, and what they are, and whence they come, we need not discuss, for opinions on that rather delicate matter are likely to differ somewhat widely. Ex r en our “ cold and callous” Government may not hope to escape impeachment. But it is a little unfortunate for the great vindication which Mr Rushworth hopes to see that many people, however misguided, are likely to give heed to opinions that do not identify the Douglas system with common sense. The Austi'alian Economic Advisory Council, for example, thought fit not long ago to condemn the system as “.mostly nonsense.” It unfeelingly characterised as absurd the idea of a Government or any other authority being able to manufacture millions of money out of nothing and give it away under the Douglas or any other scheme. It even went so far as to speak of the Douglas system as “no more than a very thinly disguised yet vicious form of uncontrolled inflation, which would necessarily be followed by continually mounting costs and prices, and all the sufferings and disaster which inflation has brought about in countries that have fallen under its influence.” It spoke cuttingly, too, of the attraction for the unwary of offers of something for nothing, and of the' Douglas remedy as being “ completely discredited.” Within the last few days the State Statistician in New South Wales has, at the request of his Government, submitted a report on the Douglas proposals in which they are characterised as “ unsound in principle and lacking in essential details.” These deliverances, which conform to weighty opinion that has been expressed in the United Kingdom, are, it will be seen, not altogether helpful to the system which Mr Rushworth —driven not as Orestes pursued by the Euries but, as he assures us, by a sheer sense <?f duty—has so gallantly espoused and upon which he is expending so much eloquence.