LABOUR’S MONETARY PLAN

Otago Daily Times, Issue 22723, 8 November 1935, Page 10

LABOUR’S MONETARY PLAN

Doubtless Mr Savage spares himself mental effort in reiterating many now well-worn phrases in his addresses to the electors. The provision, for instance, of a “ money service sufficient to give effect to the will of Parliament ” is monotonously juggled into its allotted place in his discreet exposition of the Labour programme. He has, not indicated how much money Parliament —in other .words, a Labour Administration —would propose to appropriate. Just enough, of course, to do everything that will make everybody happy and contented. A presumably inexhaustible money service would be created by the ingenious machine which Labour would set x up to bring about, in another stereotyped phrase, “ the control of public credit.” Once the machine was established its operation would be automatic. The electors may picture its cheerful mechanism, working merrily to keep pace with the demands of Parliament as prompted by a Socialist Administration. Mr Savage asks them to rejoice with him in the delightful prospect and to help to bring it to fulfilment. Of course, the money could be raised, he concedes, by taxation or by borrowing, but there is in the public mind an unpleasant association, to .which he pays deference, of penalty in relation to such measures. And why use them, he asks, when all that is needed is an intelligent control and use of currency and credit? There, with a hopeful, inviting gesture, Mr Savage leaves the matter. Maybe he has a simple faith in reiteration as a stone upon which the extraordinary impression of vagueness and indefiniteness created by such an enunciation of Labour’s plan may be worn away and dissipated. Those of the electors who like, to be left guessing as to what it all means , will not wish to press Mr Savage to be more confiding and explicit. All that is asked of them is that they should have confidence in the intelligence that would inspire Labour’s proposed control and use of currency and credit. As for what the process might imply the '.Labour candidates who extol it have evidently but confused ideas. Some of them have said that the State would acquire the shareholders’ interests in the Reserve Bank. Others have declared that the trading banks would be nationalised. Mr Savage has delicately stated that this latter step would not “necessarily” be involved. He agrees that further taxation is out of the question, but other members of his party use different language. A candidate in Taranaki, concurring with another in a South Island constituency, says that the money to provide funds for the party’s programme would “ come from those who could afford to provide it.” What this may mean the electors may just as well ponder. Is Mr Savage then inviting the community to be the goose that shall lay the golden eggs? Is that the meaning of his inviting gesture, and the simple and adequate explanation of Labour’s claim that it will “ intelligently ” control and use currency and credit? The Labour candidates seem generally to be in no less of a fog about their party’s monetary proposals than the electors to whom they so baldly commend them. Perhaps they do not altogether relish the expediency that makes them mystery-mongers. But whatever the plan which, for all his tributes to its symmetry, Mr Savage keeps so carefully at the back of the stage where its outlines remain blurred and nebulous, the conclusion is inevitable that it would involve a grave inflation of the currency with consequences that would in the long run be disastrous to the community. The community would pay very dearly for its experience of the operation of the “intelligently used ” money-service creating machine which the Labour Party would foist upon. it.