IN THE TOILS

Otago Daily Times, Issue 23353, 19 November 1937, Page 13

IN THE TOILS

ro THE EDITOR

Sir, —There is a famous group of statutary which depicts the struggles of Laocoon and his two sons in the toils of the monstrous serpents sent to destroy them. The image of it recurs to the mind on reading the utterances of so-called authorities and statesmen all over the world, striving with the results of the present financial system. They cannot break the strangling hold because they are unable or unwilling to recognise clearly what it is. In one breath they talk of making a permanent basis for prosperity, and in the next mention the “ inexorable economic law ” of the trade cycle, which simply means the alternation of boom and slump, with increasing emphasis on slump. To anyone not simply dazed by the jargon of the thing, it must appear absurd to read that prosperity will be restored when confidence reappears, and in the next paragraph that confidence cannot reappear until prosperity is reestablished. President Roosevelt is prepared to make a truly heroic stand (at least it sounds like that) in face of the new depression. “He will not swerve from his determination to carry on a wider social programme.” Horatius at the bridge was nothing to him. But a day or two before, we read that he was determined at all costs to balance the Budget. Did he never find out that the two things cannot be done simultaneously? Nor at any rate without either vastly increasing taxation or extending debt—bpth of which courses seem closed to him, and the latter in any case only camouflage. The President’s advisers in the New Deal urge that “ Federal spending must be resumed on a grand scale or private capital induced into a new construction drive” —as if the costs of such activities were not later to be reckoned with, or as if the United States were not already sufficiently equipped with the machinery of production. A disinterested 'observer from Mars might well come to the conclusion that this planet has been set aside as the lunatic asylum of the Universe. , , .. It has been well observed that the people who know what to do are not in a position to act, and those who have the power to act are either wilfully or stupidly blind to the facts. They will rationalise industry—which means regimentation and restriction; or they will have a planned economy —which means planned scarcity with themselves as the planners. They will be dictators, either Fascist or Communist, and rationalise and nationalise everything except consumption. They will have public works and rearmament programmes, and at the same time ask for reduction of taxation and balancing of budgets and world peace. They will, in fact, like the incurable drunkard, do anything to avoid delirium tremens, except give up drinking. The one proposal which will really meet the case, and give a basis for permanent prosperity, namely the financing of consumption by the nationalisation of credit, they will not listen to. It is quite true that we need a change m human nature —but it is a change not so much in its heart as in its head, that devastating rigidity of mind which applies to the twentieth century canons of distribution belonging to the premachine age. “We are a tittle oldfashioned in Dunedm. says Mr Newman Wilson complacently at the gathering of the Associated Chambers of Commerce, but he could remove the local restriction to his > statement. Most of the “Big Noises’ in the world are living mentally in the eighteenth century. — l am, etc., Truth'. Dunedin. Nov. 18.