COMPLETE CONTROL BY GOVERNMENT

Otago Daily Times, Issue 24594, 30 April 1941, Page 5

COMPLETE CONTROL BY GOVERNMENT

ro THE EDITOR

Sir,—Your correspondent “John Gilpin” asks if I "sincerely think it possible? to perfect a money system which would be fool-proof and watertight against the changing tide: of human nature, which may be calm today but stormy . to-morrow.” May' I remind *' John iGilpin ’* that even the tides and the weather have their known laws or sequences of .action, and that just as our meteorological authorities can predict the hour of high tide or the general nature of the weather to be expected to-morrow, so it would be quite possible to devise a money system to the results of which human nature would certainly react more amiably that it can to that in operation to-day? In other words,• it would be more than possible to give human nature a chance to exercise its better impulses, instead ..of pinning it down to a system that brings out the worst of it.

But your correspondent is just . One of the many who confuse moral and mechanical issues and problems. Jhe workability of a money system is a problem in mechanics —the mechanics of distribution. It has no more to do with human nature than the mechanics of a motor car. But if..,is notorious that a motor car that won't go is much more trying to the human 1 temper than one that will. Let “John Gilpin*, sit down and think how large a proportion of the crime and misery of the world—something well over 90 per cent., as I have read —is directly .traceable to* .the money system; to povertyall’ -of it - needless, at any ..-.irate before 'this war—and to the huge network of usury and gambling that has grown, up but 'of that money system. Let him even contemplate the fact that ,Mr Montagu Norman, through, the Bank of England, financed Hitler’s, re-arma-ment programme with credit that belonged to the British people. , The international'. .' banker.' is concerned chiefly, , if not solely, with the question of where to plant his am, etc. Truth. Dunedin, April 28.