DOMINION FINANCE

Otago Daily Times, Issue 25849, 21 May 1945, Page 6

DOMINION FINANCE

Sir,—Miss Gow Is wrong. Ido not make “ the false assumption that in this machine age people are unemployed because their labour is not necessary. Ido not make that assumption at all, whether true or false. I am quite aware that frequently people have been unemployed when their labour was obviously needed, but financial considerations prevented its being used: but I state the equally obvious fact that power production renders the amount of human labour necessary for a given volume of production progressively less, and thus makes the wage system inadequate as a basis for the distribution of incomes to the community. It also renders "full employment” as an objective absurd because obsolete, and more than absurd, definitely dangerous. Did not the president of the London Chamber of Commerce years ago point to the danger inherent in the system, which forced governments to “ seek adventures abroad in order to keep their people employed at home. ~ . . . Miss Gow may deny these facts; she may declare, as Feste the Clown puts it, “ No, this is not my nose neither, nothing that is so, is so,” but she will not thereby alter the facts—not even the fact that Fascism, Nazism and Bolshevism are all forms of totalitarianism. Tire fact that the National Socialists (Nazis) of Germany “ boasted of their intention to destroy Bolshevism ” has no bearing on the question. It may be a case, in Shakespeare’s words, of “ the near in blood, the nearer bloody.” One of your correspondents avers that the Russian system is a benevolent one. That may be so. but it is none the less an autocracy. What It becomes in the future, we have yet to see; but since this correspondence has departed so far from the original topic, it seems useless, or at any rate inadvisable, to continue the discussion—l am, etc., Truth. Dunedin, May 18.