SOCIALIST FALLACY

Te Awamutu Courier, Volume 75, Issue 6443, 7 November 1947, Page 5

SOCIALIST FALLACY

DENOUNCED BY WINSTON CHURCHILL “COMPETITIVE SELECTION STANDS BETWEEN US AND BARBARISM” “It is 41 years ago since, as a young Liberal Minister in Mr Asquith’s Government, arguing against this same Socialist fallacy, I said: “The existing organisation of society is driven by one mainspring—competitive selection. It may be a very imperfect organisation of society, but it is all that we have got between us and barbarism.’ I should now have to add ‘totalitarianism,’ which indeed is only State-organised barbarism.

“ ‘lt is all that we have been able to create,’ I said in days before most of you were born, ‘though unnumbered centuries of effort and sacrifice.’ It is the whole treasure which past generations have been able to secure and bequeath; and great and numerous as are the evils of the existing conditions of society in this country, the advantages and achievements of the social'system are greater still.

“Moreover, that system i-s one which offers an almost indefinite capacity for improvement. We may progressively eliminate the evils: we may progressively augment the good which it contains. Ido not want to see impaired the vigour of competition, but we can do much to mitigate the consequences of failure. “We want to draw a line below which we will not allow persons to live and labour; yet above which they may compete with all the strength of their manhood. We want to have free competition upwards; we decline to allow the. free competition to run downwards.

“That was my faith as I expressed it more than 40 years ago, and it is my faith to-night. If there were any country in the world to which these truths apply, it would be to our British island.

“I warn you solemnly that if you submit yourselves to totalitarian compulsion and regimentation of our national life and labour, there lies before you an almost measureless prospect of misery and tribulation of which a lower standard of living will be the first result, hunger the second, and the dispersal or death of a large proportion of our population the third.

“You have not always listened to my warnings. Before the war you did not. Please pay good attention to this now.”—Extract from Mr Winston Churchill’s address on Britain’s economic crisis.