NATIONAL PLANNING.

Taranaki Daily News, 16 January 1933, Page 2

NATIONAL PLANNING.

(To the Editor.)

Sir,—l take it that Mr. Wilkinson’s proposal is for the State to step in and inaugurate some form of national planning that will put the land to its legitimate use—that of feeding the people. Seeing that land gambling has mortgaged the whole of the increment put upon the land by the people in public works and otherwise, which has entailed borrowing millions, the interest and principal of which must come out of land products, surely there is nothing revolutionary about the Government putting the country in order. I have a copy of an advertisement in your paper of a certain land company that has agents in Ceylon, Bombay, Paris and London, offering big profits to investors so that owners of white slave dens may invest their profits in this country, , and our sons must sweat to provide the dividends. This is in spite of the fact that land gambling has already placed the mass of the people in a debtors’ prison, as it were, chained to mortgages on values that never existed. Land gambling must be stopped. If not, the “Over the Fence” scheme is but to throw the boys to the sharks, or make human dice of them. Not only this, but’ the savings of the white-haired and aged are levied upon to keep up the game. The world is said to be paralysed by the war debts; yet the land gambling debts are greater, and no effort is being made to stop the gambling. National planing must reverse this, and organise distribution so as to get the good- things of the world to the masses of the people. So doing is the only way of getting the world’s products to the markets.

The financial editor of the New York Evening Mail correctly points out that commodities levy commodities. This is true of domestic as well as of foreign trade. The farmer’s means of paying for a motor-car is foodstuffs. The economists and statesmen of America who have discussed national planning, say that it is much easier for an undeveloped country like Russia to find employment for her people than it is for the United States, which is over-developed in many things. But our Dominions have vast undeveloped areas to sport with. I have read Mr. Shaw’s comments on certain difficulties, but I would remind him that Cromwell had all the disagreeable difficulties of having to shoot people, and worse still to be shot at, but he stepped in and put the country in order nevertheless.

But honest national planning to set the wheels of industry in motion must bring plenty of the world’s good things to the poorest. I am enclosing for your perusal the amazing revelations of a functional organisation of engineers in Canada which has been studying individual and agricultural complexes for more than a decade. It proves that the world can and is producing commodities of every kind in such quantities that there is no hope of getting high prices. But we can produce surplus commodities in any amount, and trade them for all we need. I am, etc., C. WESLEY.

Slee