TUESDAY. MAY 22, 1934. A LAND OF ROBBER BARONS.

Star (Christchurch), Volume LXVI, Issue 20311, 22 May 1934, Page 6

TUESDAY. MAY 22, 1934. A LAND OF ROBBER BARONS.

THE DARROW REPORT, which is not necessarily the view of one man only, declares that the New Deal is a complete failure because it fosters monopoly and oppresses small enterprises, and it recommends socialisation and collective ownership and control of industry as the only remedy for the economic disease that a Presidential dictatorship had been hoped to cure. Probably in no country in the world could such a' recommendation be made with equal sincerity, although it can be demonstrated that safety does not lie along that line, for the story of graft and political corruption must be told wherever American history is impartially written. The robber barons of to-day, doubtless, have not been idle under the threat of the New Deal. Mr Darrow’s pronouncement, however, is no more than a declaration that they have defeated the recovery policy, which has been described as a transition to a socialist order skilfully prepared, in which the Government was to fix prices, control operations, exalt labour and regulate business. The phase of the Roosevelt dictatorship that has caused the greatest uneasiness, indeed, has been expressed in a very recent book by William MacDonald, who says that with most of President Roosevelt’s advisers, either Fascist or Socialist and in any case revolutionaries, the aim is seen to be the reorganisation of American society on collectivist lines, with the Federal Government as the central source of authority, and Federal power the directing and compelling force. The Darrow report, as General Johnson declares, may be regarded as an attempt to offer the country a choice between Fascism and Communism, but its effect upon a people fearful of either of these extremes will probably strengthen the hands of the President in his attempt to steer a middle course. It will not, how-ever,-make his task any easier from an economic point of view. WHO ARE THE PROGRESSIVES? JT MAY RE SAFELY SAID that H the Minister of Finance followed the judgment of his own experience rather than the maxims of latest literature when he made his selection of the directors of the New Zealand Reserve Bank, the majority of whom are over sixty, but be is in happy agreement with the author of “ Life Regins at Forty.” that the harder the nut to crack the more important the elders. These difficult years have indeed proved the inadequacy of youth at the helm, for although the last decade has not been wanting in sporadic flashes of brilliance from young men in the sparkling twenties and thirties, these early fruits have been chiefly in literature and imaginative fields, or where physical horse-power made them an asset in business or new political movements. Nine-tenths of the world’s progressive work is done by people approaching or past middle age, and this is true in scholarship and industry, particularly in the higher branches, where broad and deep perspective based on experience have to be brought to the working out of sound executive schemes. Walter Pitkin carries the discussion arising from American medical protests against the discarding of men in industry after they reach forty-five a stage further. Tie says that after forty few fools have survived to invade the company of intelligent men. They die young. The most fundamentally I brilliant conversationalists he has known were all over sixty-five. Schopenhauer, though admitting that age and experience can never be a substitute for intellectual I talent, considers, nevertheless, that j they may outweigh it.