STATE TRADING

Waikato Independent, Volume XXIII, Issue 3041, 5 April 1923, Page 7

STATE TRADING

GROWING DISFAVOUR AT HOME AND ABROAD During his recent visit to England and the Continent, Mr J. B. Mac Ewan said in an interview, that he had been much struck by the growing disfavour in which State and Municipal control wore held in the older countries by both workers and employers. He did not pretend to have heard the last word on the subject, but he had discussed it with many people in various stations of life and always had been led to the same conclusion. In Canada and America, in England arid France, in Germany and Russia, in every country in Europe indeed, the exigencies of the war had compelled the authorities to take a hand in the control of industries and services almost everywhere. The Governments had their lingers in every conceivable pie that was going. This, of course, was inevitable, Mr Mac Ewan went on to say. Private enterprise could not conduct the military operations of such a war as was convulsing Europe eight or nine years agp. ♦Still there were many people —the advocates of wholesale nationalisation — hoping that the necessities and the ex periences of the war would lead to the widespread adoption of community control in time of peace. But the necessities and experiences of the war, so far as Mr Mac Ewan was able to judge during his travels, had had an exactly opposite effect. Semi-military control, however, may not have been so idealistic as State and Municipal control, and Mr Mac Ewan did not wish to press its shortcomings as a horrid example. The information he had concerned community control of various kinds in times of peace. Here he found much to establish the superiority of properly regulated private enterprise. The story was the same in Canada, in the United States, in England, in France, and in other countries he had visited. State and Municipal undertakings were made to appear to flourish for a time by the aid of various privileges in the shape of cheap capital, special facilities and exclusive concessions; but in the long run the community came to realise that their prosperity was fictitious and their profits delusive. The representations made to Mr Mac Ewan were that the undertakings failed to attract the best workers of any class —either workers by hand or by head —and that they succumbed in the great majority of cases simply because they could not give the same efficient service as was rendered by private enterprise. Where the undertaking was a monopoly it missed not only the spur of competition but also the incentive of ambition. Where it was pitted against private undertakings of the same kind it failed because of its inferior equipment aud its lack of sustained enthusiasm. There are certain services which are properly the monopoly of the State, Mr Mac Ewan said, in dismissing the subject, but trading enterprises, speaking generally, arc not among them, and the experience of New Zealand in this respect is the experience of all the older countries he had visited.