USE FOR MILLIONAIRES

Waipa Post, Volume 42, Issue 3303, 30 May 1931, Page 7

USE FOR MILLIONAIRES

The challenge issued by " a wealthy Conservative " to Sir Charles Trevelyan, who lately resigned the position of President of the Board of Education in the Labour Government at Home, in reply to the latter's statement that the central need of the world to-day is the better distribution of wealth, is not likely to be accepted. If Sir Charles Trevelyan is a man of wealth, and if he were to give half his possessions to the poor in order to induce his challenger to do likewise, the sum of the two amounts would hardly suffice to give immediate relief to more than a comparatively few needy persons. In any case it is to be suspected that the " wealthy Conservative " has not made his challenge in any belief that the disbursement of a fortune or so among the poor would bring any nearer that happy condition when everybody will have possessions sufficient to protect him from want while nobody will have have an excess of worldly wealth. The economic injustices that exist to-day as a result of the unequal distribution of wealth I may be admitted, but it is very doubtful whether Sir Charles Trevelyan believes they could be righted, as the " wealthy Conservative" pretends to think he does, by a redistribution of personal fortunes on a basis of equality for all. In 1920 Sir Josiah Stamp, the noted British financial authority, made a calculation showing that if all the people in the British Isles with incomes of more than £250 per annum were to pool the excess over that amount and if. from the pool thus gained a sum were withdrawn equal to the amount obtained by taxation to support the national services plus savings for capital extensions on the pre-war scale, the remainder would not provide more than 5s per family per week. In fact, if the people of Great Britain were thus as a whole assured of a modest regular income of 5s of unearned wealth a week they would, for the most part, be actually very much worse off as .individuals than they are at present. The effect upon the industry of the community if, regardless of the quality of the work done and the responsibility for having it done, earnings were to be restricted to £250 a year, would unquestionably be disastrous. Sir Josiah Stamp's amazing calculation suggests, indeed, the reflection that wealthy men are perhaps not such a menace and a parasite do their socialistic critics appear to think. A millionaire is not, as a rule, regarded in a kindly spirit by the great majority of persons who are not millionaires, except when he makes some handsome bequest for the national good or when he dies and unwillingly makes a considerable contribution to the Exchequer in death duties. Yet it may be that he has his uses. Fov one thing, he is supporting many luxury trades, which provide a vast amount of employment, but would go out of existence if incomes were limited to £250, since nobody could afford to purchase luxuries. Further, the millionaire probably invests his wealth in industrial undertakings which confer benefit upon the whole community but would never operate at all if it were not that there were men of means who were prepared to provide the capital that would admit of their being started. Few persons, even among the dwindling millionaire class,, would deny that a diffusion of wealth so that it should not be accumulated in the "mounded heaps " which Tennyson deplored, would be advantageous to mankind, but surely fewer still would welcome the distrition of it to such an extent that nobody had any spare pence. People of means are in increasing numbers recognising to-day, as they did not do a century ago, that they have an obligation to use the power which money provides for the benefit of others than themselves only. The rich man who is entirely selfish and completely headless of a duty to confer benefits on the community in which he has acquired his wealth, may not yet have become a positive rarity. But where he exists he is not regarded favourably by any section of the public. It is customary in some quarters to repersent any person of means, whether he may have gained them entirely by his own merits or not, as a " social pest." The more general view and the truer view must, however, be that the system, under which men are encouraged, by their industry, their enterprise, and their initiative, to win material possessions is to be preferred to one that would reduce all people to a dead level and that it must remain until some other system is devised which may be expected to prove as beneficial in practice as it may to the thoughtless, appear to be in theory.