Dear Sir

Bay of Plenty Beacon, Volume 9, Issue 57, 1 April 1946, Page 4

Dear Sir

Letters to the Editor must be clearly written on one side of the paper only and where a nom-de-plume is used the name of the writer must be included for reference purposes. The Editor reserves the right to amend or withhold any letter or ' letters.

FULL EMPLOYMENT VERSUS FREEDOM

Sir, —State security and serfdom are the ultimate and inevitable product of the political form in which they are dressed. Forced labour is the final clause of the full employment contract; the Government will give full employment and guarantee your income provided you let it use your money as it pleases; if you will buy for your own use what it tells you; if you will save as much money as it says and let it- inyest it as it pleases; if you will work at whatever it says, when and where it says, and as much as it says, for what it says you will be paid. Beneath this conceptive form of fiscal and monetary policy is social insurance, price and wage fixing rationing, conscription, and propaganda by which the compulsory collective economy which this contract calls for; is operated by the modern State. State services which are made available in emergencies can become the normal mode of existence. The result would be the invasion of the area of personal choice by a, central bureaucracy. When the State becomes the nurse the citizen loses his liberty. Debt-free, interest-free, or any other type of money is of no use unless the individual can spend his share of it on those things he desires. If the State—i.e., the bureaucracy—is going* to introduce full employment to produce non-consum-able goods, then we will all be slaves. Some “money reformers’* still fail to see this important point. Policy is for the peope. They want all the amenities of life that the genius a man has made possible, and without that dictation and regimentation of the individual; in other words, Freedom in Security. Yours etc.,

W. BRADSHAW.