ECONOMIC MORALS

Bay of Plenty Beacon, Volume 10, Issue 89, 3 February 1947, Page 4

ECONOMIC MORALS

AMERICA LEARNING SURPRISES IN STORE The American economic problem —which may be shortly stated as a problem of learning how to spend your money without straining yourself —continues to be worked out in public, with instructive results, says the “Spectator.” Nobody who has ever tried to spend money will fail to realise that it is essentially an easy assignment. But the Americans are finding that there are several different possible answers. Having made free trade their rough objective, they now find themselves involved in the completion of a number of Government purchasing contracts (which are notoriously not instruments of freedom) and taking on a series’ of others for rubber, sugar, metals, timber, cordage, fibres, corundum and. cinchona bark. These items add up to a large propoi'tion of the annual imports of the United -States. There are other qualifications to the policy of free trade. It is reported that since America’s exports of fats must be cut down, only “traditional customers” will be supplied this year. Yet tl}.e U.S.A. objects to the recently concluded wheat agreement between Great Britain and Canada, even though the lodging of the objection is postponed for the time being. Again, something distinguishable from freedom was involved in the boarding of the American Farmer by an American crew when she was in tow by a British ship. The facts are not yet cleared up, much less the exact legal position, but it looks like free enterprise working itself out in the traditional way—to the immediate advantage of the stronger. Britain is concerned with the steps whereby the United States learns the duties of international economic power. We can even be interested in America’s internal finance and share President Truman’s uneasiness at finding an enormous deficit in Government income when the economic situation requires the exact reverse. Nor is this interest impertinent. What Britain thinks about American economic policy may not influence Americans, but what America does may make a world of difference to Britain.