Nationalisation The Killer

Chronicle (Levin), 6 April 1949, Page 5

Nationalisation The Killer

Received Tuesday, '7 p.m. LONDON, April 5. Stating that shareholders who, by means of their private savings, provide eapital for industrial and eommercial development, perform an essential service on behalf of the eommunity, Lord Brand, baifker and economist, strongly attacks Oovernment nationalisation urioposals, in an article published in the current ""issue of Lloyds Bank Review. "Neither public authorities nor financial institutions, whatever their character, can provide all the eapital needed," says Lord Brand. "A plentiful supply of personal savings is also required, by means of which existing enterprises and industries can be modernised and extended and new industries started. I regard i the drying up of such savings through extreme taxation, as one of the real dangers facing the eommunity, a greater danger perhaps than nationalisation itself. " Referring to statements by Sir Stafford Cripps and Mr. George Strauss (Minister of Supply) defending steel nationalisation as a strategic necessity for the country 's defence, Lord Brand remarked that if these arguments were sound, Russia, which had nationalised every thing, should be in a much stronger position than eit-her Britain and the United States. Yet this argument sremed to be completelv answered by the extraordinary produetive achievements of American industry during the reeent war. "If it is the task of this country. to discover a form of society which combines justice, order. freedom and initiative, who can suppose thaf we can arrive at it along the dreary deadening path of nationalisation, combined with unparallelecl taxation, when we ! can only live at all by the exercise of all the individual energies at our command," says Lord Brand.