CORRESPONDENCE

Evening Star, Issue 21749, 18 June 1934, Page 12

CORRESPONDENCE

GOLDEN GATE CAMP, TO TH* EDITOR. Sir, —I notice in this evening’s issue you have an article on the Golden Gate camp. As one who has-been in that camp I can give you some of the true facts. Evidently the gentleman who called at your office was not very enlightening as to the number of men and tents that are in this camp, or how men are paid. Some two months ago, or more, I was sent to the Public Works camps in Central Otago. Upon arriving there I was sent to the Golden Gate camp. At that time there were only seven men in this camp, and all except myself were on skilled work, some receiving as much as Is 7d an hour, others Is sd, while I received Is 3d. The remainder of our crew were in another small camp some two miles away. Just before 1 left Central ,we were shifted to Lauder Creek, leaving only two men at Golden Gate, one being a carpenter’s labourer and the other a syphon keeper. Both were on day wagesj and - to my knowledge they were the only, two men in this camp up till a few days ago. Your caller’s statement would have the public believe that men going from Dunedin would go to that camp, but that is not so, for there are no more than three tents there and one of them has cement in it, and those tents have to be wired down with No. 8 wire to stop them from being blown away. The men being sent from Dunedin have no hope of getting into this camp, but are sent to the Aurepo camp, where they have to work in gumboots in water to their knees, and have to break the ice before they can use their shovels, and are extremely lucky if they make £3 \a week. However, your caller must be very easily satisfied, and I am inclined to think he had an axe to grind when he made his statements. I will bet he is not on contract wages, but has a nice dry job where he can earn his 10s or more a day without losing any sweat over it. Let him go out to one of the other camps for a while and see if he would be so satisfied there. There must be something wrong with a man who is satisfied with the rotten conditions which the unemployed have to: put up with at the present time. He says he is taking his wife and children out there to live. All I can say is that any man who takes his wife and family out to one of these camps re-, quires mental treatment. The conditions are not fit for a man, let alone women and small children.—l am, etc.>, Ex-Golden Gate.

June 16. [While only three tents were at the Golden Gate camp at one time, the number has now been substantially in-i creased, and men sent away by the local Employment Bureau have joined the camp. One of the Public Works officials at Lauder states that there are about 120 men engaged on. the work at Omakau, their camps being dotted along the race. The number of men at each camp varies.—Ed. E.S.]

labour policy and money. TO TH* EDITOR. Sir, —Let me suggest that the greater part of the difficulties facing us to-day come from our persistent adherence to just such abstractions as fill Mr M. C. Moss’s letter. The idea that money is a measurement of value, that money is intrinsic wealth and limited in quantity, that labour power makes or mars financial values are examples of such fixed delusions which stupefy our minds and' blind us to the stark simplicity of the real and the only problem before us—namely, the problem of consump-. : tion. May I suggest to Mr Moss that the age of scarcity is over, because the machine can keep us in abundance; hut in doing so the machine is taking from us our work, hitherto our only moral claim on brfead. Must we not therefore find another claim on bread. Do we not find one in_ the. machine itself, because the machine is of our own making, and therefore ours- by right, inheritance, and merit? Is not the wealth inherent in the machine also ours? Is not the present work for economics and Mr Moss to devise some means whereby we can claim this new wealth in the form most convenient to us without leaving anybody a penny the worse? If these suggestions correotly sum up the present situation and the task, is it not obvious that the failure of our mechanism of distribution, which is money,, springs from its perversion to purposes other than clistribution? I put it to your correspondent that money should be essentially an order system, and I would invite him to re-examine his ideas on that is not unfair to say so, I suggest that the prime fault with your correspondent is that his abstractions are wholly divorced from even the following ,elementary facts about money—viz.(l) That a commodity money system is only workable in an utterly primitive community. Would Mr Moss have us retrograde to the status of Zulus? (2) That in any community utilising solar energy probably 99 per cent, of money has no tangible existence at all, but consists of ledger en-

tries, kpown as bank credit and-' bank debit, and the labour cost of entering figures in a ledger has. no correspondence whatever ■ with the . financial values thus created.: (3) That the. community will deliver goods' And services in return for a draft on bank credit with even greater alacrity, perhaps,than if the purchaser , were to offer metal, shells, cotton, cattle,' or any other, Commodity money.—l am, etc.* ■ " FbBNLEAFs June 16.