The Sun. TUESDAY, MAT 8, 1928. DEALING WITH UNEMPLOYMENT

Sun (Auckland), Volume II, Issue 348, 8 May 1928, Page 8

The Sun. TUESDAY, MAT 8, 1928. DEALING WITH UNEMPLOYMENT

THE price asked and paid for lialf-a-dozen caviare sandwiches and half a bottle of champagne at a popular London night club is £7 10s. Hundreds of fools who are easily parted from their money gaily indulge in such extravagance and look upon it as high life at its best. This particular instance of stupid luxury has been cited and condemned by an English writer as a shocking example of the hopelessness of demanding national thrift and economy from the people generally, while so many of the wealthy class ignore economy in private spending. It is certainly easy to imagine how much more usefully the money thus wasted could be spent if it were in the hands of saner persons. If it were transferred to a new capital fund for the expansion of national industry, for example, it would go far toward dissipating the evil of chronic unemployment. But this sort of dissipation is apparently not an attractive pleasure. Much prominence has been given in British journals recently to the vital question of how best to deal with unemployment. Wisdom has been liberal and active enough, but* no one, so far, has hit upon a practical solution of the pernicious problem. One of the shrewdest commentators, Sir Herbert Samuel, probably cut nearest to the core of it with an assertion that, as the question of the unemployed is not one problem, but several, it is useless to seek a solution in one measure; it can be found only in a variety. In other words, there is no panacea; the problem must be split into parts, and each part dealt with as a separate trouble. Those people in the Dominions who look askance at the effects of immigration upon their limited power of absorbing their own unemployed into industry will doubtless agree readily with Sir Herbert Samuel’s argument that emigration is not a .remedy. As Swift put it, “emigration as a cure for want of work is like cutting off one’s foot because one has no shoes.” After probing the whole problem with keen insight and a rare sympathy, this constructive English critic favours the development of national industry on capital provided from the savings of the people. Since it should be somebody’s business to view national industrial development as a whole, it is suggested that this duty should be given to a committee of the Privy Council. From the Labour point of yiew in Great Britain the picture of unemployment and possible remedies is more dismal. Labour sees the problem, as a haunting evil which excites a clamouring impulse to relieve distress irrespective of cost or future consequences. Because of this emotional mood the representatives of Labour demand immediate Government action in tlie direction of providing temporary unemployment relief, and thereafter the organisation of society on the lines of an economic and efficient Socialism as the final cure of unemployment. That is Mr. J. Ramsay Macdonald’s remedy which, really, is no better than a hot poultice of idealism. So we come back to the folly of extravagance on caviare and champagne and other luxuries, while a nation is menaced by the evils of unemployment. Communities, in the end, will have to rely on the benefits of simple living, thrift and self-reliance, instead of on the spurious aid of patchwork politics.