The Taihape Daily Times AND WAIMARINO ADVOCATE. THURSDAY, NOVEMBER 4, 1920. LEGALISED FINANCIAL JUGGLERY.

Taihape Daily Times, Volume XII, Issue 3619, 4 November 1920, Page 4

The Taihape Daily Times AND WAIMARINO ADVOCATE.

THURSDAY, NOVEMBER 4, 1920. LEGALISED FINANCIAL JUGGLERY.

With which, is incorporated "The Taihape Post and Waimarino News."

So much legislation of a reactionary character has been forced through Parliament during the present session that wonder is created as to what will happen when another turn of the party government wheel takes place, displacing that now reigning and putting another party into power. Commercialism in Britain is moving very cautiously, fearing lest that most essential part of the system, the general public, should determine to, metaphorically, upset the commercialism apple cart. Of course, the modern commercialism which is straining the victim side almost to breaking point, must have victims to exploit, and the cult is now obviously engaged in shaking off as many hangerson as possible and thereby enlarging the field of exploitation. If a poor man plays "two-upf and thereby makes money by merely spinning a penny he deserves to go to gaol, and he goes there if he is caught often enough. If a poor man owes a hundred pence, and,when pay day comes he fails, he also commits a grave offence and deserves to go to gao*. Should either of these men by a turn of the wheel of' fortune become a bank shareholder, or a share holder in a limited liability company, he may cast propriety and even common financial and trading decency into wherever they fit, a place commonly understood as the abode of fools. When dividends assume dimensions so large that public attention is attracted thereby a watering of capital takes place; that is, 'the capital is doubled, not infrequently, without one shilling additional having been put thereto. Is it any wonder the modest "two-'up" player, and the Bookie 01 Israelitish extraCtioh~should water at the mouth to See such jugglery within the pale of the law, while outsiCe it is a crime punishable with imprisonment? The'most hideous exploitation, not now called robbery, is praiseworthy if only a servile and venal government will camouflage it with an Act of Parliament. The need for caution, for hedging about the savings of the people with the oldtime safeguards has vanished in the vortex of modern commercialism. Property is now the Anglo-. Saxon god. "and banks have been enacted the personification of that goct by a New Zealand Parliament. In the early Seddonian days the bank craved mercies from the State; to-cay the State is on its knees to the bank, not a very significant change only as an illustration of the ascendancy or business acumen in the bank and a corresponding decadency in the State. The trend of commercial and financial legislation is not now in the direction of protecting the public from- overreaching tactics of directorates, bur rather in rendering the public incapable of resenting the inroads of thffr systematic exploitation. The most regrettable feature of the whole profiteering carousal is that the Government has entirely cast to the winds ! that great and grand example of honest dealing which governments were hitherto somewhat noted for. The people of this Dominion are being poisoned with a filthy sugar only because the State can make five or ten pounds per ton more profit out of it. The State is loading essentials of life with a duty that is greater than the full cost of such goods before the war. The State's keen sense of propriety and common honesty is demonstrated in the prosecutions of retailers for taking what it considers an unreasonable profit on infant's food, and a few other quite negligible articles. The hundreds per cent of bigger firms it evidently considers justifiable as no prosecutions worth while have been sustained. But go another rung up the e'ommercialisf ladder and the State makes legal the practice of the most wanton lust for exploitation. The question has been asked, without arti- i fice, whether any trading or financial,, corporation becomes richer merely by watering its capital by writing up its ■ one million of capital to two millions. , If the corporation already had the second million hidden away in secret profits where it wal not obvious to ordinary people, it does not, only in so far as it enables a new start to be made to double the magnitude at the next watering. Dividends are issued on the new capital of two millions and when they grow to a volume that is likely to cause adverse criticism the old doubling scheme is brought into requisition again. Corporations have become more susceptible to criticism in recent times, or else the pub-

lie are becoming considerably more sophisticated, and they have adopted a course which looks more honest than the old way, whether it is so or not. Anyway, it opens up a new field of argument which will take a lagging public a few years to explore. Then, if there is still an exploitation Government in power new enactments will doubtless make legal some other sinuous road to the same end. Artificial increases of capital, including the issue of bank-notes unsupported by reserves of bullion, sets up a false impression of wealth, a hypothecation of something not tangible, and constitutes a real danger to the State In which it is nncurbedly practiced. The Editor of the "Statist" has no belier in the oconomio doctrine preached on every possible occasion by New Zealand's Prime Minister. Mr Massey stands by the old story that prices, high cost of living, dear money, cheap money, fluctuations in values. of at! kinds are purely and solely the result of the operations of the natural law of supply and demand. The Editor 01 the "Statist," who writes upon economics for the whole world states,"Some economists will attribute the movement of prices to the influence of supply and demand. But these words are not infrequently meaningless terms." Then, significantly he asks,—"How does it come that supply is sometimes in excess of the demand, and that at others the quantities of goods offered for sale are in excess of the world's ability to buy them?" The fact that production has been paralysed for some years over a large part of Europe must not be unheeded ov minimised, but no intelligent person can. explain how the entry upon a career of abandonment to profiteering and frenzied finance is going to assist in the rehabilitation 1 of cither commerce, finance, trade manufacture, industry generally, or of society. The more enactment of a piece of paper bearing a certain set of heiroglyphics into twenty shillings, does not alter it from being a piece of paper, and the issue of such paper is little more than a hypothecation of labour which has yet to be wrought sometime in the future. At least, that is what the legislation of the first session of the present Parliament is heading towards. The old watering processes. are being abandoned and the more subtle course of capitalising reserves and issuing fully paid-up shares against them is now. the vogue, and this is not peculiar to any trading corporation or. company. There are not wanting indications that business and finance are developing in this country on American lines; whether producers, who fui'nish the commodities to juggle with, or the consumers, who are the victims on the other side, will silently submit to a regime of trusts, rings and powerful corporations growing up as a parasite upon production remains to be disclosed.