“Taranaki Central Press” TUESDAY, MARCH 30, 1937. STATE SOCIALISM IN GERMANY.

Taranaki Central Press, Volume IV, Issue 394, 30 March 1937, Page 4

“Taranaki Central Press” TUESDAY, MARCH 30, 1937. STATE SOCIALISM IN GERMANY.

General Geering, who directs Germany's four-year plan to increase home production of raw materials, is reported to have announced extensive plans to increase farm production. Of the measures summarised in the cable message from Berlin, far the most interesting is the displacement of incompetent farmers by State-appointed managers.

There is nothing very novel, to New Zealand observers, in cheapening fertilisers and appropriating money for farm improvements. But it is interesting, again, to find General Goering once more threatening farmers who “desert the land,” because such threats which he and Herr Goebbels have often issued against “economic saboteurs”—indicate the existence of troublesome discontent within the Reich and probably of more than discontent. Germany’s economic difficulties impose a strain which cannot be relieved by expedients that do not recognise or touch its cause, but merely shift its incidence and necessitate further regulation and control.

The food shortage is only one factor in a general situation where, as the Economist’s Berlin correspondent wrote in December, “the manufacturers complain a little, farmers considerably, and traders and consumers a great deal.”

Protection of the farmers, as the ideal of the Reich, has given way to a system of compulsion, under which they must deliver assigned quotas to special organisations which are responsible for the collection and for fixing the price. Consumers, on the other hand, face the shortages and rationing that are the consequences mainly of restricted imports; and strenuous endeavours have been made to cover, the deficiency by diverting consumption from the scarcer foods, of high value, to the more plentiful ones of less value from bacon, beef, and butter, for example, to potatoes, sugar, and fish.

State policy has led to some slight increases „in agricultural production and to some considerable ones, and it has created the potentialities of still greater increases; but it more and more clearly emerges in practice as a policy of State socialism, as dependent on ruthless methods as Russia’s, ac comprehensive in applying them. General Goering's plan to throw out inefficient—or recalci trant —farmers and to put in agents of the State plainly illustrates the technique of this type of government, as his threat illustrates its ideology: "The new measures are for the benefit of the nation, not the individual.”