ECONOMIC PROBLEMS.

Taranaki Daily News, 6 March 1920, Page 8

ECONOMIC PROBLEMS.

CREDIT AND PRODUCTION. WEALTH—STATIC AND DYNAMIC Speaking at the New Zealand Club luncheon given in his honor, Mr. William E. Home, a British M.P., at present on a world tour, dealt at some length with the nature and functions of wealth. Wealth, he said, was a word that he thought sometimes people hardly understood the meaning of. He had tried to work it out himself, and if they did so he thought they would find that wealth was of two "different kinds. They could have a wealth which he would call "static"—a wealth which had been created and was in a stationary form, such as railways, houses, and roads. Such things were all wealth. They had been created, but that kind of wealth was of no use aid of'no value, unless they had along with it "dynamic wealth"—that is to say, wealth continually engaged in the work of the production of exchange of articles. , (Applause.) What was the use of a house, if they had no food and could not live in it? What was the use of a railway, -if they had no coal for their engines and could not run their trains? (Applause.) All the wealth we had in our country depended upon the continual outpouring and exchange of commodities. (Applause.) In connection with this they had the exciting cause for dynamic wealth in credit —in, not money, but the power to call upon wealth, upon money, that would produce wealth in the future. (Applause.)

WEALTH IMMEASURABLE. His own belief was that we need not bother about the debts we had contracted —(England, lie thought, had somewhere about 8000 millions of pounds of public debt) —if only we would realise that immeasurable wealth was within the scope of any country and was only stopped, or limited, by the capacity of its machinery and the energy and the goodwill of the men wlio operated the machines. (Applause.) He had a very strong belief that in England) Great Britain, and the Dominions, we were a sober and earnest people, silent and not given to wearing our hearts on our sleeves; but lie believed that we had at the bottom an ingrained knowledge that the proposition he had put before them was a sound one. (Applause.) WORKERS' ENORMOUS TEMPTATIONS. The temptations which were put before the working "men of all nations were enormous. Thp fallacious arguments put before them were tempting and difficult to resist; and they had not had the opportunities of studying these matters that he and those before him had had. He thought it \va c a very wonderful thing that, in spite of that, in the long run the great, majority of the men of Great Britain and the Dominions were sound and understood the economic problem as a whole. (Applause.) They must remember at the present time how violently the machinery of production, if it had not been thrown out of gear, had yet been made to serve other purposes; and that machinery required to lie carefully handled to be aide to do for peace what it had done so efficiently for war. (Applause.)