PROPOSED COMPULSORY MEAT POOL.

Taranaki Daily News, 6 January 1922, Page 8

PROPOSED COMPULSORY MEAT POOL.

The chairman of the Government Committee which recommended this compulsory scheme which is making so much apprehension amongst producers, recently stated that the Government had a right to interfere, as it was the largest landowner in New Zealand; that there were 10,000,000 acres of Government leasehold, and a multitude of small farmers, who could not live under present conditions.

This is true, and these men will never be able to make a living while the value of their land is so inflated.

It is an easy thing to divert attention from the Government’s bad bargain in land by calling for a compulsory meat poo], and screaming about poor prices of meat; but the Govermhent knows quite well that to-day's market prices for meat at Hom.e are well above pre-war rates; moreover, it is well known that the meat prices of four months ago are not likely to come again, and it should be recognised that the only remedy is for the inflated value of the land to be deflated to reasonable levels. Governments very rarely exercise common sense in their business transactions, their officials have never been trained to think in business terms, and in this case the New Zealand Govern-, ment needs sternly telling to cease fooling with the meat trade, which it is not competent to handle, and come to the help of the thousands of poor fellows who have been landed with land at uncommercial values by the Government. This should be done by writing down these artificial values to one-half or onethird, just like hundreds of merchants have had to do with their stocks. “There is no royal road to prosperity,” said the Premier in his New Year’s message. Let him take his own saying to heart, and curb the enthusiasts who, without facts or experience to hamper them, would re-institute Government control as a short cut to a commercial Utopia. These Socialistic experiments have an attraction for certain minds which have not been trained in business method; but the long trail of wreckage of such experiments —from those of the early disciples of Karl Marx, the German Socialist, to the colossal disaster following the attempt of Lenin and Trotsky to°get rid of the ‘-'capitalist” —should be a sufficient warning against all well-in-tentioned but mistaken departures from tried and proved methods of trading. . Already much harm has been done. English newspapers are giving prominence to New Zealand’s folly, and likening their present action to Bolshevism and of Queensland. Let us hope that the London money market, when Mr. Massey goes there for his next loan, does not remember this, and does not transfer its trust to other places at a time when all the world is begging for its assistance. Let it not be said of New Zealand, in its attempt to grasjj the shadow for the substance, that “those whom the gctls wish to destroy, they first make mad.” (Published by Arrangement.)