EMPLOYMENT FOR ALL
SIR,—The avoidance of mass unemployment is declared by Sir William Beveridge's report to be a necessary condition of success in social insurance. It is perhaps too much to hope that the White Paper on social security recently promised by Sir William Jowitt will explain how this condition is to be-fulfilled- and by what new means the Government intend to prevent a repetition of last time when the immense demand for goods which followed final victory in 1918-19 quickly gave way to the slump of tozo-zr. May I indicate one direction in which such new means are likely to be found? Here in England most of us do not grudge the rates and taxes we have to pay for educating other people's children. Our paynients help ,to make a happier and a better world, not for them alone but also for our own children and their children, although we ourselves may not live to see it.
One-thing about this future world seems certain: it will either become increasingly a unity, or else it will break into fragments where human life will again become " nasty, brutish and short." If disintegration is to be avoided, mankind must move towards a world of units within a larger unity, a world united but by no means uniform, and the well- being of the .whole must be felt to be what in fact it is: a vital interest of every part. In particular, the rehabilitation of Europe and a rising 'standard of living among the teeming peoples of the East deeply concern the British and American Commonwealths.
The transition period is the concern of the United Nations Relief and
Rehabilitation Administration (UNRRA). But long-term policies lie beyond its scope. When its work is done, the revival of prosperity in Europe and its development in Eastern Asia can, on one condition, be prolonged indefinitely. That will mean, a practically unlimited demand for British and American goods ; the- shortage of labour for the enrich- ment of the world by new creation will then be as great as it now is in wartime for destruction ; and, throughout as long a future as anyone can foresee, unemployment will be unthinkable in Britain or America. The one condition is that we find out how to distribute all the goods we are able to produce. A way must be found to dispose of these goods at a price which the purchaser can afford to pay and which does not involve lowering the producers' standards of living. The problem is how to pay high real wages to men and women wotiong for the benefit of people too poor to make any adequate return.
-It was formerly supposed that this problem could not be solved without accumulating vast debts with such evil effects, political and economic, as are still a recent memory. But now we have a solution which does not involve these dangers. It enabled American wages to be paid to American workmen for arming and feeding Britain when, in 1940-41, we were engaged in a forlorn hope with little prospect of being able to meet the cost of whatever might be sent us across the Atlantic. It is the way of the Lend-Lease Act of March, too. A few months later we ourselves followed this way to pay British wages to British workpeople producing supplies for Russians who could not then and- might not ever make us a return in gold or goods or services.
Applied to the long-term problem of relief and rehabilitation for Europe, or to that of building up the prosperity of China, lend-lease might work as follows. Take the case of China. The American and British Governments would tax their peoples far less than in wartime but still sufficiently to pay (say) one thousand million dollars and a hundred million pounds a year respectively for the production of goods for China at the standard rates of wages in the United States and the United Kingdom. The taxes would not be grudged when the taxpayer saw that his payments, like his education rate, formed an essential part of his contribution to the well-being of his community, his country, and his world, or at least of the wider world of his children's children. And the goods for which his taxes paid—mainly consumable goods to start with—but including more and more capital goods as time went on— would be shipped to the Government of China who would thus be able to pay real wages, and not merely unconvertible paper money, to Chinese workpeople at Chinese rates. Their work would include the building of roads and railways, homes and schools, universities and factories. At last, in the fulness of time, China would be able to pay in full for. all that she was receiving—and perhaps for all she had received— from Britain or America or any other part of man's plAnet.—I am, Sir,
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