HEALTHY AGRICULTURE -
SIR,—What woukl you say of a motor-car so little efficient that it needed a donkey to supply just that bit of extra power necessary to make it move on level ground? That seems to me a not unfair likeness of an economic system which is unable adequately to pay producers of the most essential of all commodities—farm produce, without supplementary machinery, and even then does not permit them to keep their land and equipment in proper order. "It will be more than ever important after the war to adopt the most economical methods possible of keeping our national economy going," wrote Mr. Worcester in the course of his article. What, I should like to know, does he mean by "economical methods "? If, as I suspect, he refers to econothising money, that must involve saving labour, which means producing unemployment ; it also involves restrict- ing consumption, hardly desirable when, in normal peaceful time,t, pro- ducers are calling out for larger markets. I would also remind him that before this war we saved the financial system by rigid economy (on defence) at the cost, just as nearly as could be, of losing our liberty and all that makes life worth living.
Surely It . is time we reached down to the fundamentals and asked ourselves what we mean by system of economy—economy of what? Could orthodox economists answer that question satisfactorily? I doubt it. It seems to me that it needs an understanding of the conditions under which our economy has been built ap. In the early days there were very few commodities, and insufficient of those, so the restless, acquisitive, ambitious Western man, not content to concentrate on pro- ducing these few commodities in sufficient quantity for all, and then taking any time left over as leisure—as he could have done had he wished, and as some peoples did, and even do, today—made himself a system of economy which imposed on men the obligation to do a full day's work, and on those who had no profitable employment, and who were not permitted to share either the work of the others or the products of that work, the necessity to discover or invent some new material, resource, commodity, implement, &c., which would be of use to society, and which they could trade for the necessities of life so that they might live and not starve.
Under such conditions "economy" must certainly have meant economy in the production and use of "short" commodities, and the financial system we have inherited was a means (not an end, as Sir Kingsley Wood recently recognised) for effecting these purposes—to encourage larger supplies of " short " commodities to meet the needs of growing populations ; to improve the quality of commodities ; to discover and develop new commodities, resources, inventions, methods of transport, public utilities, &c. Whenever society improved its method of producing necessities it liberated so much human energy, and the assumption was (and still is) that this liberated energy could always be used to enrich society by the discovery and development of still more resources. To appreciate that this system of economy has brilliantly succeeded in its purpose it is only necessary to realise the enormous variety (some say too great a variety) of commodities available today, and the railways, shipping lines, tramways, docks, public utilities in great profusion which
are now found all over the world. But is it still necessary, or even possible, to apply further large quantities of liberated human energy to the multiplication of these material things? I would suggest that it is neither desirable nor possible, and the enotmous pre-war figures for unemployment offer solid proof of this. That being the case, we no longer need this particular type of economy which we have inherited from the age of scarcity, and it is useless to "keep our national economy going "; in fact, it cannot be kept going, as Mr. Worcester demonstrated when he made two "wrongs r in the endeavour to effect one "right" which was not in reality a " right " at all.—Yours faithfully,
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