!REVOLUTION BY REASON
PEOPLE of whatever political colour must allow that this book puts a very steady finger on the weak spot of competitive capitalism as we now know it—its apparent impotence to distribute purchasing-power. It cannot distribute purcha.s- ing-power amongst its people in sufficient quantity to enable them to claim products and take them away as fast as the great industrial machine would normally produce them. The machine thus gets choked and stops ; and this is Unemploy- ment—the same old ridiculous, outrageous, intolerable thing which roused the early wrath of Carlyle ; innumerable shirts for bare backs and food galore piled up on one side of the street, starving people congregated on the other, and no way across. The book is devoted to exploring the possibilities of a remedy. The lines are the general lines of the Birmingham Proposals advocated by the Labour group surrounding Mr. Oswald Mosley.
The idea of just these people inviting just that party out upon just this quest can hardly fail to catch the interest of readers everywhere ; especially, perhaps, those on the Conser- vative side of the table. But the interest of the people who matter, and, not least, the leaders of the Labour Party them-. selves—unless one much mistakes the qualities of some of those men—will depend much on the depth and practicability of the proposed solutions. And we may at once confess to the view that, while there is depth which this group do not at all appeal to have plumbed, yet if they would but lengthen their line a little they would probably come very near to striking the beginning of a bottom. The solution with which they arc coquetting is that of making this mass of helpless " demand " effective by getting money behind it. And if Mr. Oswald Mosley has done nothing more for the Labour Party than get theie attention to the real difficulty concealed beneath this laudable ambition, he has done it a great service. The point is that you
must do ogre than. provide the needy with purchasing-power. You must prevent the new purchasing-power from merely send- ing up the prices of what it is to purchase. The solution explored by the author, briefly put, is that we raise industrial wages to a legal minimum, thereby generating a brisker demand for necessary things, and that we offer monetary accommoda- tion to firms which require it until such time as this brisker demand enables them to pay the enhanced wages out of their own resources. He would introduce the minimum gently and thereby prevent it from merely raising prices.
One's first comment upon the proposals must be that of the ordinary man, who will think at once of the immensely complicated and almost impossible machinery required to. examine the affairs of industrial firms and decide what wage shall be paid and whether they are able to pay it. The remark is made, however; not with disparaging intent, but in the hope of stirring inquiry as to whether a much simpler way of corn..: passing the very end here in view does not exist.
It is clear to the author himself that these plans amount to, a management of the currency. It may be allowed at once that he and his associates have their eye full upon the real tragedy of our economic existence, the " Unclaimed Wealth." The problem is to keep the currency which would give them a claim on it available to all who are willing to work for it. There seems little doubt that sooner or later we arc going to drift into a regulated currency. Before we are ready for that : (a) we need to settle what we are going to regulate it by and (b) we need to find some governor, some single, simple lever with which to do the regulating ; and the latter must be more or less fool-proof so that any Government can work it. These are obviously matters of economics. But, tragically enough, they are not matters which we can merely refer to the econo- mists, as we might give a mathematician a sum to work out. There is no economic orthodoxy in our time. We have to ask our advisers for their technical reasons. We must settle for ourselves which group of economists mark the last point reached in the advance of economic science. The one par- ticular in which the present volume strains our confidence is its appearance of having accepted the work of eminent thinkers like M r. J. M. Keynes and Mr. J. A. Hobson, without considering it necessary to inquire whether the limit of their advance really still marks the " farthest North." That in an important matter it has been definitely passed by the work of Mr. Henry Abbati is a conviction which the present writer for one has found it increasingly difficult to resist. The matter in question is the economic incidence of money placed on deposit in banks. If it were true, as Mr. Abbati holds, that money placed on deposit is simply money withheld from circulation, then a great many things might follow ; amongst them the interesting circumstance that Government employment at a minimum wage regulated by the flow of goods over retailers' counters would compass the entire point contemplated by "the Birmingham "Proposals. We offer this suggestion simply on the principle- that criticism may as well be helpful where it can. We believe that the Birmingham proposers would find the suggestion worth exploring. And needless to say, we have perfect confidence that they will not viantto reject a means to their object merely because it happ-enS not to emanate from a declared SoCialist. J. W. Scorn.
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