NATIONAL EXPENDITURE.
When Sir Frederick Barthorpe referred at the recent annual dinner of the Chartered Institute of Secretaries to the con- nexion between industrial depression and excessive taxation, he may be said in one sense to have uttered no fresh truth. On the other hand, if a retrospective examination is made of national expenditure for the past six months, it is impossible not to be struck with the manner in which our capital resources have been taxed to the disadvantage of private industrial enterprise. It is one of the difficulties of the critic of national expenditure that he has sometimes to wait a long time for the justification of his comments. Nevertheless, I fancy that there are a vast number of readers of the Spectator who are able to recall the period of nearly twenty years ago when, at the time of Lloyd Georgian financial extravagances for so-called social reforms, he was plainly told not from one but from many responsible quarters, of the manner in. which capital resources were being depleted, to the detriment of the real prosperity of the country. To-day we know from painful experience that the vast sums diverted by Income Tax, Supertax and Death Duties from productive industrial outlays to non-productive national expenditure have played no small part in handicapping us in competition with other countries more lightly taxed than ourselves —competition, in short, with countries which lay more stress on the power of _private industry to raise the status of the worker than on the power _ of the State to grant " doles to those who may be unemployed.
A. W. K.
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