MALADJUSTMENT IN INDUSTRY [To the Editor of Till: SPECTATOR.] am
afraid Mr. Briscoe would find that little general benefit would accrue from his policy of increasing the output of inexpensive luxuries until something has been done to bridge the inevitable gap between the total of purchasing power and the total of prices. Owing to the increasing mechanization of industry and power production, during any given period and therefore all the time, an increasingly small percentage of money is being distributed in a form immediately available for buying eonsumabk goods, i.e., as wages, salaries, interest and profits, and an increasingly large amount is being temporarily held up paying, or being saved up to pay for, machinery, plant, overheads, raw materials, depreciation and bank loans.
Some half-dozen arguments, each vitiated by its own peculiar fallacy, have been brought forward with the intention of disproving this incontrovertible fact. One of the most naive is that contained in a leaflet now being distributed by the Economic League. In an effort to prove that wages, salaries, interest and profits can, after all, buy the whole Output of consumable goods in the 'price of which many items besides wages, salaries, interest and profits are included, our attention is drawn to the rather obvious fact that indus- trial processes and their payments in all their stages are all going on at the same time. In' one part of the industrial field, money derived front the sale of goods is being used to purchase raw 'Materials. In another, sonic of the money received a little while ago as payment for raw materials, is being paid out as wages to those who produced them. But how or why wages derived from a sum of money pre- viously paid for raw materialS are anything more or less than wages, and therefore already fully allowed for in the statement that the total of wages cannot buy the whole of industrial output including in its price far more than the total of wages, is, to say the least of it, obscure.-1 am, Sir, &c., TAT ISTOCK. The Place House, Peasmarsh, Sussex.
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