point of view) take the necessary steps to briny about better conditions, then the Gov-lent will. The Government will create a volume of business activity by government investment, which even waen deseribed by its warmest advocates docs not appear to be very different from government spending. The Government will be the borrower und the lender of the idle savings in the country, and will force the use of capital. This is the idea which being presented by the New Dealers as their future policy. The details of the pro~ gramme are stilt vague and will depend upon
accept.
What steps Congress will be prepared to The renewed interest in the domestic economic situation has attracted attention Writes Mr. Lippmann, "there are some who think that railways, utilities and housing could now invest enough capital to restore employment, if only the Government would encourage profits and remove various. re strictions. There are others who do not be-Yieve that private enterprise, even if liber-fated, could take sufficient capital to provide {ull employment. They argue, there= fore, that government investment must not only' continue, but that it should expand." In other words we are back at the old con troversy of whether government restraints or private unwillingness is holding up expansion. The tendency in the Administration is to lay the emphasis on private unwillingness, and put forward the idea that business." "the government must come to the rescue of to once again to the joint committee which ix studying the question six. months advanced, or perhaps it would be better to say, given increased currency to, a number of ideas. One is that the present depression differs from other depressions because it coincided with a change in the nature of the United States itself. The country has now become static. There is no more room for torial expansion and, owing to the immigration laws, its population, too, has become steady. An economic machine yeared for an expanding nation cannot be repaired in order to give service to a static community, or as one witness dramatically put it "this depression is permanent. nes are beginning to hope that the and the extremists on either side will lose their in- Why are yous. isis fluence, und that the problem clarified as one of encouraging private enter prise to invest what it can, and of using Public investment as a supplement where necessary. There are too many people who wish to substitute political contro! for private control of the industrial system and, therefore, do not wish to encourage private in vestment; while there are also too many who distrust and object to all government supervision and regulation and, therefor sleny the need for any government inves When the country was growing at a rapid rate, over-expansion of any activity was not great danger. The market always caught up with the supply. Now there is " danger. One of the reasons for the 1929 crash wa: that too much money went into plants, factories and machinery, and too little was left for buying the products of those new factories.
But now, according to witnesses before the commit ice, the danger is the opposite, the pendulum' has swung to the opposite extreme. There is too little in the construction trades and the goods indust The well-known commentator, Mr. Walter Lippman, suggests that statistics show that '$16,000,000,000, spent annually in capital investment, spell the difference between depres sion and prosperity. If the United States has become a static community the attempt to give precise figures is not as fantastic as it might appear. When an attempt is made to proceed from this point there is a difference of opinion.
Text read from the printed page and cleaned; old type leaves the occasional error.