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* "The mountain went into labour and indeed brought forth a mouse" . . .
the BEVERIDGE PLAN means the totalitariari State Vested Interests Would Buy Off Social Revolution The monthly organ of the National Catholic Rural Movement. -Rural Life," in its latest issue, published the following criticism of the Beveridge Plan, by J. T. Williamson. The Beveridge report on Social Insurance, stripped of all the superlatives with which it has been described by its author and by journalistic yes-men, emerges as the greatest piece of nonsense in the history of the last twenty. The mountain indeed went into labour, and alas! brought forth mouse. The "great revolutionary social plan.' with its great promise social justice, is reduced to simply another issue of pea soup for paupers.
Typical Press "Build -Up" of Famous Plan Invites Suspicion to the average citizen. It is the State who is the paymaster, and the citizen receives as its charity what is his due in justice. The principle, however, is jar more important than that. The Beveridge
FREEDOM FIRST.
The journalistic "build-up" which preceded the presentation of the Report was an object lesson in how NOT to publicise a plan of social reform. The preliminary boost, which was given in the Press, continued for months beforehand. The announcement of details of the plan was accompanied by a veritable shower of press eulogies which, coming from acknowledged organs of the capitalist system, were enough to make an infant suspicious of the bona fides of everybody concern-
To the Australian it is to be feared
that totalitarianism simply means the
Gestapo and concentration camps. Actually these things are only symptoms. The disease goes far deeper. The disease exists whenever and wherever you give the State an undue amount of power over the lives of individuals and
families. The only safeguard of freedom is
ed.
The details of the plan are most involved, but they all depend on the one principle-that workers, employers, and the State will finance, by means of regular contributions, a system of social insurance, under which every person will be assured of a minimum living allowance in times of unemployment, and of necessary health and mediThe payments will be cal benefits. made by the State. In commenting on a plan of this nature, one thing comes immediately to mind. As long as our social system is sufficiently homicidal to face individuals with the threat of unemployment and of starvation, then there must be a plan of this nature to take this barbaric threat out of the lives of men Freedom from want is and women. one of the most elementary rights of the human being, and the Beveridge plan is one way of giving that elementary thing. Let us be under no illusion, however, as to the mean and niggardly way in which this elementary justice is given
plan means the Servile State, the Slave State, the Totalitarian State. It is sickening humbug to say that we fight totalitarianism when we fight Hitler, and then to introduce this system under the plea of economic security and social justice.
2:
HILAIRE BELLOC-
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tu.storian and sociologist, who for years past has pointed to the modern evolution of the Servile or Totalitarian State. The war seems to be occasioning the rapid realisation of Belloc's forebodings on the social the Beveridge Plan being a straw in the wind question .
THE SHOP FOR BETTER SERVICE. Any goods sent to country not satisfactory we pay freight. Our motto is: "We have it; we will get it, or it cannot be had."
.
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the recognition that the individual and the family have certain "spheres of influence' which the State may not invade. When the State is made the paymaster of the people you have bureaucracy, you have the tyranny of red-tape, you have the obstruction of all true liberty. No social system is worth a rap unless, in addition to security, it gives freedom, social justice, and in the case of Australia, unless it gives positive encouragement to the growth of our native population. The Beveridge plan, and whatever imitation we are likely to have in this country, will do none of these things. Let industry pay the Family Wage! Let the price of farm products be fixed so that the man on the land can be guaranteed a family income on the; same basis! Then the individual will be able to provide for all future contingencies from his own resources without having to go cap in hand to the State. Give the ownership of property to the people! Destroy the great monopolies either on the land or in industry, (Continued on Back Cover.)
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