Get cash flowing

The fundamental importance of Alf Young’s analysis of “making money out of money” can’t be doubted. (Perspective, 
18 January). It isn’t just the gross unfairness between “pay at the top and pay at the bottom”. Such a disparity of incomes leads to the accumulation of large amounts of money in fewer and fewer hands.

Isn’t it possible, to paraphrase Keynes, for a laissez-faire economy to end up “dying on a heap of money?” Of course this is reductio ad absurdum to make the point of the need to spend to create work and jobs. It rejects the present economic and political ideology that the economic virtues are “thrift and saving”.

Isn’t the slow recovery down to a lack of political will to redistribute income and wealth? Working people haven’t enough to spend, while the rich and very rich have too much and, therefore, save. Arguably what was called in the 1930s depression “under-consumption” is economically and morally relevant today.

Ellis Thorpe

Old Chapel Walk

Inverurie, Aberdeenshire