If workers are employed to produce commodities and services, and nobody wants to buy them, it is obviously absurd to place workers on that class of production. On the other hand, if they are called upon to produce commodities and services which people do want and are prepared to buy at a remunerative price, those goods and services can, and ought to, be provided by the ordinary machinery of industry which is normally engaged upon their production; to put unemployed upon that work is merely to compete with, and undercut, those workers who are ordinarily engaged upon that species of output, and throw them out of employment, making the case no better than before. The truth is, as Mr. Harold Cox so forcibly puts it in _Economic Liberty_, p. 74: “It becomes clear that we cannot increase the sum-total of paid employment unless we also increase the volume of commodities and conveniences which all men want. None of the schemes ever proposed for State employment for the unemployed do this. They are all designed not to produce things that somebody wants, but to provide an excuse for paying wages to people who cannot find work. In every case the work is made for the sake of the workman, and that very fact implies that the work is not wanted for its own sake.” That brings us directly to the question of “relief works.” The only economic justification for them is, that when, on humanitarian grounds, payments have to be made out of public or municipal funds for the maintenance of unemployed persons and their dependants, it is better, instead of giving a dole without requiring any work, to ask for work which may confer some benefit on the community paying wages for it. The irony of the position is that the Trade Unions always ask that the wages paid shall be full Trade Union rates, forgetting entirely that the work is not remunerative work and that it is not at the time wanted by the community, but only provided by the community at an economic loss. The Farm Colony Fiascos We have had some experience of attempts to provide “remunerative work.”