The Sun 42 WYNDHAM STREET. AUCKLAND WEDNESDAY, MARCH 20, 1929 FARMERS AND THE TARIFF

Sun (Auckland), Volume II, Issue 617, 20 March 1929, Page 8

The Sun 42 WYNDHAM STREET. AUCKLAND WEDNESDAY, MARCH 20, 1929 FARMERS AND THE TARIFF

IN a spirit of goodwill and friendliness the Auckland manufacturers met the representatives of the Farmers’ Union on Monday evening to have a little talk about the tariff. The manufacturers contend that the protection to local industry afforded by Mr. Downie Stewart’s tariff is inadequate. They desire a more protective tariff, hut they also know perfectly well that the average farmer is suspicious, and unless and until they can disabuse his mind of the idea that increased protection v ’ impose hardship on those engaged in the primary industry, all the political forces at the command of farmers will be mobilised against the proposal.

Judging by the report of the meeting, a good deal of missionary work will be necessary before the farmers can be made to see the light. It must be rather disconcerting in this age of progress and enlightenment to find a farmers’ representative taking his stand on the dictum of John Stuart Mill that the imposition of a tax on imports increases the price of the commodities concerned by the amount of the tax. Mill wrote his treatise on political economy over eighty years ago. He was a mild-mannered, exceedingly cultured if somewhat neurotic type of doctrinaire, who had a poor opinion of the effect of reason and argument on those who disagreed with him. He was strong on individual liberty and the operation of the law of supply and demand. Factory Acts, State regulation of labour conditions, industrial arbitration, State industries, old age pensions and a score of measures long since hailed as milestones on the road to democracy would have been anathema to Milk Hike most economists who have never soiled their hands in anything so vulgar as trade and industry, he dealt in abstract principles which have little or no relation to the iacts of life, and are about as useful to a legislator as algebra is to a share-milker. It is not by reading John Stuart Mill that the farmer will get to the pith of the present fiscal position in New Zealand. It would be far better to pitch Adam Smith, Ricardo, Mill, Jevons, McCulloch and the rest into the dust-bin and go into the factories and works of the Dominion for the purpQse of seeing what manufacturers are doing, and making a critical study of those very industries that are the source of so much controversy. Ihe first thing the farmer will discover is that, although 36s a gallon on whisky may possibly increase the price of the commodity by the amount of the tax, it is not necessarily so in the case of boots, clothing, soap, candles and numerous commodities that are the subject of protective duties. Further, if a careful examination is made of the average farmer’s household expenditure it will be found that the effect of the protective duties is but a small factor in the cost of living. The theory underlying tariff protection and the object of giving practical effect to it is that industrialisation is the road to greater material progress and that a high standard of living, which all agree is desirable, can only be maintained in a competitive world by legislative restrictions which shut out cheap toreign labour and create more or less artificial conditions which outrage the principles of economists, but make the country fit to live in. The farmer, who represents hut 26 per cent, of the Dominion’s breadwinners, should harbour no grudge against high wages and a well-paid industrial population which provides the best and safest market for his products. Starving townsmen who, if the tariff were abolished to-morrow, would he forced to emigrate or work for a farmer for 15s a week and their tood, might furnish an interesting and instructive example of the unfettered operation of the law of supply and demand but it would be a very sorry and dejected cockatoo who awoke to . X,, A; scove „ r y .that, by destroying local industry, he had saddled himself with the whole cost of public administration and the interest on the National Debt. We suggest in all seriousness to the Manufacturers’ Association and the Farmers’ Union that fiscal debates are a sheer waste of time and a weariness to the flesh. Let them take each individual industry on its merits and get down to the vital it acts of that industry. Let its organisation he examined, its efficiency tested and its contribution to the wealth of the community estimated. The farmers will be surprised at their discoveries They will find that most of these industries are based on the raw products of the country, that they are contributing to the national wealth on a scale far in excess of anv returns available from even the best of farming. Without them it would be impossible for the country to meet its obligations or develop along sound and progressive lines.