PRODUCER AND PARASITE

Sun (Auckland), Volume III, Issue 643, 20 April 1929, Page 12

PRODUCER AND PARASITE

A GREAT ECONOMIC MYTH (Written for THE SUN) “ While producing all the wealth of this little country, the farmer secures for himself but a small share of the fruits of his toil."—E. Earle Vaile. TT is a popular notion that the farmer a is the only producer of wealth, and that the rest of us are all parasites, like ticks on a sheep. One hears it proclaimed loudly at meetings of the Country Party, the Farmers’ Union, and wherever a couple of rustics meet to talk politics over a gate while their wives are milking the cows. Probably Herodotus heard it first from the lips of Egyptian fellaheen, standing up to their knees in muck setting out rice plants, and stopping only to regard with dull resentment the merchant’s caravan as it passed on the high road to Heliopolis. The hoary old delusion comes rumbling down the ages: the Sicilian cultivator supplied the Roman patricians and rabble alike with corn, and made the same complaint of exploitation that we hear from the Canterbury farmer unless the price of wheat is guaranteed. Eighteenth century economists who dealt in abstractions and were groping blindly for laws and principles, postulated the theory that the land was the source of all wealth. The “land” that the economist talked about included earth, sea, air, sunlight, electro-mag-netic force, gravitation and a few other things that still elude our complete understanding. THE POOR SIMP The ordinary citizen, looking to the economist for guidance and being misled by the jargon this worthy habitually uses in the lecture-room, assumes that land means a farm: hence the idea that the “farmer,” a person who looks to the land for a living and freqLiently fails to find it, is the only real wealth producer in the world: all other persons are living by their wits, at the expense of Agricola, the husbandman, who, poor simp, lets them do it because, according to Mr. Vaile, “through lack of organisation and combination, he is the prey of all other classes.” That an apparently intelligent and well-educated man can seriously put forward such bosh in the 20th century is remarkable; that such a stupid fallacy should be so widely entertained that it influences the whole trend of legislation and divides great political parties is a national misfortune: but it is bosh nevertheless, and the fallacy is the greatest economic myth of the age. Admittedly all wealth is the product of human endeavour. Once brought into being it may be consumed, accumulated or destroyed. Some of it is material and much of it is almost intangible. The economists define wealth as “something which has an exchange value.” The value to the producer is determined by the demand. Under modern conditions most of the wealth required by the community is the product of organisation in which capital and machinery play the chief part. The individual producer, such as the toiler on a one-man farm, consumes pretty well all he creates. There is no surplus to increase the common stock of wealth and he generally dies in debt. SUPERFLUOUS FARM EPS It is quite true that the average farmer has to work harder for less money than anyone else in the community, but it is because he is one of the least essential members of it. Our old world is a very productive planet, and there is always a surplus of persons ready to toil from morning to night to supply the rest of the population with food and raw material. Despite the fact that the population of the United States has increased in a century from ten millions to 110, an American economic commission, after an exhaustive investigation, recently decided that they had over five million superfluous farmers who ought to be engaged in industrial occupations if they wanted to enjoy reasonable standards of living.

The only kind of farming that is profitable, i.e., that produces a reasonable surplus, is highly organised farming directed by capitalists who can employ machinery and eliminate labour. In short, when the farm is industrialised and factory methods employed there may be a return which will meet working costs and leave a surplus to increase the aggregate wealth of the community. The singlehanded farmer is merely a labourer with a roof over his head. He cannot accumulate any surplus to speak of, no matter how hard he works, because one pair of hands can never compete against capital and machinery, any more than a blacksmith can make an implement in competition with the International Harvester Company. CHIEF SOURCES OF WEALTH

Countries grow rich by manufacturing and by money-lending. The latter is merely the employment of accumulated wealth to produce more wealth. There is never any shortage of borrowers willing to become the servants of lenders, and most of them are farmers.

Britain is an example of a country which was poor as long as she went on the assumption that the farmer produced all the wealth. To-day, the British farmer is responsible for but ten per cent, of the annual production. Industrial production, income from investments and transport contribute chiefly to the national income, and any suggestion that British manufacturers, bankers, shipping firms, etc., are parasites on the back of the British farmer would be treated as a joke. It is just as big a joke in New Zealand.

In the colonisation of new territories, agriculture must necessarily precede industrialisation, but the quicker a country can make the transition the quicker will it become rich and populous and enjoy a higher standard of living. Three hundred years have elapsed since the pilgrim fathers sailed in the Mayflower. In the intervening period the United States has passed from a condition of dependence on overseas markets for the sale of primary products: it has shed all its free trade illusions and has developed the most colossal industrial and financial empire the wt'.d has ever seen. In wealth and power it is pre-emin-ent. In Canada, the voice of the farmer is still loud enough to retard industrial progress, but her course is set along the road that has led to wealth and prosperity in the United States. The same remark applies to Australia, and in New Zealand there is an awakening to the truth that the farmer has had his day. For some years to come he will struggle along as a competitor with the Argentinian rancher, European peasantry, and a horde of brown brothers in India and elsewhere who are content to work all day with a rag round their middle for a handful of rice and a bit of fish. OUR QUALITY PRODUCTS

We are still holding our Ovvn in the world’s markets because we have quality products to sell, and the rich have grown so numerous, since agriculture declined in England, that they can afford to purchase most of the lamb and butter we send at a price that keeps the New Zealand farmer sufficiently interested in his job to remain on the land. The day when the value of industrial production in New Zealand will exceed the value of primary production is in sight. Much could be done to speed its advent. The unreasoning hostility of the farmer and the farmer’s politician who declares loudly that that protection (which is a scheme to hasten the expansion of industrial production) is robbery, is still the chief obstacle. If the farmer could only see that a prosperous industrial population in our own country furnishes the most dependable market for his products, and offers to the next generation an escape from the bondage of the land, the outlook for New Zealand would be perceptibly brighter.