The Taihape Daily Times AND WAIMARINO ADVOCATE FRIDAY, MAY 12, 1916. "AN ESSAY ON SUGAR."

Taihape Daily Times, Volume 8, Issue 111, 12 May 1916, Page 4

The Taihape Daily Times AND WAIMARINO ADVOCATE

FRIDAY, MAY 12, 1916. "AN ESSAY ON SUGAR."

(With which is incorporated The Tai hape Post and Waimarino News.)

It is doubtful whetner any other trading Company in Australasia nas given cue various go\ernmeuts so much auub.e over i,.iuut yiioe inha,tiou as the colonial Sugar Company. It »s „ne one company that wni be remembered by the people as being prosecuted for its disregard of the Restraint of Trade laws; that was mulcted in heavy penalties, and which, with all its expenditure of money in trying to beat the law, could never get clear of that punishment the Supreme Court inflicted. It is the Company that a year or so ago invented one of the most naive excuses for price raising that has ever been put forward. Whether that invention was patented or copyrighted by th e Company we do not know but while no other firm has yet made use of it the Sugar Company trots it out in the same old wording whenever the people are to be subjected to another good squeeze. Its first appearance created a good deal of curiosity, and it set the whole country enquiring about where sugar was being hoarded. Thousands of working men and others, went spying to see if their neighbours or opposition in business were the culprits responsible for the squeeze applied by the Company at that time, but it was not discovered that sugar was being accumulated anywhere except amongst the Company's distributors of their own commodity, and they were prosecuted because of this unlawful withholding and refusing to sell for cash at the ruling market price to certain merchants. Once more the Sugar Company is making use of its presumably copyrighted excuse; notwithstanding an already high price of sugar that is returning huge profits of a get-rich-'suick character, we are again told that New Zealanders are hoarding sugar. The rankest nonsense is seriously put forward for extracting extortionate prices for commodities, but none are so absurd as that the Sugar Company has lit upon. They tell- us that three hundred tons of sugar a week are now being bought by New Zealanders in excess of what they required a year ago. Even if that were the case it would not be very remark-

able seeing that a special demand for Army purposes must exist, together with natural increase of population and settlement. They naively state, "We do not know what the people are doing with th e sugar, but it is certainly 'not our fault' if sugar is scarce, for our output has been abnormal. We are producing an ample supply for normal requirements of the Dominion. As a matter of fact our deliveries for the six months ending March 31 last exceeded the output for the corresponding period last year by nearly three thousand tons." They don't say how nearly but it might be remarked that they spun a similar story in Australia. The Government replied, "All right, we will just stop exportation for awhile." This had a wonderful effect and it might be tried by our Government in the interests of the hundreds of thousands of workers here who cannot make ends meet. In the good old honest trading days there was never any wail about increasingdemand by manufacturers; the way then to increase profits was the honest one of increasing supply. Nowadays they go on quite a different tack to increase profits; they don't make the output larger they just put up the price, it's easier and simpler. If consumers remonstrate they shrug their Jewish shoulders and say, Oh, well, that is the price ruling in Timbuctoo, or some other outlandish place, which is nothing short of an insult to ones intelligence. Just fancy the representative of a huge trading concern like the Sugar Company, puckering his forehead, putting up his shoulders, holding his forearms at right angles from his body with the palms of his hands uppermost, excusing his company's extortion by saying, "I do not know what the people are doing with They might be using it to gravel their garden paths for all he knows, but the people ar e better informed with regard to what his Sugar Company is doing. It comes to them very forcibly that it is being used to extract from the workers their hardearned money to an extent far beyond its market value; to make a few indecently rich at the risk of creating conditions of semi-starvation among the very poor. They must do with less sugar says the Company. Yes, they have been similarly advised by the flour-miller, the baker, the butcher, the butter firms, the milkman, the draper, the bootmaker, by the purveyors of every necessary of life, and now the sugar company is commencing another round of "boosting" up and they have the impudence to say it is necessitated by consumers' hoarding it up. Why, the average consumer hasn't the money to buy a pound more than his absolute needs, and there are thousands that are suffering because their needs are impossible of attainment at the present unnecessarily high prices. Unless legislative help is given, however, another big squeeze is coming. The Company merely wants to find out what -the people ar e doing with the sugar — nothing else.