A COST OF LIVING FALLACY.

Taihape Daily Times, Volume XII, Issue 3580, 16 September 1920, Page 4

A COST OF LIVING FALLACY.

It is not creditable to trusts and combines to continue a propaganda which is intended to biind and hoodwink people into the belief that however bitter the privations they suffer, they are not comparable with the ex- , treme conditions of life into which people of other nations are forced. Periodically, New Zealand, newspaper proprietors are made to pay for batches of that propaganda being cabled to this Dominion; trust vultures are bereft of .every spark of conscience, : or they would at least "pay for the transmission of their own trading fodder. An isolated case of wheat ! shortage in central or southern .Eurj ope, and of coal, is immediately cabled to this country with quite a batch of other stuff to which the particular shortage lends some presumption of truth". Yesterday's cablegrams indicate a shortage of bread in Italy, and they state that coal is selling at seven hundred lira per ton.. In any case Italians are not much worse off than many people in Taihape for they cannot obtain coal at any price. But with the information about coal shortage in Italy there comes a repetition of a batch of statistics about cost of living which are irTiating rather than convincing by virtue of the number of occasions in which newspapers have been made to pay for the same old misleading drivel. New Zealanders are asked to believe that while cost of living has only increased by 60 per cent, since .1914, it has soared to 321 per cent, in France, 300 in Italy, 298 in Norway, 237 in Switzerland, 235 in-Britain. 199 in Holland, and 196 in the United States. It must be first understood that these are average figures; that they include the increase in the champagne and luxuries of the idle and the profiteering rich as well as the black bread and simple'fare of the working-class. They are also designedly misleading for comparative purposes with cost of living in New Zealand as it. is mot stated that the standard of living, and the cost of living of the workingclasses in most of the countries showing the largest increase was in prewar times only a third of what they were in this Dominion, and in some instances only a fourth, and even less. Therefore, while interested people try to make it appear that workers in this Dominion- are particularly well-situated in the cost of living increase, they are nothing of the kind, for despite what statistics pretend the cost of living has gone up above the pre-war standard in New Zealand by some 130 per cent, at least, and that before the end of Che year it will have gone up by some 200 per cent. A labouring family in France who were compelled -to live on one pound per week before the war now needs a little over three pounds per week, and a' New Zealand labouring family living upon three, pounds per week in 1914, even if cost of living has increased by only 100 per cent, should now reeeive six pounds. The important aspect, being that in spite of misleading figures the actual cost of living in New Zealand is faT greater to-day than it i& even in France where war raged for five years. In fact, trade advertisements in various country newspapers indicate that necessaries of life, par- . ticularly in connection with clothing j and food, with a few exceptions, are

obtainable at a lower price than in this Dominion. It is a notable fact that some manufacturing firms who fix the selling price of retailers have been guilty of fixing a higher selling price for New Zealand than for other places. The truth about the comparative increase in cost of living can only be obtained by a knowledge of pre-war cost in various countries. It does not follow that because cost of living has increased 5Ln France by 200 per cent, and only 100 per cent, in New Zealand, that the cost of living is higher in France than in this Dominion, as a matter of fact that would not be the case as the pre-war standard of living in France was very much lower than it was in New Zealand. |i