The Wanganui Chronicle FRIDAY, FEBRUARY 24, 1939. GUARANTEED PRICES FOR EVERYBODY

Wanganui Chronicle, Volume 83, Issue 46, 24 February 1939, Page 6

The Wanganui Chronicle FRIDAY, FEBRUARY 24, 1939. GUARANTEED PRICES FOR EVERYBODY

THERE is good sense in the argument advanced by those who realise that costs cannot be brought down and that it is well to I urn to the other side of the ledger and put prices up. Why not have guaranteed prices for everybody? Every individual then will guarantee the price to be obtained by the other fellow. The butcher guarantees the price which the baker is to get and the baker does the same thing for the accommodating butcher. Everyone wants safety, especially in income, and some serious thinking will have to be done in the future on this subject for it appears that, despite England being an underfed country, it is going to limit the foodstuffs which shall be available to its people. It follows, then, that it will not be long before the farmer will have a certain income which he cannot ineiease because he will be unable to find a market for more of his produce. This will simplify matters in one respect at least for the farmer will know that when he has reached his own individual quota that he can do no more good by working and had better retire to a corner and play two-up with himself.

The guaranteed price, however, has one defect in that it does not guarantee a steady income. Weather conditions, mistakes, misfortunes and the like cause variations in farming output and the farmer is just as much entitled to ask that somebody other than himself shall bear the risks involved here as in the variation in price. In short, it would be a far, far better thing if the man who wants somebody else to shoulder his responsibilities to go out of personal endeavour and get a salaried job. While he keeps the job he gets a secure income for a specified output of endeav-

Therc is another view, however, and that which has held sway for a long time, and that, is business comprises the taking of risks and profits are the rewards of the risk-takers. I arming is a risky business and the profits are sometimes good and sometimes there arc no profits at all. Before a farmer can engage in risk-taking he must have a proper margin of ownership of Ins own in his farm. The man who has none, or very little, is not in a position to withstand the losses which are incidental to farming. In other words, he is under-capitalised and he is engaging in a very much bigger gamble than he is entitled to do.

If, however, the community can be induced to pay to any one section a higher price for the product of that section than it can be sold for, then the economics of such a procedure should bo clearly understood. The operation is a method whereby the New Zealand taxpayer helps the English consumer, say, to enjoy a. product under the cost of production. By extending such a procedure to all forms of production—and if it be accorded Io dailyfarmers there is not the slightest excuse for withholding it from taxi-drivers —the process would soon reveal itself in its true light for then it would soon become apparent that, with every increase in production, the Dominion, as a whole, would become the poorer. The policy of working hard to impoverish oneself has not, in the main, commended itself to humanity because it goes counter to that normal experience that it is better to accumulate reserves. But seeing that this is a mad world, why not go the whole journey in madness in the economic field and guarantee the profits of the bookmakers, for they are excellent cititzens who remove the surplus cash from those who have little economic use for it and prefer to engage in the risks of the racecourse instead of in those of the economic world ’

Give every man a just price—just, that is, not to those who receive his product and assess its worth to themselves in the price they are willing to pay for it, but just in the eyes of him who makes it. That most of his just price will be absorbed in makingup the deficiency in somebody else’s sale price to make it. a just price won’t matter—not at first, until the just pricers wake up.