POOR EARNING, POOR BUYING!

Evening Post, Volume CXV, Issue 94, 22 April 1933, Page 10

POOR EARNING, POOR BUYING!

When the production of a commodity was nine-tenths the result of human labour, and when human labour was paid proportionately, labour was a consumer in proportion to its capacity as an earner. But when the producing of the commodity became nine-tenths machinery and only one-tenth-human labour, labour's earning capacity, and therefore its consuming capacity, fell. Following this line of argument, technocrats contend that the old way of fixing the pay, and hours, of labour is obsolete. A man cannot consume what he does not earn. If a machine takes man's place, supplies commodities much more easily, and abundantly, and at the same time deprives man of his earning and consuming power, then the machine creates a "poverty of abundance" which the old system of wage, hour, and price cannot cure. The final voice in the disposal of commodities is the v;oice of demand. "What *do you profit," ask technocrats, "if you produce* ever so efficiently, but kill the demand of the consuming masses?" Industrial plant, they 6'ay, has reached a point at which its products are not consumable under the" wage and price system. It is not over-production. It is under-con-sumption caused by the earner-con-sumer's lack of means. Other observers there are who can see in underconsumption only a temporary condition that has occurred time and again in world affairs. Under-consumption and over-production are the same thing. Each is a temporary maladjustment between production and consumption. In course of time production and consumption always meet. Neither machinery nor technocracy can keep them apart. As surely as it falls, equally surely does purchasing power renew itself. The existing system has always provided elasticity to permit of readjustments. Interference impairs that elasticity, but cannot destroy it. If the mountain called consumer will x not go

to die Mahomet called price, then Mahomet will go to the mountain. In "Current History" for March, T. N. Carver disputes the facts of dis-placement-of-man-by-machine as well as the technocratic conclusions. Quoting American figures, he states that "it is in manufacturing that machines are most likely to displace labour. Yet even in 1927, at the height of the boom, the total number of. wage-earners in all our manufactures was only, about 8,330,000. Our unemployed exceed that number by a considerable margin. Not a very large percentage of these could have been displaced, by machines."