The Auckland Star: WITH WHICH ARE INCORPORATED The Evening News, Morning News and The Echo. TUESDAY, JUNE 3, 1930. THE FREE FOOD TRADITION.

Auckland Star, Volume LXI, Issue 129, 3 June 1930, Page 6

The Auckland Star: WITH WHICH ARE INCORPORATED The Evening News, Morning News and The Echo.

TUESDAY, JUNE 3, 1930. THE FREE FOOD TRADITION.

For the cause that lacks assistance, For the wrong that needs resistanot, For the future in the distance, And the good that we can do.

Though Mr. Baldwin has shown definite symptoms of conversion to Tariff Reform, he has once more assured the British public that he will not be a party to any attempt at levying import duties on foodstuffs until the people have been consulted by means of a referendum and have given a mandate in favour of food taxes. No doubt the Conservative leader has acted wisely in insisting on this proviso. For the prejudice against food taxes is so strong at Home that any political party which raises this cry is likely to find its fortunes speedily shipwrecked unless and until it has carefully prepared and educated the electorates up to the point 'of accepting the new economic gospel.

Yet it may fairly be contended that this vehement antagonism to any suggestion of food taxes is in reality a traditional prejudice based chiefly upon a series of unsound assumptions and illogical inferences. Tor the average Free Trader usually assumes that in "the hungry forties," before the Corn Laws were abolished, the high cost of food was due to Protection and that the price of bread dropped rapidly after 1846. The truth, of course, is that the economic crisis through which Britain passed in the thirties and forties of last century was due chiefly to the aftermath of the Napoleonic wars and the effects of the Industrial Revolution. Moreover, it is a fact indisputably established by the Board of Trade returns and other statistics that the market price of bread in England was higher for thirty years after Free Trade was established than it had been on the average for ten years before.

It is further assumed by most Free Traders that if an import duty is levied on foodstuffs it must be borne by the consumer; in other words, the price of food will rise in proportion to the tax. But this view of the incidence of import duties is disproved by the economic teaching of such eminent Free Traders as Bastable and Nicholson. For these distinguished theorists agree that where a market is particularly valuable to the foreign seller, the fear of losing it will induce competition between them and the price generally falls. Moreover, the "dear food" cry is based upon a wholly indefensible misuse of the terms employed. For nothing is "dear" or "cheap" in an absolute sense. Everything is cheap or dear in proportion to one's purchasing power, and a motor car costing £5000, or a racehorse costing £10,000, may be "dirt cheap" to a millionaire. Now, if the effect of Protective duties is, as foreign Protectionists contend, to stimulate the growth of a country's industries by defending them against foreign competition, and thus to increase employment and distribute a larger wages fund among the workers, the masses under such a system will have a larger* of purchasing power at their disposal to buy, if necessary, even dearer food. Such are the lines on which "the education of the electorates" must proceed before Mr. Baldwin's referendum can be taken.