POOLS AND PRICES

Te Aroha News, Volume XIXXX, Issue 6382, 23 August 1923, Page 8

POOLS AND PRICES

AN AUTHORITATIVE AMERICAN VIEW The extremely well written and edited monthly review of the National City Bank of New York, in the July number describes the fixation of the price of a world commodity by any group or board of officials as fantastical. In making special reference to the defeat of the “price-fixing” section at the recent wheat conference, held in Chicago, the “Review” remarks: —“It is quite impossible that any association of farmers, no matter how many are included, ever can adjust prices to suit supply and demand as readily and effectually as the present system of free-trading does it. No single group or board of officials can fix the market price of a world commodity. That idea is a fantasy. “It must be constantly remembered that every state of depression is due to loss of equilibrium which should exist between the industries. Too much of some things are being produced in proportion to the production of other things. The exchange ratio is disturbed, either by unbalanced physical production or unbalanced prices. The latter have the same effect as the forme]'. An unbalanced state of physical production should be corrected, not by throwing people out of work oi' lessening the aggregate production, but by shifting labor from one kind of production to another, to restore the balance. The natural fluctuation of prices will accomplish this if' the markets are free, so that they reflect conditions, and if producers are free to respond. These natural tendencies are baffled by efforts of interested and short-sighted persons to regulate prices and production arbitrarily. The syndicalist scheme of organising industries and tying up individual workers and producers to obey the instructions of leaders, deprives the whole industrial system of the flexibility which is necessary to its proper functioning. Of course, each group does it ostensibly in self-defence, or upon the plea that other groups do it, a plea used to justify every form of aggression and wickedness with which the world is affected.”