PRICES AND PROFITS.

Wanganui Chronicle, Volume LX, Issue 16949, 9 April 1917, Page 2

PRICES AND PROFITS.

What the State should do, and do r*t once, is this: Remove all these maximum prices on agricultural produce; fix a minimum price, and let the rise and fall of prices operate. "Ah!" you

, will say, "if we do this, prices will soar; there will be rigging of the market, the poorest of the poor will suiter, and the farming community will mase undue war profits." I do not believe that prices will soar beyond the capacity of the British public to pay them. With regard to the profits which might accrue to the agricultural community, the State has a perfect weapon m its possession. If it is proved that agriculture has made an undue profit out of the transaction, the State can recoup itself by increasing the ss. in the £ tax now imposed on farmers to 7s 6d. The thing is so simple. This is the right principle. You leave the fanning community alone, which is all that they ask for; jthey do their best in anteed market to produce for you in , their awn way the maximum supply of food, and they will be perfectly concent if, in the process, they get an undue profit, to reimburse to the State through the income-tax the amount to be decided by the Chancellor of the Exchequer and Ins colleagues That is the business way of doing things, but this perpetual wrangle day by day and week by week between the Food Controller, his assistant, the military authorities, and the agricultural producers can have but one effect—to sterilise the activities of the whole of. this agrarian population.