Page:David Atkins - The Economics of Freedom (1924).pdf/271

 ''diate family. The great excess acreage seeded to wheat was cut down to more nearly that required to meet local needs.'' Naturally also there was a drop in the yield per acre and then on top of this the peasant and his family began to eat wheat. This has played the mischief with export wheat and upset the balancing of trade deficits and made national budgets knotty problems for overwrought finance ministers.

“The drop of about 90,000,000 bushels exportable wheat in the Danube basin alone is a serious matter for those nations, especially Roumania, which depended upon wheat more than any other product to ''keep its money at par. But when one considers that these governments were not of the people, but were for and by the ruling class, and when one realizes that the peasant, the common man, is better off to-day than he has ever been before, one cannot help but feel that the time has come for the governments to adjust themselves to the new order.”''

In a further comment, Mr. Michael adds:

“The large estates, in time passed, produced vast amounts of wheat—the whole farm organization being built up around wheat production, just as in Iowa it is built up around corn and hog production. These large owners had no patriotic motive in growing wheat. They grew wheat for the cash it brought them and that cash was expended largely abroad at the luxury centers—Paris, Berlin. But they produced much more wheat than the cities ate (the peasants ate but little white bread) and the excess was exported abroad. This created a balance of trade in favor of the exporting nation and kept its money up to par…

“When the peasant got hold of the land he began to grow the things he wanted to grow…The result…was somewhere around a hundred million bushels less export wheat in 1920, if we take all of the Danube States together. This played havoc with balances of trade and the exchanges value of the money of most of these countries took a big drop. The State and the city dwellers suffered and accused the peasants of disloyalty to the Government for not growing wheat.”

The italics are inserted to point the significance of this impersonal review. The omissions are not germane to the writer’s contention, which is this: High rents and high taxes, whether direct or indirect, have precisely the same economic effect upon the tiller of the soil, and force an illogical production of an exportable surplus to keep our money at par. The earnest and misguided friends of the American farmer are