Page:Walter Renton Ingalls - Current Economic Affairs (1924).pdf/46

32 only a misconceived activity, and unequal at that, as I contend, the case against them will be strengthened.

The cost of living has nothing to do with the matter. That very conception implies that everybody is entitled to a certain kind of living, which of course is not so. This resolves itself again into the question of production and prosperity. If production be increasing faster than the increase in population people can live better and will live better. If the opposite condition be prevailing the scale of living will be lowered, and then no class of workers can maintain its previous scale except at the expense of other classes of workers.

According to newspaper reports, a constant improvement in relations between wage earners and employers, growing ability of workers to improve standards of living through increased wages, better working conditions and shorter work days make up labor’s program for “permanent prosperity” as outlined by Samuel Gompers in recent harmony meetings with Secretary Hoover and President Barnes of United States Chamber of Commerce. “Those who clamor for wage reductions,” said Mr. Gompers “are in the fullest sense promoting national retrogression and destruction. Continued payment of high wages, continued advancement and improvement in standards of living, continual enlarging capacity of wage earners to purchase and consume the products of American industry, are better preventives of industrial depression than any suggestions brought out by Secretary Hoover’s business cycle committee.”

The ideas of Mr. Gompers, which may be accepted as those of the conservative element of organized labor, exhibit a terrifying economic misconception.