Page:Walter Renton Ingalls - Current Economic Affairs (1924).pdf/77

Rh Unionized labor imposes restrictions upon the practice of certain of our trades and thereby diminishes the supply of goods that those trades produce, again with the natural consequence of raising prices. In some overmanned industries we are expected to support a large superfluous personnel without their producing anything.

In railway transportation the government itself sanctions the annulment of competitive conditions and fixes terms whereby men doing a certain kind of work on the railway right of way get 50 cts. per hour while the same kind of men doing the same work in private fields immediately adjoining get only 30 cts. per hour. This policy increases the cost of railway transportation, which is reflected in the prices for goods.

The elevation of prices in this way, in the absence of monetary inflation, is, of course, possible only by the creation of conditions that give some classes of workers an undue share of the goods that are produced, or the ability to command them, at the expense of other classes. This is the real thing in profiteering.

The most glaring and most serious manifestation of this is the profiteering at the expense of the farmers, although clerks and the white-collar classes are victimized in the same way. The farmer, as a direct producer, is closer to the operation of the law of supply and demand than is the proletariat. The farmer, too, might curtail supply but he knows enough to understand that high prices for a diminished product would be of no benefit to him, but the opposite. Therefore the farmer, who is characteristically confused in his ideas about money and credit, looks first for the way out of his difficulties by monetary inflation, which