OCR Text |
Show SEVEN REMEDIES FOR USURY Plundering of Poor Can Be Stopped by Encouragement of Habits of Saving and Economy. As we see it, the remedies needed to stop the plundering of the poor through usury are these: 1. Habits of thrift, economy and saving must be encouraged, and parents must teach these habits to their children by precept and example. exam-ple. 2. Farmers who need money to purchase pur-chase supplies must borrow it from banks at legal rates of Interest instead in-stead of paying ten times the legal rate of interest In the form of "time prices." 3. Banks, whether state or national, must be treated as public-service corporations, cor-porations, which they are, and rigidly regulated by low as other public-service corporations are. 4. In every Btate stringent anti-usury laws must be enacted and enforced. 5. The crop-lien must be repealed, or where this cannot be done, the rate of advance which merchants may charge on "time prices" as compared with cash prices must be strictly limited lim-ited to a rate not exceeding one per cent a month. 6. The national government must establish es-tablish a modern system of rural credits cred-its in harmony with European models. "What Europe has done for her farmers, farm-ers, America must do for hers." 7. To supplement the long-term land credit system, we mus.t work out a new system of personal or short-term credits by encouraging and stimulating stimulat-ing credit unions, co-operative savings and loan associations, Reiffeisen banks and all other practicable agencies of betterment. The Progressive Farmer. |