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Show IMPROVIDENT LEGISLATION The plight of the farmer at this time is due neither to overproduction over-production nor underconsumption. He is paying high prices for what he buys including labor and is selling his products for 'less than it costs to grow them. Why. Because the politicians, to get the labor vote cut down a day's work vo the factory making his machinery and implements and on the railroad, hauling his products. Laborers in the factory and on the railroad having to work but 8 hours a day and getting time-and-a-half for any time worked c."er, -.ic not going to work on a farm where the day is from daylight day-light to darkness, unless they receive proportionally more pay. This has compelled the farmer to pay higher wages and has so increased his cost of production as to leave him little if any margin mar-gin of -profit. ' Ir.e so-called Capper-Towne law regulating transactions in grain, however well intended, is an economic mistake. You can't increase the selling price of an article or' commodity by mere legislative interdiction. Elemental economics, whether bs applied to selling wheat or doing other kinds of merchandising, are not so plastic as to be controlled by vargaries or mere theorems. The farmer and everybody else will be beteer off when half-baked half-baked philosophers and blatant demogogues are eligated to the rear and our public policy characterized not by blind and improvident improvi-dent exploration but by economic prudence. |