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Show Quit Kicking And Go To Work! Continual howling about reduced earnings of many corporations Is doing much to prolong the depression, depres-sion, Intimidate the Individual and drive money into hiding. Why shouldn't corporation and private earnings fall below the peaks of two or three years ago? We were then living under abnormal abnor-mal conditions. When an automobile salesman without any capital could open an expensive show room and sell automobiles as fast as he could get hem, we were not living in normal times. When a bond salesman sales-man without any practical experience, exper-ience, capital or knowledge of the Intrinsic value of the securities he handled, could open an office equipped with expensive furniture and oriental rugs, and sell securities, securi-ties, bonds, stocks, etc., to a clamoring clam-oring public, and make money faster than he ever dreamed of, ordinary caution should have warned anybody conditions were not normal. When a real estate operator could take practically worthless land and sell it at fabulous fabu-lous figures which no normal crop value could Justify, it should have bef-n self-evident that there was something wrong. And so on through every line of industrial, agricultural and financial activity. During ten years of inflation, countless persons came to think that by their own ability and shrewdness they were creating wealth for themselves by speculation specula-tion when, as a matter of fact, most of them were creating nothing noth-ing and saving nothing while thay lived In a fool's paradise which they thought would last forever. The majority of persons have more today than they had in prewar pre-war times but they complain about having less because they arc making comparisons on a false basis. This Is true of individuals and it is true of companies. Industrial concerns expanded beyond any normal requirements. They have endeavored to maintain operations on an inflated basis which cannot be done because there is no longer L any artificial demand to maintain such production. All over the nation, one-man industries in-dustries and one-man farms are starling again on a deflated basis. You can drive through the country coun-try and see little "shacks" springing spring-ing up on cheap land and in the far-away places. The occupants of these little homes are going to produce their living and gradually make a little surplus. The big farmers who bought high-priced land on the strength of high-priced crops, as well as the industries which built and equipped plants at peak prices and built up peak overheads, are all going to have to readjust themselves to the basis of the man who is starting at the bottom today. The laboring man who enjoyed wartime wages for the past decade, is in the same boat. The same inflation that affected industry and the individual also affected government and taxation, and government is among the last to recognize conditions and reduce its mushroom expansion accordingly. accor-dingly. The trouble with government govern-ment is that its managers (our public officials and public servants) ser-vants) will not reduce their own. functions voluntarily. The reduction reduc-tion will have to be forced by a tax-weary people who, after they have adjusted their own personal and business affairs, will turn to their governmental problems which In a large measure they have permitted per-mitted to expand, by their own in difference, without check during the past decade. Emphasizing the term "hard times" has become more or less a racket indulged in by a growing army of theorists who would remedy re-medy our ills through schemes which try to create employment at public expense, thereby further discouraging industry through exorbitant ex-orbitant taxation, thus creating more unemployment. Most of our economic doctors are afraid to state in plain English that we are on a basis; that products of all hinds will be selling at pre-war prices; that a large part of our unemployed are going to have to make employment for themselves at wages more nearly what fhiy received before the war. Many of the jobs they enjoyed will never return because the conditions that produced them are gone forever unless we start another world-wide war, which would be a terrific price to pay to stimulate employment. employ-ment. It may be hard medicine to take but It is reality and the sooner we recognize the conditions and ad-Just ad-Just ourselves to them, the sooner will we conquer the depression by merely returning to more normal standards of living. |