The midland journal. (Rising Sun, Md.) 1885-1947, 1893-09-15
QUESTIONS OF THE DAY
The Root Cause of all Pauics,
Crises, and Hard Times,
and the Remedy.


We have in the present business
crisis great object lesson of the un-
scientific construction of the existing
business system and the calamities
which society must suffer until il is
replaced with national plan. We
must pay heavily for this lesson; let
us therefore study it carefully and get
its value.
To the question what makes these or
any other hard times, ten men you may
meet on the street will give as many
answers. One will say too much silver,
another, too little, another will say
speculation and inflated credits, another
will talk about the tariff, and so on.
Now various of these causes have had
something to do with accelerating
or aggravating the present crisis,
but the main underlying and only
effective cause of this, as of all other
crisis and hard times in general, lies
far deeper and is inherent in the exist
ing economic system. 1t is the lack Of
an equilibrium between the producing
and consuming power Of communities
The vast majority Of men, the working
masses of the world and of each COM
munity in it, do not receive for their
labor anything like the equivalent of
its product, and they consequently have
not the power to buy and consume as
much as they produce.
The result is and must be an accum-
ulation in the hands of few OF the
surplus product which the community
as whole is unable to buy back and
reabsorb. There may be bitter need
and want of these surplus goods among
the members of the community, the
men and women who produced them !;
they may be half starved, half clothed
and houseless, but not having received
for their work the full value of its pro-
duct they are unable to buy back the
things they need, and SO We have store.
houses bursting with grain and factories
full of bales of cloth, defended by
police and militia from naked and
starving mobs.
This is the cover production which
is the reductio ad absurdum of the
economic system and which, always
going on to greater or less extent,
periodically reaches such proportions as
to cause great crisis or general stop
page of production. This, of course,
by further reducing the previously
inadequate purchasing power of the
masses, still more completely stops the
market, and so matters 60 from worse
to worse until sufficient goods have
been "thrown overheard" sacrificed"
spoiled and wasted to relieve a little
the glut, the production can begin
again. All the while, do not forget,
there has been among the people such
an intensity of need and want, as would
in a moment have absorbed ten times
over the cover production" could it
have been distributed among them.
When political economist tells you
that the existing system is based upon
the Intervening of demand and sup
ply, tell him that he lies. 1t is on the
contrary a most ingenious and effective
plan for preventing supply from meet
ing demand or getting within gunshoi
OF it. And so your economist will
presently confess by admitting that by
demand" political economy does moi
mean the demand of men as measured
by their needs, but the demand of mer
measured by the money they have. In
the sense of political economy it is
money alone that talks.
1t has, of course, always been true
that the workers have not received the
full value of their produce, but owing tc
the vast multiplication Of the produc-
tive power of the worker by machin-
cry in modern times the discrepancy
between what the workers produce and
what they receive and are able t.
consume, is vastly more than in any
previous age, Wages, that is the share
of their product received by many
kinds of workers, are doubtless more or
the whole than before the introduction
of machinery, but to be in the same
proportion to the product they mus
have been multiplied by 10 and some
times by 20. The consequence of the
prodigiously increased modern excess Of
the product of the worker over his
power of consumption as represented
by his wages, has been on the one hand
to make "over production" constant
condition, and to leave a vast mass Of
.1oloroA Iobo, tub;oh uo1ar khe