The daily Nome industrial worker., 1917-08-24

time had come when to uoe their expression there was no good req son why any man who wants work should be idle. It is not without its delicate humor that the ''bettah clawses' consider that when an idle man is offered job he should jump at it and ask no irrelevant questions as to the rate of pay.
 From end to end of the country there has been intense industrial ac- tivity. These excess profits were no myth. Men became immensely wealthy almost overnight. The cry wGs for an increase in the technical means of production for more and more rawmaterial. These with labor could be relied upon to furnish the profits There was a market for all this product of labor and the ma chinery and plant owners got it all.
 We suppose few people but believe the current fiction that excess profits will make the rich bugs pay for the war, if the taxation is extended to that. In point of feet it does TO such thing. It tends rather to in increase the profits. That has been | the general experience in Great | Britain. Take the British shipping 1 industry, supposed to have been hard hit by the U boats so that 4. was on the verge of ruin. They have an immense excess profit tax l in Great Britain and when they were proposing to increase it an- other per cent, t was protested against as certain to ruin the snip owners. "Bonar Law met them by narrating his own experience with | shipping shares. He had invested eight thousand one hundred and ten pounds sterling in fifteen different companies under a management of seven owners. He would have been glad to get five per cent a year in ordinary times, four hundred and five pounds. AS a matter of fact he had received three thousand six hundred and twenty four pounds in 1915, and three thousand eight hundred and forty-seven pounds in 1916. Good Lord", exclaimed MT. Duncan the labor member, was that after paying the excess profits duty?"
 Yes. Bonar Law replied. Be- sides on top of that ono of the steamers had been sunk. He had received two hundred pounds on that ship and on the top of 1 his handsome dividend he had received one thousand pounds on the liquidation.
 In fact the dividends of the Brit ish steamship companies are so enormous as to vie handsomely in pleasant rivalry with the American profits from American war babies.
 Another proposal had been made, and made by mon who themselves rejoiced in considerable incomes and that was to seize all incomes over | $100.000. But that would require men of great magnitude to enforce It could not simply be thought of When we behold the coal operators threatening to close their mines be- cause profits now are to be restrict ed to the still generous margin of l 1916, we can understand that patri- otism has strictly limitations in bus mess.
 They are willing to go far, but not too far. Stone Webster a great construction and traction firm built small arsenal for the United States without profits, but they fol- lowed this up by erecting another which gave them three million and . million dollar bonus. for 90 days work. So their patriotism paid.
 l It is rot easy to conscript profits or even excess profits And there l is nothing reveals so clearly the important influence of this monied power in the realm of legislature than the fact that conscription of wealth is to be taboo among the legislators.
 Lafollette is indeed voice crying in the wilderness. But he is re- gardcd as either an Ishmaelite or a Don Quixote. He is an anachronism