The daily Nome industrial worker., 1917-04-10

clothing leather shoes and the like. To get these the European belliger- ents must sacrifice their stock of gold. It is matter of life ana death that they are supplied with them to maintain the vast masses of productive labor engaged in car rying on the war. Hence the gold is dumped, and the purchasing power that that foreign gold posses ses is placed in juxtaposition to the purchasing power of American con- sumers, the general demand is the domestic demand plus the intensive foreign demand while the supply is an unchanged factor.
 Those who own the commodities for sale meet a social condition wherein they can dem2nd all the traffic will bear and then sp,re, and they get what they ask. Prices go up and they gC up because the goods possess a social necessity that must be met aEG which it will cost to reproduce them Their values have increased some, the ex- pressiop of their values expr ssed in terms ol gold a lot more. The price is above the normal values because of the greater demand while the supply is constant.
 What is happening today, and what is actually puzzling us all is not the high prices of necessities, but the low wages. Wages are ac. tually below their economic stand ard. The price of labor is below it's value. The value of labor is the cost of reproducing the labor power. and because the workers have to live on an inferior scale of | living, and because the continuance of that scale must in the end pre- vent reproduction of that labor power, labor is the only commodity being disposed at lower figure than it's actual value
 The reason for that is that there is not a proper demand for labor There are still too many workers for the jobs and hence this commo- dity fails to rise as do the rest
 It ought to be plain to any per son that this is the crux of the whole question. If one lives i'll 6 land where labor is proportionately as rare as are the other commodities labor will be bought accordingly and none feel the trouble of high prices i'll the least. Thus in the Klondike in the early days the hign cost of living then make the high costs of living now cheap in com parison. But no one suffered. for the very simple reason that labor was paid for in proportionate manner.
 But we keep on thinking that we are being robbed as consumers: that it is the men who own commodities that are raising cain with the si- tuation when it comes to selling. but that is only part and an unim portant part of the truth. The full truth is that while other commo- dities are being sold probably some thing above the actual labor values therein, and expressed in terms ot gold as price, the labor commodity is being sold under it's value and this gives rise to the whole trouble.
 What we see too. is that those who own the necessaries of life as they reach the consumers, are well organized to keep up that price while labor is not organized to do anything of the kind except in a nondescript, ineffective, incoherent fashion Hence we are unable to control the situation and the pricee of everything go up expect wges.
 The trouble is not the high costs of necessities, but the low wages. Increase the wages and the high costs will not bother anyone, even Kansan editors or Labor Advocates.