The Bourbon news. [volume] (Paris, Ky.) 1895-19??, 1920-02-03
PROFITEERS AND WHY THEY
PROFIT.


There is much noise being made
just now by the Federal Department
of Justice. District attorneys and
their subordinates are telling what
they are going to do to profiteers-
if they can only find the profiteers
A washington correspondent
pointed them out recently: prof
teering occurs between the producer
and the consumer, with the weight
of evidence showing that every
handler of food products gets
share" Can anybody doubt that this
is fair statement of the case-that1
if ''profiteering" is to be defined as
the taking of profits larger than had
been customary before the war and
larger than were necessary to give
{, fair return for the service render
ed, practically every merchant in
country has been is now a profiteer
Nor are the merchants the only
persons to whom the war and its re-
sultant upsetting of business prac-
Ices and traditions brought increas-
I'D profits. The manufacturing in
terests have made sums almost be-
yond comprehension; the farmers
have, in most cases, secured profits
| far above normal from their farm
ing. Everybody has been profiteer-
ing in a sense, except the people liv.
ing on stationary salaries or fixed
incomes. When readjustment
comes, however, and the industrial
spree IS over it will almost certainly
be found that a great mass of wealth
las been transferred from the peck
cts of the classes in between. The
real profiteering has been in the pro-
cesses Of distribution, and this is
true of most other things as we'll as
| foodstuffs.
Now, any cutlery against middle
men" as class will get us nowhere.
They have been doing simply the
thing they have been trained and
expected to do--that is, they havv
been getting all they could out of
their business. They are no more to
be blamed for doing it than the rest
of us are, even though they have
been making things pretty hard for
some of the rest of us while doing it.
Nor will they be stopped from doing
it by anything the Department Of
Justice can do.
1t is the system that is wrong.
The men who transfer the necessary
commodities of life from producer to
consumer should not be men working
solely for their own interests, and So
interested in making the processes
of distribution just as expensive as
possible. They should be agents of
either the producer or the consum-
ers, working to make and paid for
making, these processes just as in
expensive as possible.
OF course, no such radical change
in our business institutions is going
10 be brought about in few months
mot even in few years or few
decades. 1t can be started, how
ever; and every step toward it will
not only reduce the actual cost of
the processes of distribution, but
will make it harder for the distribu-
tors to take more than a fair wage
tor their work. If the energy that
is being put into this anti-profiteer-
ing crusade could be turned to the
promotion of cooperative bnying on
the part of the consumer it might
create less commotion, but it would
do immeasurably more good.
Cheaper processes of distribution
must be worked out by the parties
interested-the producers and the
consumers. The distributors are
not going to work them out; there
is no reason why they should. If
farmers do not want better markets
sufficiently to organize to get them,
# consumers do not desire cheaper
food sufficiently to combine to buy
them, things are likely to continue
| Just about rs they are.