The Manning times. [volume] (Manning, Clarendon County, S.C.) 1884-current, 1920-06-09
THE BLOOM IS OFF THE BOON.


mean the boom Of fantastic economies
with hysterical price convulsions and
fraudulent wage demands for work
lazily, partly and shabbily per-
formed. The boom of grossly swollen
initiation, with fabulous interest rates
for money of low purchasing and
producing power after the borrower
gets it, while a government bank pol
icy lends to anybody that can pay
| the rate, whatever his use or abuse
of the funds, but withholds money
from the producer that cannot pay
the rate, however necessary his pro-
duction may be. The boom of abnor-
NAL costs but outrageous, Grim
inal profiteeering.
Yet because of the very nature Of
the boom which we have had and
which is now going as all such booms
go, it is not leaving, it need never
leave in it's wake the usual terror of
collapsing booms-panic. The dread
ed panic whose cause is deep seated
and whose effects are long enduring
is due to an inordinate surplus of
commodities which cannot be liqui-
dated Mt cost prices, which,, crowding
the shelves, counters and cellars of
merchants, filling to bursting the
warehouses of wholesalers, and block
ing the yards, floors and all the spare
space of mills and factories, keep
tied up all the bank loans in, around
and behind the vast, unliquidated
/ mass.
This sort of panic, we say, is we'll
nigh unthinkable when there has been
the country over an almost starvation
underproduction, when shop shelves
are bare, warehouses are empty and
industries are behind on their orders,
short of materials and long of profits
gathered in and salted away. Unless
some calamity entirely unforeseen
and wholly improbable bursts upon
us like n bolt from the blue one
might say that the kind of panic
which this country and the whole
! world fears could not now be pos
sible
The vanishment, on the other hand,
of our false, violent, frenzied boom,
far from being regrettable, is to be
| welcomed, for it promises that we
| are coming back to solid earth, with
s,.ner and sounder methods and safer
and surer results, where there may be
truer relation between prices and
values, where labor will earn as we'll
as receive, where capital will be sta
bic and productive rather than spec
tacular and greedy and where profit
eering will be banished for the good
and sufficient reason that you cannot
have proftcering when there is !
enough production to go around
among all buyers and consumers.
We are going to see some pling
down upon US the tidal wave of i'm
ports; already they are pouring into
this country by millions of tons and
billions of dollars more than they ever
billions of dollars more than they ever
did before the war. Yet they need not
cripple our industries and destroy our
prosperity. They will be largely of
raw materials and goods only partly
finished. This will be so for the rea-
son that the major part of the pro-
ductive world was more busy during
the war destroying than creating, was
failing to keep up it's productive ma
chinery and was losing on the battle
field it's very flesh and blood pro-
ducers.
The world is not yet ready, the
world is not yet able, to overstock us
with manufactured goods upon which
depend our industrial workers. Until
Europe has rcgained it's productive ca
pacity and resumed it's manufacturing
pace and until we ourselves have
filled with overproduction and surplus
| the vast vacuum OF our own product
i've deficiency Of the last several years
we can be safe from foreign trade
submersion. We can and should pros
per more nationally, more genuinely
and more generally than either the
mass Of our population or the nation
as whole has been able to prosper
in all the high fever and wild de-
lirium of the war boom in which there
have been more rainbows than eco
nomics, more spending than earning,
more wasting than saving.