Carolina watchman. [volume] (Salisbury, N.C.) 1871-1937, 1933-12-08
BUY NOT, EAT NOT
By O

Sometimes we have to 60 against our training Or 60 broke. Some
times what we have always believed to be a rule of virtuous conduct
proves fatal in practice. For instance, we have grown up in the belief,
fosnred by OIL parents and teachers and enforced by our government,
that we have no right to take Or use the property of another person
without his consent, but if the property in question happens to be a
blackjack that the other person is about to bring down on my head
l shall have a better chance of surviving if l perceive, in time, the
unwisdom of clnging unaterably to old convictions. That is, there
are times Of emergency when clinging to N old conviction will be
ruinous. Let u consider the present time in its relation to our old con-
vicion in favor of thrift.
People of pioneer stock are often spoken of as the backbone of the
country" and probably they are. Pioneers art thrifty or they don't sur
vve. If the wood pile is used too freely in the autumn it may not last
through the winter, and the Midland child learned thrift at its grand
mothers knee. Moreover, we've been taught for several generations
that it isn't what a man earns that counts and takes care of him in his
old age; it's what he saves. We've always believed that thrift is a
virtue, that spending is risky and that squandering is suicidal. We
demand thrift from our government, vote against political candidates
proven unthrfty, and we investigate, and often relegate to private life,
officials shown to be carelessly lavish with public funds. The value Of
thrift, indeed, is one of our strongest convictions. No one doubts that
it is a right and useful conviction Or that it would be dangerous to
unseule it; but here is the United States government coming to us
now, asking us to buy, buy, buy, advising us o spend our money rather
than to save it, and generally appearing to set itself strongly in opposi-
ton to that old principle of thrihiness in which we were trained. There
seems to be a C contradiction somewhere.
Moreover, the government asks us to spend at a time when we have
the least to spare, at a time when the Federal government itself, as
well as our State, county and city governments, are taking heavily from
US in taxes and in that way lessening our power to spend. Worse still,
our government, through the MIRA, asks us to spend at a moment
of great financial uncertainty in our lives, at a moment when we don't
know whether we're emerging from the depression or going deeper into
it, and when we aren't sure whether we're less afraid of the future than
we were a year ago, or more so. The curious thing about the govern
ments exhortation to us o spend is that the exhorters know how we
feel and how we're situated; they know our old conviction in favor OF
thriftiness and they agree with that conviction-and'yet these same
exhorters ask US to buy, buy, buy!
What's the answer? Money S a means of trade. If you had a cord
Of wood and no food, and your neighbor had a cellar full OF potatoes
potatoes to eat but he'd freeze to death, and you'd have heat enough
perhaps, but you'd starve to death. Thrift is indeed a virtue; but this
is a time of emergency during which it's necessary to buy goods SO
that somebodyll have money enough to pay us for what we produce.
If it's hard for us to get rich by washing one another shirts, it's cer-
tainly impossible for IS o make a living by washing our own. 1t seems
wiser to live by spending than to perish by saving