Askov American. [volume] (Askov, Pine County, Minn.) 1914-current, 1934-06-07
THE SILVER BILL

Gold and silver, bi-mettalism
and the like. is a subject that can
be discussed for hours at a time
by those who think that all our
troubles are tied up in metal.
Arthur Brisbane once said that
less than a dozen people in the
United States really know some
thing about gold and its effect
on trade. commerce and credit,
the remark coming at the time
when the change of gold content
of the dollar was made.
Under the title, "Silverites Get
Their Handout and Then What
Happens?" The Minnesota Daily
at the State University, wrote edi-
torially on the bill before Con-
gress as follows:
The silver bill now before Congress
represents one of the most typical
and some will say, one of the most
eplorable-specimens of American
legislation. 1t is a compromise of
the most glorified sort, something for
everyone save the economist and the
nationalist, and nothing at all definite
for anybody in particular except per-
haps the crusading politician. Three
interests have been active in obtain
ing passage of the bill; the producers,
the spectators. and the inflationists-
at-all-costs. Each of them gets his
little handout, but when anyone raises
the question of national welfare or
economic soundness. the answer con-
sists mainly of crying wolf and as
cending flights of rhetorical bOmbast.
In the language of a Wall street
cynic, the new bill authorizes the
treasury to buy IAN unspecified
amount of silver at an unspecified
price under unspecified circumstances
for a specified but highly theoretical
purpose" What it does is merely to
permit purchases of the metal up to
certain maximum, and storage of
the bullion for use as reserve. 1t is
not bimetallism: there is no fixed
ratio established between the price
of gold and silver. There is no at
tempt to look into the future to in
quire what will happen to silver
prices when the maximum allowed
under the bill has been accumulated;
there is no assurance that silver
prices will be any higher or the cur
rency system will be any more stable,
lacking international cooperation,
than they have been previously. The
choicest designation that can be APP
piled to the whole sorry mess is that,
after half century of sQuabbling
over the issue, a combination of spe-
cial interests, pork-barrellels. log
rollers and pseudo-economists have at
last succeeded in bamboO2lng the
treasury. the Congress and the Presi-
dent into cutting a special piece of
cake and letting silver into the polite
society of monetary responsibility.
The prime fallacy of the whole
plan is, as Roosevelt has repeatedly
pointed out, that world silver stocks
are too large for any one nation to
stabilize prizes successfully. An even
more fundamental fallacy is that, sup
posing an international silver plan to
be agreed on some time and carried
aut, the mere fact that it was inter
naional would make it superfluous
the same cooperation exerted on GOLD
could accomplish the necessary stab
ilization, and would at the same time
eliminate the necessity of meddlins
with double standard. Per Sc, there
is no special virtue in bimetallism
except to the silver producers, an(
they as dealers in a particular com
modify are scarcely entitled to an!
more government favors than, say, thu
producers of copper or tin. The sup
ply of gold in the world could easil,
be stretched to cover all the need
of trade and commerce if every ma
ton established itself on gold stan
dard, and all agreed on uniform re
duction of the gold content of thei
eurrencies when business expansion
seem to make it necessary. The bill
now before Congress takes no accoun
of these facts; its only purpose is t
quiet the querulous walls of a fey
selfish victims of the depression, an
it will probably remain for politician
and economists a decade hence to sal
wage the wreckage and rebuild tn
monetary edifice on sounder founda
tiOnS.