Askov American., 1942-06-18
GAS IN THE CYLINDERS

Sandstone, MINI.
GAS IN THE CYLINDERS
Editor Askov American:
We've camped at the forks of the
road. mean our industrial pro-
gress has come to a dead stop, ex-
cept as stimulated by war demands.
We can't make up our minds which
road to take.
The two roads are (1) public own
ership of goods-production, and (2)
public control of the quantity of
money in circulation.
No. 2 may seem to some utterly
foreign to the problem, but lis not
One learns that when the order goes
out from the privately owned Fed
eral Reserve Bank to "call all loans
to refuse to make new loans," as
happened back in 1920, and again in
1929 and again in 1886. At all three
of those dates business took nose
dive. Why? Because some fifty bill
lion dollars was destroyed"
Community cooperatives, which
are a limited form of public owner
ship, has had a long and painful
struggle. The idea is ideal. If all
producers and consumers, as pro-
ducers and consumers, belonged to
cooperatives, that would help. But
it would not yet solve the problem.
Even if the public owned and con-
trolled all the means of production,
processing, transportation and dis
tribution, yet there would be the
medium" of exchange.
And the medium of exchange is,
as "Coin" Harvey used to say, the
"life blood" of civilization and in
dustry Money is that medium. It
is the means by which title to goods
is transferred from person to person.
A man who produces butter can't
very well 60 about swapping butter
for shoes, tobacco, shirts, socks,
house paint, cylinder oil and ''snuse."
The convenient way, the civilized
way, is to exchange all his butter for
a common, universally accepted
medium" which is divided into
small units, like pennies, nickles,
dimes, quarters, halves and dollars,
and with those buy post cards, over
coats, fence posts, breakfast food or
anything else he wants in the sduan-
titles he wants as and when he. wants
them. -
But there's always a difficulty, a
''bottleneck.' It is not bottleneck
in the capacity to produce goods,
but bottleneck which slows up the
flow of money. AS money gets
scarce the price of goods goes
down (because there's more goods
than money! and hence the produc-
ton of goods pinches off. In other
words, as money gets scarce it gets
''higher" in value. This may be fine
for the buyer of finished goods Gun
less the price is ''fixed" by combina-
tion), but is not so good for the
producer of raw materials who must
sell in a competitive market.
The trouble all arises out of the
fact that goods and money do not
balance. AS goods increase in guam
tity money should increase in volume
(not value), so as to match the goods.
But when money is privately con-
trolled the money-manipulators de-
light in making money scarce which
makes it of higher value, which ups
interest rates and lowers farm-pro-
duct prices.
The remedy for this problem is
simply one of returning to the Con-
stitution, which provides that Con-
gress shall regulate" the value of
money. The value of money, just as
the value of any other commodity,
is determined by its quantity as re-
lated to the quantity of goods and
services available.
But Congress, not private banks,
should hold the controls" and keep
enough money in circulation down
in peoples pockets to keep goods
moving from producer to consumer.
AS goods increase, or are about to
increase (due to a big crop or an
upspurt in industrial activity, then
more money should be pumped into
the empty pockets of the aged and
unemployables, not into bank vaults
or the caves of Kentucky. The mon
ey in empty pockets will soon find
its way over the counters thus Great
ing demand for more goods.
If this condition was maintained
then all people would be on an equal
footing. Then private enterprise