Democratic Sentinel, Volume 16, Number 45, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 25 November 1892 — “But Goods Are So Cheap.” [ARTICLE]

“But Goods Are So Cheap.”

This is the argument with wLich our farmeis and work people will be bamboozled for the next five months into voting for a tariff, the effect of which is to enrich at their expense she small class of people who are at the bott om of high tariff legislation. Innumerable smallbore orators and newspapers will repeat this fall the stale old chestnut: “Fifty years ago you hauled a load of wheat one hundred miles over corduroy roads, sold it at fifty cents a bushel, mid bought salt at $3 a barrel. Now you, under a high tariff, go ten miles over macadamized roads, get eighty cents for your wheat and pay fifty cents for salt. Hallelujah, vote again for lhe 60 per cent, tariff.” Now- there is just truth enough in this ancient campaign rot to float the orator’s monstrous inferential falsely. Salt can be bought for fifty cents a barrel, but high tariff has no more to do with it than with the macadamized roads. Why is salt so cheap? Fifty years ago it was supposed that the Creator had given the north but one salt bed; that at .Syracuse, N. Y. A ring of speculators became millionaires by inducing congress to put a high duty on this necessity of life. Did they lower the price? Not much. Another equally valuable salt bed was found in Michigan. The Michigan and Syracuse people combined, but nature was too generous. For salt was found in Kansas and at a dozen other points. Now salt is nothing but boiled water, and its manufacture is as cheap as dirt. In a while the cry “protect our infant industry. Develop home salt by a big tax,” did duty, but God has been too liberal. There were too many salt deposits in the United States. And so we have, after paying the salt monopoly $100,000,000, salt at fifty cents a barrel. The cry of “infant industry” was a fraud from the start. Occasionally the tariff architects blunder and get the duty too high and then the article is over-produced and its price falls to less than the duty. Hence this chestnut. “My friend,” says Mr. Orator, to the countr jinan, “don’t you know there is a duty of fifty cents a yard on that shirt you have got on?” “May be,” says greeney, “but the blamed thing only cost twenty-five cents.” Now this joke is a dead give awaj’ of the whole high tariff argument. For it proves that if the object of high tariff was to cheapen goods bycompetition, the duties would be put to that point that would bring results like the countryman’s shirt. But such results are exactly what high tariff doesn’t want, and such mistakes are invariably corrected at the first opportunity. But why are goods so cheap ? In the first place, remember cheap is a relative term. Giving the high tariff advocate a benefit of all the reductions in dutied articles that he claims, we are still paying for them 50 to 100 per cent, more than they cost in Europe, and in those portions of Europe that are working under high protection. This proves that it is not high tariff that cheapens goods, but dense populations and their labor surplus. Again, everybody knows that the cause of cheapened goods is increased machinery skill and power and more effective labor. “Exactly,” cries the high tariff man. “High tariff stimulates industry and that brings inventions into demand and improves, by high wages, the effectiveness of labor.” Stop a moment, my friend. There is no place on earth where machinery has reached that development and wages been so improved within the last forty years as in free trade England. To make the above assertion good, you must show that your improved machin ery and labor skill is confined to high tariff countries, a thing that is absurd. This process of cheapening goods is common to all the world and nowhere is it so effective as on the salt ocean, the only portion of the earth that man has not vexed with tariff. Ocean freights are about one-tenth of what they were twenty years ago. . • And now comes an answer to this “But-goods-are-so-cheap” business that one never reads about in the Indianapolis Journal. Look at the scale of prices of farm products for the last twenty years :

Home Market Prices for the Fiscal Year Ending June SO. Cotton Corn Wheat per lb. per bn. per bu. Cents. Cents. 1872 Eos 70~ FT47 1873 1.88 62 1 81 1874 15.4 72 1 43 1875 15.0 85 1 12 1870 .. 12.9 67 1 24 1877 11.8 54 1 17 1878 11.1 56 1 34 1879 9.9 ' 47 107 18.20 11.5 54 1 25 1881 11.4 55 1 11 1882 11.4 67 1 19 1883 10.8 68 1 13 1884 ... 10.5 61 1 07 1885 10.6 54 86 1886 ... 9.9 50 87 1887 9.5 48 89 1888’ 9.8 55 85 1889 9.9 47 90 1890 10.2 49 83 1891 (at close of). 6.0 4185 Now for the other side of this cheap goods business. The manufacturer, while ■ his goods have been cheapening, has been protected by the government. In 1890, . finding this cheapening process inconvenient to deal with, Harrison’s administration'came to his rescue and raised , his 47 per pent, protection to 60 per cent. For campaign purposes it made a show of helping the farmer, but, as Blaine said, it did not increase the price of a bushel of wheat or pound of pork (if he ■ had lived south he would have added, or cotton) a penny, and it could not, foi I such prices are fixed in the markets of i the world. I Does that farrnc ret his woolen goods 300 percent. cheaper than in 1872? But

that is the decline, as the above table shows on the cotton. Does he get his dry goods, his farm implements 70 per cent, and 80 per cent, cheaper than he did in 1872? But that has been the depreciation in his wheat and corn. Then it looks as if there were two sides to this ‘‘but-goods-are-so-cheap” argument. This article is getting too long and I can't allude to but one more fact and that is, the whole world over, all kinds of staples have in the last ten years declined 33 1-3 per cent. If any one wants the facts let them read David A. Wells’ “Recent Economic Changes,” and especially that chapter devoted to the causes of tliis universal decline. The aim of this article is to be fair. High tariff, and competition induced thereby, have something to do with cheap goods. Just as I pointed out the other day, it has something to do with wages. But that doesn’t satisfy your McKinley worshiper. He insists that raising duties cheapens prices through competition, and that is the sole cause of their decline. It is a sufficient answer to such a claim to ask, “Then why don’t you raise them to 500 or 1,000 per cent, and make us all happy?” D. P. Baldwin. Logansport, Ind., May 26, 1892.