People's Pilot, Volume 5, Number 49, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 11 June 1896 — Plenty of Money. [ARTICLE]

Plenty of Money.

One of our Chicago dailies declares that there is plenty of idle money in the country, that is anxiously seeking Investment, and that anybody who has good collateral can get all the money he wants. That sort of argument is wickedly misleading. Of course there is idle money in the country, and of course it can be borrowed on good security. Thousands of farmers could get money by mortgaging their farms, and when they had got it the farms' would practically belong to the money loaners. The farmer does not want to borrow money. He wants simply to sell his products at living prices. That he cannot do. Why? Because business is paralyzed; and what paralyzed it? The legislation of Congress that established the single standard and the calling in of their loans by the banks a few years ago. Business is afraid to go ahead on borrowed capital. It is afraid that it will be crushed almost without notice by the people who loan it money. The farmer has products to sell. He has wheat in his bins, corn in his cribs and stock in his fields and yards. But he can get nothing for them; and he has no money. The public wants his products, but the people have little money with which to buy, and hence consumption is limited and prices are necessarily low. The banks and the Shylocks are masters of the situation. With less than one-half the per capita circulation that we need, they are able to hoard this money and drive the people to despair. Enlarge the circulating medium and they cannot hoard the money; they cannot build a wall between their vaults and the people by demanding usurious Interest or unusual security. It is a crime to put all the industries of the country Into the grip of the money owners, and that is what Congress has done. All the money in the world will do us no good as long as it is locked In bank vaults. What we want Is to make money so plenty that the vaults will not hold it. —Farmers’ V.pice.

“Sound money,” so called, means a high-priced dollar that is to say a dollar that will buy more of the products of labor. Then It will require more labor to get it. The man who has the dollar Is benefited, and the man who has to perform the labor is worsted. That U what “sound money” meanß in a nutshell. But the strange thing about it is that the fellow who has to do the work will shout and vote for it Wherever the gold men in the democratic party (there is not many of them left) can’t carry the state conventions, they are bolting and electing a contesting delegation—-that is, where there are. enough of them to make a respectable holt. There is no such thing as the world's money. Gold is valuable, but its value is mostly artificial because it is in demand as a material on which to stamp money. But it goes for its weight in foreign countries the same as silver, nork or beans. Did It ever occur to you, honey, that you can’t put down monopoly by voting for the parties that create It?