Economic essays

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Monograph

Identifikator:: 1753623200

URN:: urn:nbn:de:zbw-retromon-136107

Document type:: Monograph

Title:: Economic essays

Place of publication:: New York

Publisher:: Macmillan

Year of publication:: 1927

Scope:: viii, 368 S.; Ill., graph. Darst.

Digitisation:: 2021

Collection:: Economics Books

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Document type:: Monograph

Structure type:: Chapter

Title:: The farmers' indemnity / Alvin S. Johnson

Collection:: Economics Books

THE FARMERS INDEMNITY 219 milk and lift the curse of anaemia and rickets from the rising generation. Overproduction of cash crops is a necessity, in a debt ridden farm population, and overproduction means low prices. Low prices, given fixed debt charges, evoke greater efforts to produce. The farmer thus joins hands with the German around the vicious circle. It may be permitted to draw one final analogy. The Germans, compelled to produce as much and consume as little as possible, make a poor market for Allied producers. The British textile workers and the French vineyards have grievances of their own against the indemnity. Is it to be supposed that our debt ridden farmers are a good market for our industrial products? Ask the local merchants, the disconsolate salesmen, the manufac- turers who find trade becoming more and more a hand to mouth affair. The farmers don’t buy as they should, because they can't. IIT EE "2a Lapp a i el A concrete example may serve to set us on our way toward the next phase of our inquiry, the search for causes. I take for my example a prairie state farm with whose history I am familiar but which is in no other respect a departure from type. This farm was won from the public domain in the middle sixties. The original owner sold it in 1895. The farm was sold again in 1910, and was purchased by the present owner in 1919. Like all other farms in the county it is now for sale, and will probably remain in this state for five or ten years. Even a cursory survey of the farm will show that its golden age lies well in the past. The house, unusually spacious for a prairie state farm, is sadly dilapidated. The rain goes through the roof of the east wing, but the farm family doesn’t use the east wing. The shingles are badly curled on the rest of the roof, prepared to catch a spark some windy night. The barn roof sags in the middle and one corner has settled badly; the carriage shed is a morass in wet weather. The skeleton of a windmill still stands, but the pump is worked by the farmer’s big boy, who means to get a job in Kansas City before many droughty sum- mers have gone. There is a tract of wet land on the place, once drained and miraculously productive. It reverted to swamp through the choking of the drainage pipes. Since the days of the original owner the orchard has been grubbed out to make five

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