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

228 ECONOMIC ESSAYS IN HONOR OF JOHN BATES CLARK the working farmer, not to the landholder as such. They would not be absorbed into the value of the land, to burden the next buyer in the full measure of their benefits. The removal of the subsidy to agriculture represented by the increase in the value of land would restrict cultivation to the lands that actually pay. The gradual lifting of the burden of debt would lighten the pressure to produce the maximum volume of cash crops. The tendency to overproduction would in so far be abated. IX With good roads and the automobile, with rural post, the tele- phone and radio, with a marvellous variety of labor saving devices for lightening the burden of the farm and the household, we have in this country at the present time the technical basis of the richest and most agreeable country life in the history of the world. But we have permitted these gifts of fortune to be turned against us. The paved highway is a road by which the best blood of the country flows swiftly to the cities. The automobile and farm machinery serve to transform the young man who might have become an able farmer into a half-baked mechanic. The selephone and radio ceaselessly din the seductions of the city into the ears of the children of the open fields. The sky and sun and the good brown earth are abandoned to moron and peon. It is not by any law of nature, but because of a lazy habit of mind that assumes that if laissez-faire and free movement serve well to govern the traffic in peanuts and popcorn, gimeracks and gewgaws, therefore they must also serve well to govern the exchange of lands and homes, the price men pay for the right to produce a people’s bread, the price they may exact of others when they in turn choose to shift to the urban side of the national economic equation. We shall be a sound nation when we have a sound agricul- ture. We shall have a sound agriculture when we free it from speculation and a swift turnover of holdings, with its consequence, unbearable debts, an indemnity upon the land. We can do it without disturbing any just rights or equities. If we choose.

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