TOPICS OF THE DAY.
THE DANGERS AND DIFFICULTIES OF FOOD CONTROL.
LORD RHONDDA is, we are sure, a patriotic man, anxious, not to exercise power or to feed ambition, but to render true service to the State. He has taken upon himself an arduous and ungrateful task, but it is one at this moment of supreme, we had almost said of the supremest, importance. If only he will obey his own humane and common-sense instincts, all may be well. If, on the contrary, he yields to the wild cries and importunities of the Sophists and the Demagogues who now too often control our politics, and takes action, not became it has been proved necessary or right, but because it is demanded, or said to be demanded, by a vast section of the people, and because it is easier to follow than to lead, to swallow paradoxes than to teach sense, we shall head straight for disaster. We shall be worse off than if no Food Controller had ever been appointed. We ask Lord Rhondda to close his ears to the clamours of an ignorant, self- opinionated Press, to the menace of the mob, and to the prompt- ings of cynical or hysterical colleagues, who want something for the political shop-window, but care little what it is as long as it can be labelled a "quick cure." But when we ask this we are not asking him to do nothing. We want action, but action based on the rock of reason, not on the marsh of muddle-headedness. What we want him to do is first to consider what ought to be the aims and objects of the Food Controller, and then to ask himself how he can accomplish them with the minimum of injury and waste.
Briefly, what the Food Controller has got to do is to make us all eat less and waste less. He cannot actually make corn, but he can at any rate produce a virtual substitute. That substitute is a reduction of unnecessary consumption. For national purposes it is as good to save a million tons of food, which would otherwise have been wasted by folly or consumed by gluttony, as to produce a million tons of new food. As the Food Controller's Department has been so wisely telling us of late, we have got to " Eat L6ss," and above all to eat less bread. When we come clown to the bed-rock conditions, these are the essential words :
Eat Less Bread.
And now we are reaching the crucial point as regards Lord Rhondda, the point where he must show himself a true statesman, or a man of timid character and contracted heart. He must at once ask himself : " How in these cir- cumstances can it be right to reduce the price of bread ? Is not a high price the greatest, in fact the only really efficient, bulwark against waste and over-indulgence in bread ? ' If Lord Rhondda has any doubts as to the answer, let him ask himself the further simple question : " What was it caused the rise in the price of foodstuffs ? " The answer is plain. The first, the essential, cause of that rise was the increased demand for bread. "What was the cause of that increased demand ? " It arose from the great and, in most senses, wise increase in wages ; that is, from the increased purchasing-power of the majority of the people, an increase sometimes amounting to two hundred per cent. over peace wages. Speaking gener- ally, almost every working-class household in the Kingdom has had since 1915 more money to spend. Very naturally and properly from the household point of view, the bulk of that new money has been spent in buying more food, and especially more bread. But when an increased demand of this kind goes on in almost every house in the land, day by lay, there can only be one result—a great rise in prices. That is how Economics puts the drag on 'human desire, and on the human will, and prevents mankind as a • whole • from eating itself out of house and home. But for that hard fact we could settle wages by Act of Parliament and make every- body economically happy by a stroke of the pen. We should only have to vote wages sufficiently high and there would 1e no more pinching or " just doing it" in the world. We should all be rolling in superfluity. But unfortunately the creation of this paper paradise is prevented by a stern circum- stance, which we often set forth in this journal before the war. What we used to say, and what the past three years have abundantly proved to be true, was that, be your intention never so benevolent and your will never so good, it is impossible to give any body of a orkers a remuneration higher than the economic conditions allow. You can give them more nominally, but the only result of raising everybody's wages by, say, fifty [Cr cent, must be that prices go up proportionately. In the end the spending power of the wages will be found to be exactly what it was before their raising by Act of Parliament. The result of a sudden rise in wages is to make everybody rush into the shops and demand more of- the good things of this life. But if this is done without any corresponding' increase in supplies there must be a rise in prices. It is inevitable. There is no other way but an increase of prices to determine who is to have the goods when twenty men are competing for, say, ten loaves. As we are finding out, the plan of using the standard of physical power—such as the ability to stand for hours in a queue—is not proving any more satis- factory than that of choice by privilege ; that is, giving the food to a particular class of the community and withholding it from other classes. To return to our point. Prices have gone up because we have vastly stimulated the demand through higher wages, but have not been able similarly to stimulate the supply. This has remained stationary, or has even been reduced, and thus the tendency to an enhancement of prices has been almost unchecked. Indeed, so great has been the rise in wages, that is, in purchasing-power, that the natural effect of a great rise in prices, i.e., diminution of con- sumption, has hardly been. felt. In other words, even high prices have proved less of a check than they ought to have proved. In these circumstances it is surely madness to take artificial means for bringing down the price of bread. The only result of doing so will be to stimulate still further the demand for bread, to make people less anxious and less careful in its use, to cause them to regard bread less and less as a precious thing which must be kept for the sustenance of Iife and for no other purposes.
Though Lord Rhondda may be temporarily successful in the effort which it is stated he is about to make to reduce the price of bread, all that can really happen will be a rise in the demand for bread. But in the present state of supply what does this mean ? It means that for a time, and while certain stores hold out, we shall live upon our reserves, just as we did in the case of potatoes. Then suddenly the crash will come. The new demand created by an artificially low price, if sustained, must either break down the barriers and lead to what may be called an illicit or illegal rise in price, or else to a catastrophe in the corn market, which is only a synonym for famine. We shall find that people cannot, or will not— the things are much the same—sell at the rate the Government have fixed, and then corn will disappear as did potatoes. Now if corn goes to cover, bread ceases to exist. But of course no Government will be able, or ought to, tolerate' such a state of things. They will be obliged to step in and commandeer the whole of the corn and bread supplies in the country. This means that they- will have to be responsible for distribution, and we shall not have that balanced working of supply and demand which so effectually puts bread upon the table of rich and poor alike every morning. But a break- down in distribution is always the first signal of famine. Famines generally begin by some wild and injudicious inter- ference with prices, followed by an immediate breakdown in distribution, which is called, because it looks like it, a failure of transport. It is really due not to that cause, but to the fact that the Government have destroyed the natural distributive functions in the community, and have been unable to put anything in their place. High prices are not the causes of famine. High prices are the alternatives to famine, terrible and grim alternatives if you like, but at any rate they are attempts to deal with famine and prevent its worst con- sequences. They are like rashes in disease—which are not nice things in themselves, but which it is death and disaster to suppress and drive in.
Once more, what Lord Rhondda has got to do is not to stimulate consumption by low prices but to increase supply, and if he cannot do this in the positive and benevolent way by creating more food, then he must do it by the negative and painful way of checking consumption and checking waste —by cutting up his loaf so that it will go as far as possible. Supply in the positive or the negative form is the only real remedy that mankind has ever had or ever will have to prevent scarcity and famine. Here once again we may interject the remark that supply, i.e., production, is the only solution of that seemingly dreadful dilemma that you cannot obtain increased wages by Act of Parliament or by goodwill, because if you do prices will always rise and outwit you. The only way by which you can really increase the remuneration of labour is through increased supply; that is, through an- en- larged product. • That, and that alone, will give you increased wages in the true sense. That, and that alone, will alter the ratio between the remuneration of Capital and Labour. That, and that ,aloner will tend to economic. and so to social, - equality—accumulations of capital so great that they will bring the wage of capital down by competition to three or even to two per cent., and production on so great a scale that the necessaries of life, bread and butter, i.e., the fats, become almost as cheap as air or water.
But these are ideals. How is Lord Rhondda to deal with: the actual situation before him ? In the first place, he has got to harden his heart against the confused nonsense talked about "profiteering." He has got to put himself, not in the position of the kindly and benevolent probationer-nurse who will do anything a patient asks, and thinks that as long as it involves some painful sacrifice on her part it must be right for her to do it, but in that of the experienced' Sister who knows that her business is to cure her patient and not to pet him, and who is able and willing to do all that is necessary to assist the surgeon should he be compelled to employ the knife and cut into the living flesh. Lord Rhondda is at the Food Office not to give us a "jolly" or to make us feel happy or pleasant, but to save us from destruction by famine. But though we know that interference with prices is madness, a sure way of creating famine, we are of course by no means prepared to say that the State may not have to take over the absolute necessaries of life and determine how much each man, woman, and child can be allowed to eat in the matter of bread. One would like to see such action put off as long as possible. The alterna- tive to such rationing, however, is not the lowering of prices. Of that we are absolutely convinced. Whether a half- way house between rationing and simply allowing the check of high prices—the evil of which we admit is that it tends, though not nearly so much as people think, to put the well-to-do above the poor—can be found in severe sumptuary laws is worth considering. We do not say it is possible, but if it were possible to make it a penal offence for any person to consume or to obtain through any retailer more than a certain fixed amount of bread or other scheduled necessaries each day, the price of bread and such other necessaries would go down automatically owing to the great reduction in demand. In other commodi- ties the price might be ]eft to rise as high as it liked in order to check demand and produce conservation. No doubt we shall be told that here the difficulty would be to enforce the law that no one might eat more than a certain amount, and no baker supply a household with more than so many ounces of bread per day per person.
Nevertheless we are convinced that this form of rationing is a possible one. Instead of bread tickets and queues, a man would obtain a police order and register it with his baker, and that would be his whole source of supply for bread. If he wanted to dine out in a restaurant, he must take his piece of bread with him in li!s pocket. Other supplies would be allowed to him on payment as now. That would be troublesome and inconvenient, of course, but we are convinced that it would be better than the attempt to lower the price of bread artificially. As we have said before, that is only a vivid way of telling the people to eat more bread. We cannot say too often that this is exactly the opposite, and must be the opposite, to the injunction " Eat Less Bread." If Lord Rhondda's first act is to be the lowering of the price of bread, then if he is to be consistent he should sweep away his predecessor's advertisements and substitute for them : " The Food Controller gives you the opportunity to eat more bread." And all the time the submarines are sinking more food ships, or at any rate are reducing the number of ships which in the last resort are the only things which stand between us and famine. Remember, no foreign corn can reach us except in a ship. But while the sub- marines are in this way actually reducing the supply, are we going to be so mad as to stimulate demand, and so dissipate our supplies by an artificial lowering of prices ? In a word, are we going to take off the brake and throw it away just as we reach the awful Hill of Famine 1
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