Wise And Apposite Warning

The idea of regulation is always associated with certain chosen and favoured individuals. Regulation cannot stand alone and by itself. It always boils down to favours and monopolies given to particular persons. A regime of permits and licences and quotas, and prices decreed from the secretariat, is neither a free nor a mixed economy. It is privilege and prerogative. “Partial freedom is privilege and prerogative and not liberty,” said Burke. In a regime of monopoly there can be no patriotism. There may be a party spirit but public spirit there can be none.

     It would be useful to quote further from the same great philosopher who was a source of inspiration to Mill, Gladstone and Morley. “Whether the middleman acts as factor, jobber, salesman, or speculator, in the markets of grain, these traders are to be left to their free course; and the more they make, and the richer they are, and the more largely they deal, the better both for the farmer and consumer, between whom they form a natural and most useful link of connection, - though by the machinations of the old evil counsellor, envy, they are hated and maligned by both parties. The middlemen are often accused of monopoly. Without question, the monopoly of authority is, in every instance and in every degree, an evil, but the monopoly of capital is the contrary. It is of great benefit, particularly to the poor. A tradesman who has but a hundred pound capital which, he can turn, say, once a year, cannot live upon a profit of ten per cent. But a man of ten thousand pounds capital can live and thrive upon five per cent profit in the year. These principles are plain and simple; and it is not our ignorance, so much as the levity, the envy, and the malignity of our nature, that hinders us from perceiving and yielding to them; but we are not to suffer our vices to usurp the place of our judgment. The market settles, and it alone can settle price, which is the balancing element between consumption and production. The market is the meeting and conference of the consumer and producer when they mutually discover each other’s wants. Nobody has observed with any reflection what the market is, without being astonished at the truth, the correctness, the celerity, the general equity, with which the balance of wants is settled. Those who wish the destruction of that balance, and would fain, by arbitrary regulation, decree that inadequate production should not be compensated by increased price, directly lay their axe at the root of production itself. They may, even in one year of such false policy, do mischiefs incalculable because the trade of a farmer is one of the most precarious in its advantages, the most liable to losses, and the least profitable of any that is carried on. It requires ten times more of labour, of vigilance, of attention, of skill, and, let me add, of good fortune also to carry on the business of a farmer with success, than what belongs to any other trade.”

     It has become a favourite procedure with legislators and the executives playing to their tune, to sit heavily on farm produce prices, acting on the theory that those prices regulate all other prices. In order to keep down prices at all levels, they think wages should be kept down, and this cannot be done unless the price of basic food-material is forcibly kept down. Acting on this theory, the farmer is oppressed and his state of penury made permanent. This short-sighted policy of keeping things cheap, by making the life of the peasants one of barren penury and hopelessness, cannot be too severely condemned. It is the worst form of tyranny that can prevail in an agricultural country.

     The following profound words on the subject of legislators, with no knowledge of the work involved in agriculture, interfering in the affairs of farmers, uttered by Burke must be inscribed in large letters on the walls of our legislative chambers: “Of all things, an indiscreet tampering with the trade of food-grains and other farm produce is the most dangerous, and it is always worst in the time when men are most disposed to it that is, in a time of scarcity; because there is nothing on which the passions of men are so violent and their judgment so weak, and on which there exists such a multitude of ill-founded popular prejudice. What man, of any degree of reflection, can think that a want of interest in any subject, closely connected with a want of skill in it, qualifies a person to intermeddle in any the least affair, much less in affairs that vitally concern the agriculture of the country, the first of all its concerns, and the foundation of all its prosperity in every other matter by which that prosperity is produced?”