The merchants’ association of the city is doing a public service as well as enhancing public estimate of its members by utilizing liberal space in the newspapers to demonstrate to the people the fact of the reduced cost of living.
The people are allowing themselves to believe that prices have not come down materially. Almost every day one can hear somebody say that he is unable to tell any difference in his living expenses a year ago. He will admit that sugar is cheap, but instantly name some other thing that is still relatively high. He may confess that flour and meat are way down from the peak levels, but he will ring in the qualification also that “man can not live by bread alone.” And every time he is reminded of some other remarkable reduction in some essential commodity, he will mention some other that has not come down much.
That can be done all right, but it is an unfair estimate to make of today’s living expenses. We should gauge costs by the prices of essential commodities, by the prices of those things that we are bound to have. It is unfair to estimate living costs by combining sugar and limousines or bread and Brussels carpets. One is a necessity; the other is a luxury, or perhaps to be more accurate, a semi-luxury. We can do without many of the possessions that still command high prices if we can manage to scrape up enough to buy those commodities which are needed in our everyday life.
And this is what the public is not disposed to accept as a fact. The truth of the business is that the average fellow has been used to so much within the last few years that he has come to accept everything as necessities. He must have his telephone, his automobile, the high-priced clothes, his fancy shoes, his ham, his steak, his fancy articles of food and damask and Axministers, forgetting that many of these things, while entirely desirable, are beyond the reach of today’s wage-earner. However, when this same fellow comes to compare living costs, he includes them all in his category and comes back with the reflection that, after all, there is but little difference between today’s prices and the prices a year ago.
The advertisements being offered by the merchants are surprisingly informative as showing what today’s cost for necessities is. Reading off the comparative prices of given staples today at this time a year ago one is bound to be impressed with the fact that the merchants are making their case, that they are proving beyond a shadow of a doubt that there has been a material reduction in the cost of living, a reduction that will measure up around 50 per cent as against the peak price, granting, of course the accuracy of their lists.
Of course, it may not be entirely proper to make the comparison against the peak—we have never been disposed to accept that as a safe criterion in making any estimates of comparison,--but in view of the fact that the highest level in wages reached and the highest peak in prices touched for the last six years is commonly accepted as the basis for comparison, the merchants are only following a common custom.
May be, it is the only logical contrast to draw. We take it that nobody expects a quick and endurable return of the levels prevailing before the war. If there is anybody holding to the belief that the world will be immensely better if it can crawl back to 1914, it would be well to become disillusioned early. The world is never going back to 1914. It couldn’t if it wanted to in view of world economics and it certainly has no desire to do so, if it is in its right mind. The only people who have returned so far back in the past with the ostensible purpose of staying there are the republicans who are now making our laws. They have framed a tariff bill that would fit it fairly well from their standpoint, before the war, but which will not even accommodate their own tariff convictions today. Nobody else, however, has any disposition to dip so deeply into the hoary years ago. And it would be calamitous if any determined effort should be made to force the economic status of the world back to a condition that is absolutely non-existent in these times.
From the editorial page of The Charlotte News, Sunday morning, July 24, 1921
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