POLITICAL ECONOMY AND THE LYTTELTON TIMES.

Auckland Examiner, Volume III, Issue 141, 12 March 1859, Page 5 (Supplement)

POLITICAL ECONOMY AND THE LYTTELTON TIMES.

The silliest book which we have read for a a quarter of a,century is Ruskin’s recent work on the Political Economy of Art. The author makes it his boast at the commencement that he never read but one work on Political Economy and that was twenty years ago. The silliest newspaper writing on Political Economy we have ever met with is to be found in the Lyttelton Times ; and measuring by Mr. Ruskins’ scale, we should say that it must be at least an hundred years since the Editor went through his readings on the subject. Indeed, like General Wade’s roads, he would seem to have studied the science before it was invented—for certainly no one who had studied it since, would write such nonsense, and exhibit such painful ignorance of its principles, as does our grave and solemn cotemporary. For instance (only one among so many) there is an article in the Times, of the 22nd January, on the question of wages in relation to the existing state of affairs at anterbury. The Editor sits on the seat of judgment and pronounces ex cathedra on the emergencies of the case. Wages it seems are higher at Canterbury that our cotemporary likes. This

state of things has he thinks gone on long enough :it is time it was altered. “Now that we have a fair prospect,” he writes, “of a sufficient immigration to keep pace with the amount of capital introduced into the community, it will be necessary to place the wages of the laboring man on a more satisfactory footing. The rate of wages for unskilled labor cannot as heretofore be arbitrarily fixed without relation to the demand for produce and the price of provisions. If wages do not rise and fall according to prices, our position is not a healthy one; an injustice must be done to on© side or to the other, to the emplo.yera or the employed. When other considerations besides the price of produce and provisions regulate the rate of wages, there is something anomalous, and unhealthy in the position, that ought to be at o.uce obviated if possible. Scarcity of labor wil raise the price of labor to a rate that locks up capital and prevents the development of the country by making expenditure on wages unprofitable. If wheat is at a low price and wages are high, of course there is an end of farming —an end to the increasing value of land—an end of progress and well-being. If the source of supply is kept open by immigration the rate of wages is left to be determined by legitimate influences.” What an awful jumble of idteas! Firsts wages are to be put on. a more satisfactory footing, More satisfactory to whom ? Not to the laborer, if, as is evidently intended, wages are to come down. This, as far as the laborer is- concerned, is Mrs Bond and her ducks. Then it is to be done by adjusting the wages to the price- of provisions ; which we are told is absolutely essential to the attainment of a healthy state ; the unhealthy state of course being that of laborers too well off, And then conies a dim preception that not the prices of produce and provisions, as had just been most positively asserted, but an increaseed supply of labor by means of immigration lies somewhere at the bottom of the question, or at least has some sort of connection with it; and something is said about “legitimate influences,” at the meaning of which we are left to guess.

Our contemporary may rest assured that there is only one thing that will ever regulate wages in any country where they arc not fixed by Legislative authority, and the normal condition of the laborer is above starvation point, and that is the supply of labor relatively to the supply of capital and the demand for the one arising out of the existence of the other. Labor is just as much a.commodity as beef, horses, cloth, corn or Lyttelton Timeses —and in exact proportion as the supply meets the demand will wages, beef, horses, cloth, or Lyttelton Timeses be high or low.