﻿ALL THE NEWS THAT’S FIT TO READ  

By T-BONE SLIM 
 
MR. JOHN P. PUBLIC, is is reported, is in buying mood again. Unfortunately, though, justas John has worked himself into buying mood, he finds his credit is no and he has no money. 
Quite a contretempts. 
We see John standing in front of the “Coffee And” Laboratories, Inc. sucking his thumb (a sure sign he is in the mood to go into foodstuffs in a big way) or we see him shaking off a few chills in a big way in front of the Burlap, Bagginf and Benny Company’s style display “If I was a millionaire,” he was heard to remark, “I would buy me a pair of sox.” Undoubtedly J. Poor Public is in the buying mood. 
(Note: The chills were part of the early August cold snap pressing early winter.) 
gee, I’m quite a crepe hanger! 

(Any city you wish to name), August 3, ‘31.— Fire, thought to haw been started by a short circuit in the cash register,destroyed a garage full of used cars, and a ire-pump in good working order—everything but the pump was covered by insurance—loss $2.50. Moral: Don’t forget the pump! 

Two Oakland, Calif., model high school students say they turned bandits to finance themselves at a military training camp, climaxing their career by shooting down a policeman who they’ feared had come to arrest them. No matter how consistent the course of the boys may have been, they must be censured for permitting their military activities to precede their training. 
Social workers are puzzled. 
 
Our Optimist. 
Certainly the black clouds of gloom which enveloped the outlook a few short weeks ago show no signs of getting any darker — if only prosperity can hang onto the corner post a little longer; till the clouds roll by. . . .. 
(Indians forecast cloudy weather for 40 more years.) 
Newspapers, somisscalled, in agricultural states are busy apologizing for 30 cent wheat—an apology is always acceptable. I wonder what tune the press would play if farmers declared for a two year moratorium on taxes? 

Farmers are exploited as producers and their oportunity to pass the buck to others is compeltely dissipated in their role of part time employer of labor, a miner circumstance in their trials. It is in the capacity, that of a producer, they are “taken for a ride” and made to walk back—and all that it implies. 
In late years the process has wen described as deflation, a condition that presupposes inflation in other quarters—no deflation can occur without corresponding inflation elsewhere. 
When producer (worker or farmer) is deflated, signs of corresponding inflation appear, beginning in his immediate surroundings and continuing to the skyscraper canyons of finance. Highly polished brass dazzles the eve and at times it is thought the deflation and inflation has been carried beyond the zone of prudence. The more intimate inflators therefore to regain the lost regard of the deflated might moderate their customs, slow down their vice for display and ostentation, regulate their lives to conform more nearly to the “humbleness# they helped to create. Grandiose establishments and more grandiose programs are not the more dangerous phenomena od inflation; it is when inflation attacks the otherwise impregnable skull that the damage is done—referred to in everyday parlance as swelled head. 
(Some towns have this to a degree verging on supersufficiency.) 
Certain political super-seers are tearing lose a series of crocodile cheers for their most-high compatriots of the more or less non-existant grasshopper and drouth relief. “Hoover will take good care of us next winter”—he is preparing, preparing, preparing. (I wonder who will care for us till Hoibut gets ready?) 
The dole is trotted out as a ghost to scare the kids—if it isn’t a ghost it’s an ulcer now chewing up the vitals of dear ol’ England. 
What is a dole? 
It is the difference between 30 cent wheat and $2 wheat, say. 
It is the difference between wages and the full product of one’s toil. 
(I see nothing frightful about it.) 
It is the counteracting of deflation already accomplished and the prevention of it being made absolute and complete. 
Every producers knows all this and will excuse me the small conceit of pretending to be the one smart child in the human family. But there is this about inflation that often excapes the best of us in the medley of phoney suggestions advanced as cause per se of our worries: 
When inflationcannot absorb all the deflation an extra agency is resported to—this goes under the dignified term of expansion (contraction is its reverse and where one is found the other is not far away.) 
Expansion is evidenced not only in material establishments but as dividual embonpoint (exhibits: well in the personal rotunda of inchins number 2 and 3.) and whereever flesh shows a rolling tendency we may expect to meet human skeletons afoot (or crated) in the immediate neighborhood — exceptions prove the rule—and uite often we findthe skeleton begging food from the fat party oblivious of the fact he is predestined to fail in his plea not because of any flintiness of the fleshy one’s heart but because, alas, the big boy (big madam) is too stout to rise from the easy chair with out rope and pulleys. 
“NO!” solves the problem (taken from life). At times expansion is resorted to in such a grand scale (as at present) that half the plants, utilities, machinery, are just so much useless display and wealth destroyed—witness the witless double-tracking of railroads to handle two or four trains a day; the palatial cream stations (Bordens) windows boarded and hay two feet high in its siding . . . To accomplish this and other gigantic expansion there must be contraction somewhere and unless all signs are upside down methinks it is the farmer and worker that is tightening up his belt. 
Now before we go let us try to bear in mind this one thing, this immutable law: 
You cannottake something from someone and change it to nothing, it remains no matter what you do withit; if the taking away of things from anybody is carried far enough, soon there shall be nothing more to take away and the person or persons standdeflated. But the things taken away are not turned to naught,they exist and constitute an inflation beginning in the original earner increasingly to the ultimate receiver. 
Thus it follows, to say “the farmer shall be deflated” is to say big business shall be inflated—this has been done as an organized move, hence if the producer resires to deflate big business it must organize for that purpose.