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PRODUCTION AND PURCHASING POWER. 91
Further, in those industries which have become monopolistic
in character through organization on the part of the producers,
prices must be controlled by the state in order to keep the issue
of capital within reasonable bounds and prevent the artificial
strangling of production and consumption.
In this way it might perhaps be possible to establish a proper
balance between production and consumption without too
great a limitation of free enterprise and at the same time to
stop the intolerable tyranny of the owners of the means of production
(land and machinery) over the wage-earners, in the
widest sense of the term.
PRODUCTION AND PURCHASING POWER
Mein Weltbild, Amsterdam: Querida Verlag, 1934.
I do not believe that the remedy for our present difficulties
lies in a knowledge of productive capacity and consumption,
because this knowledge is likely, in the main, to come too late.
Moreover, the trouble in Germany seems to me to be not hypertrophy
of the machinery of production but deficient purchasing
power in a large section of the population, which has been cast
out of the productive process through the rationalization of
industry.
The gold standard has, in my opinion, the serious disadvantage
that a shortage in the supply of gold automatically leads
to a contraction of credit and also of the amount of currency in
circulation, to which contraction prices and wages cannot adjust
themselves sufficiently quickly.
The natural remedies of our troubles are, in my opinion, as
follows:
(1) A statntory reduction of working hours, graduated for
each department of industry, in order to get rid of unemployment,
combined with the fixing of minimum wages for the purpose
of adjusting the purchasing-power of the masses to the
amount of goods available.