Evening Star Newspaper, June 25, 1933, Page 63

Fiction Features Magasine PART ‘7. -————— e WASHINGTON, D. C, JUNE 25 1933. Puzzles 16 PAGES. o MENACE OF CHEAP LABOR World Economic Conference Is Taking Up the Problem of Poverty, Although This Work Is Little Discussed—OQOur Case Is Thoroughly American, However, and Does Not Go Into the International Tangle— Natural Increase in Labor Supply Decreases Wages. CONCERTED attack on the pov- erty problem is one of the less talked about purposes of the World Economic Conference. It is by far the most important of all economic problems. It is the one problem which justifies the study of eco- nomics—if the study of economics can be justified. Just what contribution to that problem can be made by a world economic conference remains to be seen. From our own point of view the prob- lem of eliminating poverty is a peculiarly national, and in no sense an interna- tional one. From the standpoint of most of the other countries represented at the World Economic Conference it has an international aspect. In so far as they can dump their unemployed upon us they will experience relief. That, how- ever, will deepen our problem and tend to reduce us to their level, Drawn for The Sunday Star Magazine by J. Scott Williama, BY THOMAS NIXON CARVER Professor of Political Economy of Harvard University. There is danger that our represent- atives at the World Economic Confer- ence will play into the hands of those countries whose favorite remedy for un- employment and poverty has been to send their unemployed and their poor to us. None of our representatives has shown any appreciation of the real situ- ation, neither, for that matter, has the administration in Washington, nor any one closely connected with it. On the contrary, Samuel Dickstein, chairman of the House Committee on Immigration and Naturalization, has introduced 13 separate bills for loosening up our immi- gration laws. The President himself has never shown any interest in restriction. Another very popular leader of the Democratic party has declared himself in favor of opening our doors to all the people of the earth without regard to race or nationality. That would mean unrestricted immigration of coolie labor from India, China and Japan as well as of cheap labor from Europe, Eastern Asia, Africa and the islands of the sea. That would mean a vast increase of our unemployment and poverty. Eventually it would mean a reproduction in this country of the chronic and biting misery of those unhappy countries. If his poliey were adopted, all the benign reforms now incubating in Washington would benefit other laborers than our own. EVOLUTIONISTS are in the habit of attacking our economic system on the ground that it makes the rich econ- tinually richer and the poor continually poorer. It may be so mismanaged as to produce those undesirable results; but it may also be so managed as to pro- duce the opposite results. No economic system is foolproof. If it is managed in the interest of the rich and against the interests of the poor, one set of results will follow. If it is managed in the in- terests of the poor a different set of results will follow. There is the pose sibility that the rich, knowing exactly, what they want and how to get it, will