President Roosevelt's refusal on Saturday to establish Federal regulation of farm prices is another attempt of the administration to dodge the fate which is written for it. When expediency asserts itself in the use of the "handy" weapons recommended by Mr. Milo Reno, organizer of the National Farmers Holiday Association, the Federal government will find itself taking care of the farmers simply because the farmers have to be taken care of and because no one else can take care of them.

But Federal responsibility towards pauperized farmers is in this case deeper than expediency. The Federal government has always undertaken to provide a mechanism through which goods and services can be exchanged with a minimum of friction. Accordingly, when the mechanism breaks down, as it has assuredly broken down, it is no less the duty of the government to repair it. As long as truckloads of fresh milk and butter are being dumped into Wisconsin creeks while unemployed factory workers in the city are standing in line for a bowl of soup, the responsibility of the government to effect physical transactions between the two groups is, even under the constitution a very real one.

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The administration and the farmers disagree only upon the method of raising farm prices; that farm prices ought to be raised seems eminently patent to both. But not to Pollux and myself. What is needed is not higher prices, but more and faster money. Given a limited flow of money, higher prices simply mean lower physical turnover, less industrial activity, and deeper depression. Only an increase in the flow, that is, in the velocity times the quantity of money, can produce the greater turnover of goods which alone means prosperity for farmers or for anybody else. From the specific standpoint of the farmer, the velocity of money means the number of times an average dollar bill passes through his hands in a month or in a year; and since there is little likelihood that this figure can be raised for him, the only thing to do is to increase the income which he gets when he gets it.

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This elementary observation the administration has taken into account in the rather feeble expedient of buying gold for more and more dollars. There is no question that this is a move in the right direction; towards putting purchasing power into the hands of people who didn't have it before, and who will therefore spend it. But as a move, it is little more than a gesture. Quantitatively negligible in itself as purchasing power, the new gold is zero stimulation to a specie-glutted credit structure.

Moreover, and even despite the fine clothes which inflation must apparently wear in order to pass muster before the sound money men, it is a little discouraging to see a lot of people in the west turning out to waste their lives scraping up tid-bits of metal which are hard to find and which will never serve a useful purpose.

After all, a ten-dollar bill is a ten-dollar bill, whatever may have been the circumstances of its birth. And if the administration has decided, as it has apparently decided, to expand the currency, then it should go ahead and print what it needs at a minimum of labor in the government printing office. If it is at a loss to find suitable penalties to impose upon the recipients of the new money, it should at least choose something of greater value to the community than gold mining. CASTOR.