The progressive devaluation of money forces everyone into its almost automatic gear: increase in the price of goods and then fight for an improvement in income.
It has become a hunt with monthly stops;
but these stations do not mean rest periods, but bitter struggles of individual groups and classes for their livelihood, for their daily share of the small total product of the German economy.
The latest wage struggles that are taking place in the Ruhr mining industry must also be seen in this light.
Understanding the drivers in this way does not necessarily mean condoning their effects.
The miners are rightly better paid than many other workers in Germany;
their work is hard and drains life.
At the same time, however, as the primary reproducers in our national economy, they bear a heavy responsibility.
Their wages appear in the prices of almost all commodities;
their process becomes exemplary for the widest circles.
The partnership that exists between colliery owners and miners has so far been able to avoid the most serious conflicts, but has often gone too far in terms of mutual friendliness and willingness to raise wages and prices.
Even if the workers sometimes rebelled against excessive price premiums, their resistance was short-lived and unsuccessful, and the whole had to bear the brunt.
Profits from sham trades
With the fixing of the October wages the situation has now arisen that the parties publicly accuse each other;
none would like to have the odium of heaviest taxation upon them.
The award gave the miners a 24.7 percent wage increase.
The arbitral award states that this would be an anticipation of an increase in prices that has not yet occurred.
The colliery association is demanding very substantial increases in the price of coal for this wage increase to take effect.
The miners' associations, on the other hand, claim that the collieries could do without them.
It is in the most urgent public interest that the calculation of the coal prices is checked carefully, that the profits from interposed sham trading companies, the quite far-reaching self-consumption rights of the smelting works and the far-reaching supply rights of foreign holdings are duly taken into account.
It would be very instructive, for example, to know what interests and ownership of foreign companies the coal syndicate has been able to buy out with its profits.
Clarity must be created here!
And that's what the Reich Coal Council is there for!
A matter of such public concern calls for public, meticulous accounting.
However, it must also be said that wage demands based only on expected inflation are unjustified in principle.
This would set the flywheel of inflation in such frantic motion that the dizzying rows of numbers would lose all footing, all value.
What is left of the former cultural layer of Germany
This does not agree with the view expressed at the conference of the German mechanical engineering institutes, namely that the rise in prices must be stopped somewhere, namely with wages.
As long as the real cause, inflation, persists, this is of course an impossibility.
It must also be demanded that not only the manual workers in the wage war should be allowed to conquer their nominal increase, which is at best a preservation of real wages, but also that the intellectual workers, who have hitherto lagged behind at a terrible distance, receive an increase in their starvation rations.
What is left of the former cultural layer of Germany - and we desperately need it to be preserved - can only be saved if, on the way to the earned income, it receives in part what
Germany has become poor and restrictions are imperative.
However, it is the task of economic policy to ensure that the restriction is made in the right places.
Over time it has been seen that direct forced interventions in economic life are of little use.
But one has the tools of taxes, tariffs, railway tariffs and the long-forgotten discount.
These means will have to be used in such a way that useless production for the whole is avoided and at the same time the national economy keeps going.
The increase in unemployment in some places is probably largely the result of the change of season, but must be watched particularly closely given the current rate of inflation.
The rise in the price of essential foods has prompted calls in some places for forced farming to be reintroduced.
However, the government has so far not agreed to take such measures, given recent bad experiences.
It wants to intervene where there are obvious deficiencies in the mechanism of the free economy.
For example, the scandalous butter auctions were banned from October 1st.
The view of the Prussian Minister of Agriculture, Dr.
Wendorff, however, seems rather fatalistic to us about the butter price: "that the butter prices are adapting to the rising dollar prices" is not only "regrettable" but also unjustified in this form.
In other respects, too, everything possible must be done to ensure that prices are not exaggerated in times of inaccurate calculations and poorly comprehensible markets.