386 LIVE-STOCK AND MEAT INDUSTRY 



Responsible Government for the Packers. The principle of 



" responsible government" is as sound in economics as it is in 

 politics. The small-scale business maintains the personal contact 

 of owner and public to such a degree that the question never 

 arises as to its " responsibility." The question to be solved is, 

 how give those concerned in the meat business, as producers of 

 live stock or consumers of meat, a "voice" in this business? For 

 there must be a voice representing these interests if the business 

 is to be in fact responsible. The simplest and most logical solution 

 would be to let the producers' organizations and the organized 

 consumers send duly elected representatives to meet in a confer- 

 ence or "parliament" with representatives of the packers. The 

 consumers are not organized, as yet, to any extent, and such a 

 proposal would have only a theoretical interest for them, for the 

 immediate present. Producers of live stock are already fairly well 

 organized in specialized associations. However, the live stock 

 associations would do well to ally themselves, for such a conference 

 as outlined, with the strongest farmers' organization in America, 

 namely, the American Federation of Farm Bureaus. Or at any 

 rate, a section of the American Federation, representing the 

 packing house territory, would be very much interested in 

 such a fundamental question as the issues between packers and 

 live stock growers. 



Such a conference would be in the nature of a collective bargain 

 parliament. The producers would have to accept the economic 

 law of supply and demand as fundamental in governing prices 

 of live stock, rather than the cost-of-production theory. 6 The 

 producers' ancient grievance is price fluctuations from day to day. 

 Doubtless a collective bargain could be made, stabilizing live stock 

 prices over certain periods, such as is now done in the milk busi- 

 ness with monthly milk prices. Only it would likely be impossible 

 to stabilize live stock prices over periods exceeding one week in 

 length. At any rate, the producer would feel that in such a confer- 

 ence he had a voice, and that he had a part in the directing, under 

 economic laws, of the production and marketing of live stock. He 

 would feel his own strength, his own power. He would perceive 

 then, for the first time, that the packers' power, like his own, was 

 not autocratic except temporarily and locally and within very 

 narrow limits. His instinct for "representative government" 

 would be satisfied. Of course representative government does 

 not make all men happy or cure all ills or level all inequalities or 



6 See Appendix to chapter XV for further discussion of this point. 



