The Indianapolis times. [volume] (Indianapolis [Ind.]) 1922-1965, 1934-03-22
DESERT OF SCARCITY

~ TWO men are lost on a great desert One
l. has a full bottle of water the other
bottle quarter filed. AS they move YEARLY
onward, hoping for an oasis justice demands
that they pool the water supply and share it
equally Failure to do so will undoubtedly
result in a fight.
Nov let us transport these two men to
rowboat on Lake Superior. Again they are
lost, and again one has full bottle of water.
and one bottle quarter full. The full bottle
man refuses to share and battle ensues.
Maniacs There is plenty of fresh water over
the side of the boat"
Reciting this parable, Stuart Chase says
the desert is the economy of scarcity, from
which we have departed through machine and
resource production; the lake is The Economy
Of Abundance"-whichi is the title of his latest
book, just published by Macmillan.
Two other new and significant books deal
with the same problem through divergent APP
proaches. One is a grand new high school
and college textbook, Our Economic Society
and Its Problems" by Assistant Secretary of
Agriculture Rex Tugwen and Professor How
ard C. Hill of the University of Chicago (Har-
court Brace. The other is Our Next STEP"
by Matthew Woll president of the Amer
lean Federation of Labor, and William English
Walling (HarperS.
The textbook is one that the generation
now in the saddle would have done we'll to
study. II GAS topical, sound material, we'll
and simply prepared and suitably illustrated
and it aims to tell the truth about American
life instead of clarifying the industrial age.
Some of its topic headings: Present Levels
Of Living" Raising the Levels of Living by
Improving Methods of Production" Raising
the Levels Of Living by Improving the Con-
duct of Business Affairs" Raising the Levels
of Living by RediStributing Income" and
ditto by wise use of income, international CO.
operation, and considering alternatives for
cut-throat free competition-including social
control, economic planning and the Russian
experiment
The Woll-Walling book does good job of
analyzing the Roosevelt economy which it
criticises for lack of a national economic
policy. 1t explains the mass purchasing power
need, and poses squarely the question whether
the corporations are going to control the gov
eminent, or vice versa 1t makes a case for
the A. F. of LIS project of federal licensing
of corporations. But then the authors hop
back a century, demanding that we build a
Chinese wall and live behind it. selling abroad
only few things like cotton and buying only
a few things like rubber.
Mr.. Chase is radical and critical but no one
can say he doesn't offer prescription. Cap
italism based on scarcity economy. when
savings and interest thereon were virtue,
is dead, he says. Our scientific development
has brought us to the better life, if we can
learn how to use our machines.
We must run our machines as fast as they
can 60 employ workers only few hours,
encourage invention, wipe out obsolete plants
and debts, centraIze government, move out
goods to consumers whether they pay for them
or not-eighteen points in all. Mr.. Chase is
equally critical of the Swope plan and those
few phases of the new deal such as blowing
up cotton, which restrict production of goods.
The Swope plan, he holds, points toward an
other crash or dictatorship.