The Daily Alaska empire., 1934-02-07


 In his address at Topeka. MT Ogden Mills lifted the discussio, of the Roosevelt policies into tn realm of reason and honest in quiry. I cannot imagine why tn Democrats should appear to re sent the speech, or wish to evad, the challenges which it contain What can be more desirable than to know the weightiest objection that can be made against pro gram which is admittedly experi- mental, and to consider hoy weighty they are?
 i MT Mills first point is that w have witnessed "an unconstitutional attempt to extend the power of tho Federal Government. He cites the Thomas Amendment dealing witt the currency and N. R. A. The fThomas Amendment delegates to the President certain powers whicf Congress possesses. MT. Mills does not attempt to prove that this delegation of power was unconsti- tutional, and I doubt whether he can prove it. AS to N. R. A. there can be little question that certain phases of this experiment, par ticularly those in which there is regulation of industry which is wholly within a state, would be held unconstitutional except for the doctrine that they are temper ary and for the emergency.
 What MT. Mills really objects to is that Congress and the President l by mere declaration of emergency can in effect suspend the imita- tions of the fundamental law. Who pretends that they can? The emergency must actually exist be- | fore they can declare it and there must be no doubt that it exists, and the final decision as to wheth- CT it exists lies with the courts. ] Is there any doubt that there was an emergency last spring? MT Mills says that "in all of it's long history, no provision has ever been made for the suspension of the Constitution in time of emergen- cy." I am afraid MT. Mills has not pondered the recent decision of the majority of the Supreme Court in the Minnesota case, a decision con cured in. as it happens, by all of President Hoover's appointees.
 MT. Millss second point consists of a denunciation of planned 1 economy" plus the statement that this is the Utopia to which the President is leading us." As he has done me the honor to quote some thing wrote recently describing the dangers and difficulties of a planned economy, I may perhaps be permitted to say that 1 do not regret the Roosevelt program as di- rected to the establishment of a planned economy. The program does call for the planning of many activities, and for the conscious management of many things. But so did MT. Hoover's program, when he advocated the planning of pub lie works, when at the outset of the depression, he pledged indus tries to wage, price, and capital investment policies, when he at tempted to stabilize farm prices, when, through the Federal Reserve System, he attempted to relate the price level through credit ex- pansion. MT. Roosevelt has carried these principles further than MT Hoover did. But they do not set up a planned economy" in any true meaning of the words, and the first to bear witness that they do would be the communists who in- vented the idea.
 There was a period, think, from July to October, when there was some reason to think that the Ad- ministration was drifting into a situation where it might really have had to regiment and plan the whole of agriculture and industry In that period, the Administration seemed to have lost sight of the fact that the crisis was an essen- tially monetary phenomenon; it failed to manage money; the de- flation was resumed, and defla- tion carried to it's logical end means either general bankruptcy and paralysis or the centralized di- rection of production. But since October the President has taken the other road He has set out to manage the currency with a view to re-establishing a level of prices at which profits reappear and pri- vate enterprise can revive. In SC far as the monetary experiment succeeds, a planned economy" as MT. Mills envisages it, becomes un- necessary, and no nation ever sub mitted to real planning, with CO., ercion and regimentation, except under the pressure of dire neces- | sity.
 That does not mean that +be