Glacier County chief. [volume] (Browning, Mont.) 1931-1940, 1940-10-11
GEN ERAL
HUGH S.
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Washington, D. C.
WAR PROFITEERING


Very timely is Leon Henderson's
warning to producers of raw materi-
ais not to profiteer prices upward.
Timely, too, is the Brooking's insti-
tution's report on the same subject.
One of the worst evils is price in
iation. In 1914 to 1918 it increased
average American prices to 2l3 per
cent of their pre-war level. The eff
feet in human suffering is devastat-
ing, and it does not cease with the
guns or for many years.
For an example of only one of its
lesser evils, compared with purchas-
ing power of 1918 dollars, the stag
gering costs of the war to us were
more than doubled by reason of that
initiation alone. That means that the
burden of that mountainous debt on
all our people was also doubled. A
greater evil is that starting at the
high peak of war prices, there is first
an abrupt and ruinous and then a
gradual decline in values, prices and
wages back to about the pre-war lev
Ell. After the Napoleonic, Civil and
World wars that process, in each
case, took IA years.
OF course, any such process is
simply slow destruction of half of
all values in nation. Our postwar
gyrations from fash-booms to deep
and continued depression we're all
by-products of this massive readjust-
ment. 1t profoundly changed and
gravely threatened both our econom-
&c and political systems. Indeed, the
old threat is not yet removed as a
new and similar menace appears.
So much for the brief mention of a
few of the terrible hangover effects
Of wartime price initiation The jit-
terbug joyride of the actual price
debauch, while it is going on, makes
teverish appearance of prosperity
but it is prosperity for precious
few. Some wages 60 up with prices
and some go up first, but most of
them lag grievously. All people de-
pendent on fixed revenues-such as
salaries, pensions, interest on saw
ings and almost all wages-are the
real sufferers.
The most piteous of these cases
are the families of soldiers at the
front. All these people-and they
are by far the majority of us-fnd
their cost of existence doubled or
multiplied while their means to get
II remains the same. 1t all adds up
to serious nationwide cut in wages,
salaries and income. This is dis
Tessing and hideously unfair and it
Produces an even more dangerous
result for warning nation. 1t de-
stroys morale both at home and
among the soldiers at the front. Ma
poleon said that in war the ratio of
the value of moral strength sis to
the physical as 3 to l."
In most great wars this terrible
force has been either little needed
or inadequately handled. In the
World war, our war industries board
was presented with the process of
rising prices too late to prevent it,
but it did halt it in its tracks and
later turned the trend downward.
That experience proved that war in
1atlon can be prevented and sug-
sested the only way to do it.
The Bookings report advanced
some methods and Leon Henderson
described others. The shortcomings
Of both parcels of suggestions is first,
that they are theoretical, expert
mental and uncertain, and, next,
that they are aimed at only the
prices of certain commodity groups,
or piecemeal price regulation. It
can't be done that way.
There is only one way to do this
Job. That is, by fiat, to put ceiling
over the whole price structure and
thereafter to permit increases in
particular cases only on a showing
OF necessity. That's what our World
war experience proved.
BLUFF AND APPEASEMENT
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