The Daily Alaska empire., 1945-09-12
OPA Should Be Liquidated by Congress
(The Argonautl


 Although the Office of Price Administration began to reduce its staffs immediately following the Japanese offer to surrender, it is recognized that picked nucleus has been retained The dream of the New Dealers to turn the United States into Socialist republic managed by bureaucrats has not yet been disspated by cold reality. The Congress should write the edict for the dissolution.
 President Truman has in preparation for Congress seven or eight that immediately urgent. As soon as these put in the hopper bill to abolish OPA should be introduced and passed and signed. Although Congress has previously extended the lease of life to this bureau deadline for it's aboishment can be set and intermediate reduction of it's to interfere with the law of supply and demand can be commanded.
 Some control of prices was needed during the war to prevent imitation, but the OPA group went far beyond any necessity. It became an instrument for wasting the time of business men who were doing their best to win the war and trial laboratory in the regimentation of the general population As in all devices to change the habits of the people, its possibilities for racketeerng were early recognized by the financial underworld. In the Los Angeles area, for example, the more gasoline denied to the common and uninfluenal supplant the more was available to the black market In the San Francisco region the OPA restored the American scene the obscene prac tices of the bootegger and high jacker Meat was smuggled into the urban markets liquor used to be-
 The American people have had more than enough of the indgnities inflicted them by the OPA They know nstinctvey that the artificial control of prices 
 use the words of the Honorable E. H Moore in his address to Congress June G. 1949 repugnant to the conception of free trade and enterprise as encompassed by the Constitution. Both are the essence Of sociastic state"
 The operations of OPA during the war involved general violation of the Bill of Rights for war time There is no excuse from here on to continue making the U. S. Constitution obsolete. The nation was demoraized by the prohibition experiment fol- lowing the First World War, and unless we want our people to lose faith in Constitution (which may be the intention of the OPA brain trust, had better be rid of it immediately Congressman Moore spoke truly when he said that OPA has become a monster of oppression vehicle for crime the insrumentallty of destruction the breeder of greed and the per petrator of shortages and hardshps
 Happily, President Truman has gained the con- fidence of the people other previous Presl- dent by his intellectual honesty and simplicity. He thinks as an American But as Congressman Moore said: "OPA has failed under the management of un- American minded who have no confidence in the principles of the Constitution the integrity of the American way of life"
 The blame for the continuation of the OPA con- fusion must be placed directly on Congress lndl- vidually and collectively. Business men who have been discouraged by harassmen into desparng of the survival of the free enterprise system can serve themselves and their country best by demanding that their Congressman forthrightly proceed to destroy this Frankanstein which Congress itself created