Court Opinion

ID: 8589770
Source: CourtListenerOpinion
Date Created: 2022-11-23 15:45:17.515027+00
Date Added: 2024-06-11T16:54:21.898581
License: Public Domain

MaddeN, Judge,
dissenting.
I am unable to agree with the court’s decision. We have here, apparently, the naked question whether a ceiling price for a commodity, which ceiling price was lawfully imposed by the Government, is the proper measure of just compensation for that commodity, when some of it is taken by the Government for public use. I think it is the proper measure.
On December 11, 1942, the Government imposed a ceiling price of 6.75 cents per pound on whole black pepper of the kind herein involved. There was then an enormous supply of such pepper in the country, and the market price was lower than the imposed ceiling. On February 3, 1942, the ceiling price was revised to 6.50 cents per pound, plus certain warehouse and labor charges. During the period when the first ceiling price was in effect, the market price was lower than 6.50 cents per pound. This would seem to show that the new ceiling price was reasonable, and this was probably why the plaintiff, Commodities Trading Corporation, which owned a large fraction of all the whole black pepper in the country, did not resort to the Emergency Court of Appeals, which was, by Section 204 (d) of the Emergency Price Control Act of January 30, 1942, 56 Stat. 23, 32, 33; 50 U. S. C. Appendix 924 (d), given exclusive jurisdiction to review the *264legality of price ceilings. The ceiling price then became the maximum lawful market price. Many millions of pounds of pepper were sold by private owners to private buyers, and at that price. The plaintiff chose not to sell any of its pepper. By September 30, 1943, the total supply in the country in the hands of importers was down to about one-third of what it had been when the 6.50 cents ceiling was imposed in 1942. No doubt this reduction of supply would have resulted in a greatly increased price in an uncontrolled market. But the market, in pepper, and in most other commodities, was not uncontrolled. If, in the changed circumstances, there was something unlawful about keeping the same ceiling price that had been imposed earlier, there was, I suppose, a new opportunity to resort to the Emergency Court of Appeals for relief. The plaintiff did not resort to that court. In May of 1944 the War Department requisitioned a small fraction of the pepper which the plaintiff owned, and in settlement offered the ceiling price for it, which price the plaintiff rejected as being less than just compensation.
We do not have here a case where the Government, with a view to taking, or diverting to its own use, the whole supply of a commodity, first sets a ceiling price and then requisitions the property. The ceiling price here in question was imposed upon a commodity in general use, and of which the Government ultimately took only a relatively small quantity. In the numerous sales and purchases between private persons, the ceiling price was the market price. It was not a free market, any more than the market for steel or wheat or gasoline or shoes was a free market. But it was the market, and was as lawfully the market as is a market strongly affected by custom duties or excise taxes or railroad rates or other governmentally imposed conditions. For one citizen to sell to another at a price above the ceiling was made a criminal offense. Yet, the court decides, if the Government itself needs for a public use, such as to feed the Army, some of the commodity, it is constitutionally required to ignore the control which it has imposed to prevent the public economy from being destroyed, and must discriminate against those who obeyed its law and let their goods go into the chan-*265neis of trade, by paying to tlie ones who held their goods out of the market some two and one-half times as much as the price at which other persons sold their property. I get the impression from all this that the basic though unconscious philosophy must be that control of prices in wartime is really beyond the power of the Government, yet must be tolerated because it would cost many billions to compensate all those who are financially harmed by the controls. Since it costs considerably less to pay the relatively few persons whose property is requisitioned by the Government, not the price which, in fact, their property would have brought in the market, but the price which they would have been able to get if the scarcities resulting from the war had existed and the controls made necessary by the war had not existed, they are given that artificial and speculative price. The result of this discrimination against those who let their products flow into the channels of trade in wartime, in spite of the necessary controls, will be to encourage hoarding in the hope that the Government’s necessities may compel it to take the property by requisition.
I would hold that the amount awarded to the plaintiffs for their pepper was just compensation. The decision of the Circuit Court of Appeals for the Seventh Circuit, in United States v. Sanitary District of Chicago, 149 F. 2d 951, was, as I read it, in accord with what I would decide.
Jones, Chief Judge, took no part in the decision of this case.