OCR Text |
Show Battle Creek S Greed, selfishness and cowardice are selling this country down the river. We have had no real cause to fear the Russians. They have done little except sit on the fence and smile, as we continued to dig our own economic graves. What I refer to, if you have not already guessed, is the creeping inflation that is day by day undermining under-mining the foundations of the American Am-erican economic system. Everytime we open a daily newspaper, headlines head-lines like these jump out at us: "Wages Going Up," "Tax Increases Necessary to Meet Rising Costs," "Price of living Up Three Per Cent Over Last Year," "Steel Prices to Go Up to Meet 1957 Union De- mands," "Fuel Oil and Gasoline Prices to Increase," "School Costs Soar." The late Joe Stalin once said, "Capitalism is doomed. The American Amer-ican people are too selfish to discipline dis-cipline themselves in order to prevent pre-vent their own economic ruin." Joe just about hit the nail on the head. The giant industries continually demand greater profits, the unions higher wages, and the vote-hungry politicians are too cowardly to speak out against the rising tide of inflation; which bids fair to engulf en-gulf us alL All this, no doubt, is what President Presi-dent Eisenhower had in mind in his recent State of the Union Message. Said he, "The time has come when industry and labor should exercise self-restraint in their demands for price and wage increases." This is the first time in many a day, when a top-flight political leader has had the courage to even suggest that the time is ripe to call a halt on the vicious cycle. But of course, Mr. Eisenhower is not a candidate for re-election and his party is not in power, nationally. Self-discipline and self-restraint have always been cardinal virtues in the democratic way of life. To safrifice personal advantage for the good of the majority and to deprive ourselves today in favor of a more secure tomorrow, are the economic principles under which America's greatness has been achieved. Both of these fundamental funda-mental ideals have been taking a beating in the last twenty years. Only three end results are currently cur-rently on the horizon if the present trend continues gaining momentum momen-tum as it goes. Runaway inflation, a total collapse of our economic system or rigid price and wage controls imposed by government. Only you, I, and the rest of us, have within ourselves the powder to stop the plunge into economic chaos. We are the government, we are the workingmen and we, as stockholders in America's industries, indus-tries, hold the balance of power when it comes to establishing policies pol-icies that will control the same. Only we, acting individually and collectively can prove Joe Stalin to be definitely wrong. Is it worth at least a try ? |