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Show "- : ii LOOKING I Managed Economy KW! By GEORGE S. BENSON ' j T 'r- ' AHEAD President oi Harding College JV ' ' Searcy. Arkansas - hHSINESS took me to Indianap-r Indianap-r ' in the last week of May, just V. C.a to witness another sick-of sick-of ?g fluke of manhandled econ-tmy. econ-tmy. Dead hogs lay uncounted on i.he ground by the roadside in the sun, 100 per cent loss to their owners, to the nation's wealth, and to the world's food supply. It Was a blunder, of course. Surely this time nobody will say, "We planned it this way." It was two years ago that the government named an arbitrary price on fat hogs and guaranteed it for two years. The aim was for the people of the United States to have just the right amount of pork at the right price. Obviously, price-fixing was only the first step. In. order to get just the right amount of pork, the government rationed corn, essential essen-tial in the growing of pork. Balanced RATIONING pork Appetites was the next measure, meas-ure, so the right number num-ber of hogs would feed just the right number of people just the right number of days. It was "known," of course, how much grain it took to produce a pound of pork and how many pork eaters eat-ers there were and how much ham and bacon they ought to, eat per family per day, or per county, coun-ty, per degree Fahrenheit, or something. Lest one reader of this column lacks such knowledge, let me offer 11 some facts of life about hogs: j Just ten months from the day a j farmer consents to tolerate an-. an-. other family of. pigs pn his es tate, he can be selling 250-pound, prime shotes. America was in the third generation of swine af-' ter government guaranteed the price when O.P.A. lowered the bars and took ration points off pork. Something HAD the big-wigs Was Askew figured right? No! . . Hog rece-ipts at eleven main packing centers exceeded ex-ceeded processing capacity. Result: Re-sult: embargo. Indianapolis was only a sample. Packers quit buying. buy-ing. Farmers with trucks full of hogs formed caravans on the roads. Traffic jammed. Lines waited and waited some more. Pigs died of thirst and hunger and were piled outside the stockyards. Carpenters hide their mistakes with putty. Doctors, it has been said, bury theirs. I hope no Washington braintruster was too badly disappointed when (after ration points were lifted off pork) the American people failed to eat up the consequences of his error. After all, enough pork is enough. And what happened was no worse than this nation had every right to expect. , The law of supply and demand is a law of nature, no less than the law of gravity. In like degree de-gree they are God's laws and no mortal can make headway against them. Pork is perhaps the easiest of all markets to guess; and what a flop! War caused no part of the pig fiasco. If such tinkering should become a national postwar post-war policy, we would be- in for a sad season of man-made muddles. |