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Show V " PROFITEERING IN WAR SUBSTITUTES ""While consumers are being asked to buy Liberty Bonds they are: being plucked by the food profiteers. A signal case in point may be cited from the daily market reports. The government has fixed the price of wheat at $2.20 a bushel. The price of corn per bushel one of the substitutes for wheat on which Mr. Hoover asks the American people to rely is $1.75, or 45 cents a bushel less than the regulated price of wheat. We are asked to consume o more wheat until harvest, Yet the price of wheat flour is quoted at 5.8 cents a pound, while the price of both white and yellow corn flour is six cents a pound in 100-pound sacks. Mani- ' festly, the profiteers are "soaking" the American people to the extent of 25 per cent on com flour, a cereal which they mast buy as their staff of life. If this were the only instance of profiteering xm foods, it would still be serious. As everybody knws it is not the only instance. It is typical of a wholesale plucking of the consumer, con-sumer, whose problem of supplying his family with bare necessities necessi-ties becomes more harassing as prices go up. In Great Britain the profiteers are sent to jail for such business. Is there not power enough in the government, state or federal, to prevent the robbing rob-bing of the people who are asked to strain their resources to the Utmost in order to suport the war? Philadelphia Public Ledger. |
