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Show TIME FOR A SHOW-DOWN In a recent letter to Representative Gore, Democrat, of Tennessee, Bernard M. Baruch gave the people of the United States sound advice and warned labor and management manage-ment to settle their differences or face government intervention. inter-vention. He recommended an inventory of the resources of our nation so we might have "an over-all picture of the balance sheet of the country." He also urged an examination of our productive capacity "to see that enough of what is produced remains in the United States to avoid disastrous inflation, and then how much to allocate for the rehabilitation of Europe, China, the Philippines. . "Unless this dividing is done wisely, we will sink and the whole world will go down with us. We should direct our aid. to foreig-n countries by giving priority to those who need the most and who will use it to help set themselves on their feet. "If we promise loans to foreigners, the money will be useless if they cannot buy goods from our production here. "Such demand will further inflation 'temporarily because they aggravate demands here. There is no use giving foreigners for-eigners credit (or our citizens greater buying power through increased wages and decreased taxes) unless we are willing to establish priorities which will ration our production where we want it to go until production increases. "We must be careful when we give aid to other countries, that this aid is not used to nationalize their industries against us, to destroy our own competitive system which, 3 think, should be preserved. England, Czechoslovakia, France and other countries are nationalizing or about to nationalize their, industries. Russia has totalized herself one buyer and one seller and is totalizing- all countries coming under her aegis." Mr. Baruch might well have gone farther and said that : our federal policy of making loans and grants in our own country to nationalize great segments of American industry,' through government ownership and competition, is as destructive de-structive of American enterprise as are loans to foreign na ! tions that promote similar socialization of productive activity.' ac-tivity.' Mr. Baruch stressed the inescapable fact that the race between rising wages and prices is a creature of "our own - procrastination and negligence." Everything should have . been included in the original price control bill all the ! elements of cost, wages, rents Failure to do so has started the race . . "Tax reduction should have been more considered, outlined out-lined and then put into effect, and only after the inventory into our national wealth and liabilities was known . . . Even now it would not take long Then we would have the facts not fictions stirred by all the contending pressure groups trying to help themselves in prices .wages and taxes for their own interests and ignoring the general good." Are we too dumb or too selfish as a people to listen to such elemental reasoning? , |