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Show WE WOULDN'T UNDERSTAND Along with hundreds of other Milford residents, we were wondering- where food for ourselves and our children was coming from when the recent overnight rail tie-up stranded 300 hungry persons here to help the 1800 citizens and 2000 miners and rural residents deplete the stocks on the shelves of local grocers. Fortunately, an agreement was reached before the situation became serious. During the strike, another OPA inanity became-manifest, and had the strike not been settled promptly, OPA stubbornness would have forced Milford and Western Beaver County into Needless Meatless days. A local meat market had been receiving half its meat supply from Salt Lake and half from a Southern Utah packer. The manager phoned the Salt Lake OPA office, when he believed he would have to help feeci the stranded passengers as well as his regular reg-ular customers, during lengthy strike negotiations, nego-tiations, requesting the quota for the South ern Utah packer be increased during the emergency. The Salt Lake OPA-ers phoned the Denver OPA-ers, and reported back to the local merchant that it would be impossible to increase in-crease the quota, even though the Cedar City range is glutted with cattle and hogs i and is suffering from a most critical feed shortage. When pressed for reasons for refusing re-fusing to allow the Southern Utah packer to kill sufficient surplus' livestock to feed a Southern Utah community, the OrA-ers replied: "You wouldn't understand." And that's the only answer our local merchant could get. This merchant has been a successful suc-cessful business man for more years than most of these OPA-ers have been alive, yet he "wouldn't understand" their reasons for refusing to allow him to try his best to feed r. bunch of hungry people. We don't think 'e could understand it, either. How many Milford people know that the OPA has issued a total of MORE THAN EIGHT THOUSAND orders, directives and legulations. Each merchant is expected to keep abreast of all OPA directives, or face riosecuuon lor violating them. Would anj sensible person, would anyone but a job jealous OPA-er, expect a merchant, in addition addi-tion to the hundreds of details he must personally per-sonally attend to if he keeps his business out of the red, to keep track of 268 price regulations with TWENTY-FIVE HUN DRED amendments. True, there are only four food product regulations that affect food stores, but there are now 25 supple-ments supple-ments with NINETY-SEVEN amendments. There are three procedural regulations the merchant must be familiar with, and 12 amendments. There are 39 supplementary orders, with 131 amendments. There are three general orders with six amendments. The total of the regulations, orders, amendments amend-ments and "interpretations" (made necessary neces-sary because no one but an OPA-er knows how they should be inteipreted) amount to three thousand, five hundred and seventy-six lengthy, multi-phrased chunks of "law" that a merchant dare not be unfamiliar with, on pain of fine and imprisonment. Add to this 11,848 idividaul orders, most of which affect purchase costs, selling costs, or both, and we can understand why no one but an OPA-er would understand their reasons, rea-sons, for not letting Cedar City instead of Salt Lake City furnish food for Milford during dur-ing an emergency. Lord, can you spare another Moses? We are in a red-tape wilderness that's awfully |