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Show Through The Looking Glass In "Alice through the Looking Glass," when one of the characters charac-ters ran forward with all his might, he found himself further back than where he started. The harder he tried to go ahead, the further behind he went. The Federal Power Commission Commis-sion has developed a theory of book-keeping; and this theory it imposed upon all companies engaged in inter-state natural gas business. The theory specifies that the more valuable a property proper-ty becomes, the less it is worth. In other words, it is a theory of "vanishing values." According to the FPC's new economic theory, reserves to cover depreciation of the value of an entire natural gas industrial indus-trial plant, including well, property pro-perty and equipment, must be set up out of profits. Each year the value of the holdings must be depreciated by the amount of the reserves. Accordingly, the longer the company remains in business, and the more successfully success-fully it functions and ordinarily ordinar-ily would be considered to be increasing its actual and goodwill good-will value the less it is worth. In the course of a few years, the entire plant is written off in theory it has no value and gas rates then are based by the FPC. on a "no value" figure. By this curious reasoning, property with tremendous economic worth has become, according to FPC, an economic ghost. In the history of this nation, no other mining or public-utility industry has been "regulated" so strangely. Never before has such a theory of "vanishing values" been conceived. Actually, it has been conjured upon the weird principle that natural gas can be made a profitable business if its rates are based on 6 per cent of nothing! Congress today, after having considered a flock of FPC's rulings, rul-ings, each one as cockeyed as the above, is considering a bill which will clip the Commission's wings. FPC members say to Congress, "We see just as well as you do what's wrong, so why do you go to all this trouble to write new legislation about the Commission? We can save yuu all this trouble by creating a new set of rules." This self-serving self-serving argument does not appeal ap-peal to hardboiled members of Congress who operate on the belief be-lief that once bitten you should be twice shy. |