| Show 0 Z national topics interpreted by william bruckart Wal lonal press presa building wa ton D C washington ton most observers and thinking citizens have been inclined to take little stock long and in the talks ot of coughlin senator long and rather father coughlin Coughl ln the radio priest concerning plans for redistribution of wealth the consensus has been that their plans sooner or later would fall of their own weight but it can be denied no longer that long and coughlin have developed a gigantic following of people who lack information as to the alie fallacies of the arguments however logical they sound that have been spread by these politically smart showmen one reason that serious attention to their proposals Is now necessary Is that some of their arguments are being advanced from high places in the federal government I 1 refer specifically to the 06 testimony before the house committee on banking and currency by ala marriner ariner S eccles governor of the federal reserve board and as such the titular head of the nations banking system mr eccles lid did not quite take a leaf out of cluey longs book he approached the position of the louisiana senator however when he proposed a redistribution of income whereas senator long has urged a redistribution of wealth mr eccles suggested in his testimony in effect that it would be all right for a man with say ten million dollars in capital to keep that sum provided his income was redistributed mr eccles went back to the days immediately following the world war to illustrate his argument and showed that at the top of the postwar post war boom one tenth of one per cent of the families at the top of the income received as much as 42 per cent of the families at the bottom of the list furthermore he said that the stogie single average family in tile the big income class got as much as four hundred families at the bottom of the income list tills this one tenth of I 1 per cent was unable to use all the income in consumption he continued they therefore had to find an outlet in the investment field As a result the capacity to produce increased out of all proportion to the capacity to consume so mr eccles took the be position that a solution of the depression was a redistribution of this income with the idea that it would increase purchasing power in the lower brackets the governor offered no explanation of how those in the lower income were going to obtain possession of the redistributed income of the rich because hla his argument stopped at the point where the government would take money by taxation that Is the reco recognized weakness of the programs advanced by senator long and father coughlin Coughl ln and governor eccles showed no ability to solve solie the problem on top of the outbursts by lou long and cou coughlan Coughl alln ln and the serious testimony by gov proposes arnor eccles central bank comes senator nye the north dakota progressive with a bill in the senate to create a central bank senator nyes ayes action has caused many humorous expressions here we have a senator who has fostered even boasted about progressive ideas and has called himself a liberal it Is necessary only to recall that the father of the central bank idea was the ultraconservative ultra conservative alexander hamilton na mllton the first secretary secreta reta ry of the treasury senator nye advances a bill with the thought that the central bank would avoid hamstringing ham stringing of credit I 1 think financial experts all agree that this Is true the thins thing which senator nye overlooked however Is that mr hamiltons central bank collapsed nad and brought ruin and grief to thousands the reason it collapsed was because in removing control of the banking facilities fac afe s from experienced bankers the whole thing had been turned over to the control of politicians who generally speaking are experienced only in politics it seems paradoxical that the north dakota senator should advance as a liberal scheme the creation cro atlon of a central bank which one hundred and fifty years ago was tile the height of conservatism the nie legislation was offered in the sume sufia week that governor eccles had proposed to in his testimony on the banking alif in the house that the federal reserve board should have bave complete control of tile tho credit expansion an and d contraction in this country I 1 b elleve believe most persons will have in considering the two schemes as separate and distinct it Is to t 0 be noted that there are nt at least ninety nine radical members of the house of representatives who are convinced that the federal reserve system hns has failed of its purposes most of them have been repeating without rhyme or reason the accusation that bankers are re fusing to make loans they think therefore that it if there Is a central bank banh or it if credit control la Is placed in the reserve board and taken away from the federal reserve banks where it now reposes there will be bd additional loans forced out of the commercial banks history indicates i however that this Is fallacious no business Is going to borrow money when it need it and neither Is any person in his right mind going to make a loan unless he has at least reasonable assurances su of repayment it will be recalled that president roosevelt at one time spoke disparagingly of the refusal of the bank ers to make loans the president subsequently learned that attempts to pump money out of banks must tall fall for lack of borrowers I 1 think everyone acquainted with conditions must agree that the eccles idea and the nye legislation means absolutely nothing in the way of recovery aids for it has always been true you can lead a horse to water but you cannot make him drink the fallacies being put forward by senator long and father coughlin and now being stop and nibbled fit at by gov consider arnor eccles and senator nye obviously have been accepted by thousands of people senator long claims that it at least six million persons are supporting his scheme it would seem to be the time therefore for citizens to begin to analyze the trend of events it if they are influenced fluen ced by such leadership in connection with this trend it Is Inte interesting to observe how much trouble sentor senator long and father coughlin Coughl ln already have caused for the administration it must be said frankly mr air roosevelt and his advisers thus far have not found a way to deal with it they have tried fighting back and each time they lle haie succeeded only to in furnishing fresh ammunition for the long coughlin team senator robinson of arkansas democratic leader in the senate made one of his greatest speeches of criticism of senator longs schemes but the result was only a fresh outburst by the louisiana senator who took robinsons own words and converted them to his use I 1 reported to too previously that the administration had prepared at one time to take action against senator long on income tax questions mit but apparently the powers that be have decided that such a course instead of putting long back in his place would make a martyr of him among the observers here the belief prevails that the only way longs attacks con can be stopped and his tactics broken up Is by ridicule the administration has told congress that it wants to keep the NIZA through donald donald it R new plans chberg ni some for times called caled the assistant president dent the administrations position was laid before the senate committee on finance the other day with the suggestion that the proposed new should be confined to matters of interstate ter state commerce that Is the administration apropo proposes sea that in extending the f for or two years from the coming coining june 6 expiration date it would apply only to industry engaged in lines of commerce and endeavor that carries across some state lines by the same token the proposal would eliminate the codes of fair practices from application to the so called service industry and could not therefore apply e even v e to hours and wages w in n those t lose local plants now under codes mr RIch bergs statement immell immediately provoked discussion which certainly can be expected to increase in volume because it Is in the nature of protests from those who claim to speak for labor sloane sidney y mAn of the high c command immediately protested as a 9 did william green ore en president of the amerlean american federation of labor each of these individuals contended that the NITA would be a worse failure than it la Is now if it were confined to the narrow definition of interstate commerce and applied only to those industries dus tries mr hillman Hlll man who Is labors representative on the national industrial recovery board when he learned of mr Rich bergs statement pron promptly aptly struck back with an emphatic observation that the country would not permit such action it Is unthinkable he be said that congress will withdraw the only protection that the three million cill llon or four million underpaid overworked over worl ed and helpless workers in the service trades now have some of them ns as a result of the are for the first time in their lives getting one day of rest a week and something a little better than the coolie wages they have been paid in the past 1 I am not interpreting the constitution I 1 leave that to the supreme court of the united states State sg but I 1 have been impressed by opinions given by outstanding members of the bar that a condition of keeping millions of workers at starvation wage levels does affect interstate commerce 0 western newspaper union |
