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Show High Wages, Crop Loans Threaten Cost of Living Price Control Measures Considered Likely; 'Peace -Lovers' Picket White House; Hull Reveals Post War Plans. i i LXAlJ By BAUKHAGE National Farm and Home Hour Commentator, WNU Service, 1343 H Street, Washington, D. C. Dollars! At last they are beginning to worry Washington. Not the ones going out of the treasury we can take that in our stride. But the ones rolling into pay envelopes and starting start-ing to burst forth again is such excitement ex-citement that everybody is afraid that the noise is going to scare prices up a tall tree. Wages today are the highest in history. And as one official remarked re-marked to me: "If something isn't done we'll have inflation and a slump that will be streamlined. It will make the old-timers wish they had their old Model T depression back again." Some people put the blame other places but this is the story that friends of the administration tell. Leon Henderson, price czar, hoped to keep prices from running away by using moral suasion or legal effort ef-fort to keep industrial prices from going beyond a certain level. There were two reasons for that: to get down costs in essential defense commodities: com-modities: to control prices on basic materials like steel which always take other costs up when they rise themselves. Next, to achieve a balance between be-tween agricultural prices and others, oth-ers, the government would support farm prices up to a certain point. Lastly, a certain amount of elasticity elas-ticity in wages would be allowed in order to prevent strikes. But what happened? Wages Reach Peak. Workers demanded, and as I stated, are getting, the highest wages in history. Workers wanted to get their slice of the money the government is spending on defense. Then the friends of the farmer came along. They said the farmer might as well cut a melon, too, while the cutting was good. And so congress voted an increase in crop loan rates, which the President said might push certain products above parity. And so the result is more dollars for the consumer to spend and less things for him to spend them on, especially since the defense industries indus-tries have to beat their sewing machines ma-chines into tanks and the like. When the demand is big enough and the supply is small enough it takes all the king's horses and all the king's men to keep prices down. You can't repeal the law of supply and demand. However, the prospects pros-pects are that congress will be asked at least to try to amend it. In other words some drastic price control con-trol measures will be taken. A flat ceiling will be established for certain cer-tain goods and then, unless a method is adopted for getting folks to lock up those extra dollars with no place to go, nobody knows what will happen. hap-pen. 'Peace' Pickets 'Muddy the Water" "Muddying the waters" it seems to me that I have heard that phrase more and more often recently. There is a good example of it right in front of the White House every day in fact 24 hours a day while the American Amer-ican Peace Mobilization pickets stroll backward and forward, day and night. I watched them in the bright sun of noon. And as I looked at each face we stared brazenly at each other I felt sure some were sincere believers that war of any kind was wrong some were fanatics joining a cause for the sake of joining. Some were simply indulging in an exhibition complex and some were cleverly "muddying the waters." The leader of the line was a girl in a military cut jacket; she was carrying a United States flag. She looked straight at me as she approached ap-proached and as she drew nearer I noted the strong oriental cast of her features. Next to her was a man carrying a placard and a lantern (the light of peace). He had deepset eyes that burned with the light of the fanatic. Gray hair, sunken cheeks, the stoop of frustration. You have heard the type rant on any emotional emo-tional subject. He shuffled past. Man Is Self-ConscioQS. Next was a serious-looking, average aver-age man in glasses. He was the only one who looked at me a little self-consciously. He carried a banner ban-ner with the commonplace request to "join the peace movement." There were others but by this time I was feeling a little self-conscious myself, so I grinned at the policemen police-men and they grinned back. There were two of them guarding the pickets who had been attacked at least twice by overpatriotic soldiers. Two more bluecoats stood at the White House gates for when there are demonstrations no one can enter en-ter the grounds without proper identification. iden-tification. As I went in I heard one of them reporting at the call-box "everything going fine out here." But I wondered. Hull Tells Plans For Post War Peace Just a simple bourgeois, I, A thing of shreds and patches, Of fiscal bumps and scratches, And monthly bills to pay. With apologies to Gilbert and Sullivan, Sul-livan, I modernize Nanki-Pooh from the Mikado hoping there will be no reprisals. For sometimes I think it is time the bourgeois who seem to be so unpopular (until the guns begin to shoot and the taxes are levied) deserve a word or two. And so on one Washington summer sum-mer day recently when I was wakened wak-ened by the birdsong in the neighboring neigh-boring invisible elms I had a surprise sur-prise that pleased me. As I opened the door and reached for the milk, the morning papers and the rent bill, my sleep-dimmed eye caught a cheering headline: HULL DEFINES OUR POST-WAR PROGRAM WANTS RAW MATERIALS TRADE FOR ALL That was the first hopeful message mes-sage for the average guy, that my weary eye had met in a long time. You may recall that in this year of our discontent one of these columns col-umns began this way: "There is a peace-machine in Washington, all oiled and ready to start the moment the last gun is silenced in Europe. From it may come a plan which the democracies can offer to the world as an alternative to the totalitarian way of life." And at last the good, gray and stubborn gentleman in the state department de-partment trotted it out to hold up to the struggling world; a promise instead in-stead of a threat, a hope instead of a sneer. Two hours later a philosophical Communist friend was sniffing at it as we walked past the treasury building. "Back to the old order," he said contemptuously. Half an hour later a genial conservative con-servative was laughing at it "Give me good high tariffs," he said, as if he were contemplating a slice of juicy roast beef. Perhaps, as an old-style bour-' geois, I should have agreed with that, but I am a bourgeois, new style. I don't know anything about economics but I know what I like I like to think that Secretary of State Hull is right when he says that the seeds of war take root behind any artificial barriers which keep people from getting their share of the earth's bounty. Five Points in Program. Mr. Hull's program is the one he has lived by since his early days in congress and the "five points" which he outlined to the world are his credo no extreme nationalism which would enforce excessive trade restrictions; non-discrimination in international trade relations; raw materials of the world available to all nations; international agreements agree-ments to protect the consumer countries coun-tries and their people; international finance run so that all countries can develop their essential enterprises. If these conditions were explained to the middle-class people of the world today, in Britain and Germany, Ger-many, in France and Italy, in terms of the kind of life Mr. Hull believes his plan would bring, and if those people could be convinced that such a plan would be carried out, I'll wager they would turn their guns and battle for these five points under un-der any honest leader. Unfortunately there were, once upon a time, 14 points which Wood-row Wood-row Wilson offered as the basis of peace in 1918. And all those little points were broken oft short by the gentlemen in Paris who thought they had a better scheme. They made a peace which we learned to our sorrow, was just a "thing of shreds and patches." |