Swinging Doors

Within the past year or so, the OPS office has inhaled and exhaled administrators through it doors almost with the speed of an Old West bar. The murkiness inside those doors also suggests a saloon, for the course of the price and wage stabilization program has been erratic and clouded at best. Congress, in fact, would probably do better by closing it down, temporarily at any rate.

Why, you ask, especially considering the steady climb in prices? Actually the climb has not been any more outrageous this year than a percent or so over last year's, and what is more important, the prices of most commodities are nowhere near their ceilings. Coffee, for example has sold consistently several cents below the government's limit. With other products, moreover, the price has been set so artificially low as to create shortages. DiSalle's decision last year on the price of fuel oil for homes on the Eastern seaboard is a case in point. The Gulf Company's refusal to sell at a loss produced a dearth of oil which was alleviated only when the Petroleum Administration for Defense (which is independent of the OPS) persuaded eleven large companies to enter a voluntary agreement to sell oil below cost. The fiction of control on the one hand and its arbitrariness on the other are not much of a recommendation for the program's continuation.

The major reason for these incongruities is that the prodigious arms program, whose future economic fury was the main argument for controls in the first place, never came off. Instead, there was one roll-back after another. The tremendous inflationary pressure forecast turned out to be little more than a mild shove.

Further, more blatant evidence of insincerity and capriciousness appears in the government's wage decisions, which, after all, had no little effect on prices. In the steel case, for example, the several problems requiring settlement were tossed about like so many hot potatoes, the wage controllers pleading dependence on a price settlement and the price controllers bickering between themselves and the President. Everyone was burned save the union.

Another key dispute was the threatened coal strike this fall. There, stentorian pronouncements about milk and children issued from UMW headquarters until their author met with the President shortly before November 4. Then they ceased. Lewis, never known for his amenability toward government limits on his union, cheerfully wended his way South. No strike hindered the Democratic Party's electoral fortunes, and when Truman announced he had overruled his Wage Board and its carefully drawn precedents, the affair justifiably enough took on a musty odour.

What all this indicates is that the Administration, after all, was not too concerned over inflation. The distortions, the parade of administrators, and the mythical coilings all imply a fondness for the convenient campaign issue unwarranted at any time in so important a matter.

Doubtlessly, once the arms program is unrolled, the economic pressure thus freed will make price and wage controls necessary. (Doubtlessly, too, certain aspects of the OPS have functioned well and should be retained, such as the metals allocation program). Until that occurs, though, the controls program will remain vaudevillian. An orgy of demolition is obviously not the answer, for international events are arbitrary taskmasters at best. The OPS should be reduced to a stand by board, prepared to impose controls whenever the government finds them genuinely necessary and only then.