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AMERICA’ S TOWN MEETING OF THE AIR
American investors furnished funds . . . which they lost . . . which ran a WPA, btiilding schools and highways and housing in Eirrope and South America.
We no longer have these costly but concealed subsidies to take up the slack in employment. Private enterprise in America today is in a situation where chiefly its own workers are its customers, and its customers are its own workers. Unless it can keep the circle of goods and wages moving then the government directly and brazenly must All the gap in employment on one hand and the need for goods on the other. We are right out in the open with sheer naked taxes on private enterprise for cash relief. That system can grow to Heaven knows what !
Government last year tried to cooperate with the business demand to get out of government spending, and the problem has come back with increased intensity. What, then, can we do?
There is, to my mind, an essential first step. That is for big business deliberately and speedily to go to a policy of high volume production, low price, and the highest wage scale possible. As one industry has put the philosophy, we must have more goods for more people at less cost. Steel prices cannot be geared to produce profits at 45 per cent of capacity. Building materials must be priced so that building may go on from year to year, as needed. Bmlding industries cannot prosper if we can afford to build only in the years when we can afford to be extravagant.
In business that is really competitive, prices adjust themselves. But today a few companies in each industry have grown so powerful that they can, by various devices not reached by present laws, hold prices up for a long time even if they lose customers. They have a short-sighted philosophy that it is better policy in the long run to sell less goods at high prices than more goods at lower prices. Steel has dechned in production from near 90 per cent of capacity to near 30 per cent without dropping the price a cent. It is interesting to know that even the government cannot get really competitive bids for steel. For example, bids for reinforcement bars for Fort Peck dam were filed by 10 companies, but each bid was exactly $253,633.80 . . . identical to a penny. That could not happen in a truly competitive industry. Indeed, there are reputable economists who