We use Optical Character Recognition (OCR) during our scanning and processing workflow to make the content of each page searchable. You can view the automatically generated text below as well as copy and paste individual pieces of text to quote in your own work.
Text recognition is never 100% accurate. Many parts of the scanned page may not be reflected in the OCR text output, including: images, page layout, certain fonts or handwriting.
BEST BROADCASTS OF 1938-39
believe it would not happen even in a wisely managed monopoly.
Steel is not alone in this policy. Important basic industries, notably those supplying building materials, have followed the same policy and have simply priced us out of a hoiising program.
The other day when General Motors laid off 30,000 men Mr. Knudsen, their president, stated as one of the reasons, “I think the price level rose too fast in the spring of 1937, and we just could not get adjusted to it.”
This dramatizes the fact that there is a silent economic conflict in this coimtry between two kinds of industry. On the one hand we have high price, low voltime industries, largely in the monopoly or semimonopoly class. On the other hand we have competitive industry, large and small. Competitive industry is much dependent on noncompetitive industry for its raw materials. The automobile industry as a whole has been competitive and has followed a high voltune, low price policy. The unprecedented growth of this industry has been due to the fact that it did not shut down its plant and wait for the people to get rich enough to buy cars. It tried to make cars that people could buy without waiting to become rich.
I hope to see antimonopoly laws enacted that will be adequate to throw the power of organized government back of those businesses which are pursuing a policy of serving the public with an abundance of goods at prices it can afford to pay.
This brings us to another problem that faces both business and government. Mr. Knudsen gave another and very illuminating reason for laying off those 30,000 men. One reason was, he said, that new cars could not be sold, and the reason for that was that used cars could not be sold. In other words, one reason why those men are out of work tonight is that there is not enough buying power in the particular kind of people who certainly would buy used cars if they could.
But it has been the underlying policy of this New Deal administration to raise the incomes of just this sort of people. The administration has tried to keep the used car market open. On Jime 2, 1937, I opened the Congressional hearings on behalf of the President’s proposal for a minimum
iq6