$uhsidies ild $ocial $ecurity

There are many vital matters before Congress today that interest Mr. John Citizen, be he lumberman or otherwise. Two in particular deserve our special attention: subsidies, and social security from cradle-to€rave. They are as important to every lumberman as his good right eye.

SUBSIDIES: This is a tricky subject. To deny it would be an attempt to deceive. A wise man once told me that in handling any controversial subject, the first thing to do is notice who is for, and who against it. You will find the men who oppose the payment o.f subsidies by our government to be mostly experienced, practical, hardheaded men who know things from experience. On the subsidy defense side you will find mostly the same gang of dreamers and theorists who have been doing our experimenting for a decade. There are just enough exceptions on both sides to prove the rule.

The subsidy theory: the producer says he cannot sell his product at the government fixed ceiling price and get by, so he must either get a higher price, or quit producing. The subsidy theorists would have him continue to produce and sell at the ceiling, and then have the government pay him the difference between that and the price he says he must have, as a subsidy. The consumer gets no increase in prices, the producer gets what he is askipg for in price, and the government taxes all its citizens to get the subsidy money. They say that inflation is very imminent, and that to prevent inflation we must hold prices. The reason they think inflation is a danger is because there is a lot more money, buying power, in the hands of our citizens, than there is goods to buy with that money. So, to prevent a runaway situation, we must keep prices down, and we can only keep them down and at the same time keep the producer in business, by paying subsidies.

The anti-subsidy school has a million practical arguments against this proposed plan. They say it is one hundred per ,cent artificial; as much so as trying to treat cancer with shots in the arm. If infation threatens, they say, because people have too much money in their pockets, what better way could be found to reduce some of that pressure than to let the public pay the fair present price of the necessities they buy, instead of letting the govern-

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ment pay the difference, thus leaving a lot of surplus money in the pockets of the consumer? Critics of the subsidy plan say it comes from the same school of thought that kille{ off the pigs, plowed under the crops, muddled our money, primed the pump for years until it squeaked, adopted the philosophy of scarcity, and in a thousand different ways sought to substitute artificial economics for plain business sense.

And what is more, they emphatically declare that it would be plain murder to again place unlimited guantities of money in the hands of politicians, to distribute according to their own whims; or needs. It is time to take such unlimited powers out of the hands of mortal men. The temptations, especially in a big political year, might prove too great.

The battle is drawn. Watch it. Take a hand in it. Gov. Jim Hogg once exhausted his collection of condemnatory adjectives in denouncing'a proposal for subsidies. Chief Justice Nelson Philipps, twenty odd years ago, said: ,,Subsidies are the convenient and insidious instruments of absolute power." Albert Goss, one of our present day farm leaders, said recently: "Subsidies are a demagogue,s paradise, enabling him to promise higher prices to the producer, and lower prices to the consumer."

Our owtr opinion is that subsidies are the inevitable refuge of the impractical and the don't-knows.

SOCIAL SECURITY: Here is an even more dangerous proposition. It is an insidious threat against the very foundations of Americanism. There is before Congress a "cradle-to-grave" social security bill, fathered by a number of legislators headed by Senator Wagner of labor law fame. It proposes to stick the long arm of government deep down ,into the payrolls of the nation and take from employer and employe both many additional billions of dollars annually, with which they propose to hand-raise, milk-feed, and coddle free-born Americans from birth to death. Jesus said: "Me ye have not always with you, but the poor ye have always with you." This proposed law would give the lie to that prediction of Jesus, and drag in the millennium by the very horns, doing for every citizen most of those things which since 1776 have been considered not only the duiy