V.sabond Editorials

By Jack Dionne

NRA is dead. And with it dies other prospective laws that have frightened ernployers and retarded recovery. It is my earnest belief that immediate business improvement will follow.

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President Roosevelt went before Congress and warned it against "printing press money" and the possible dire consequences possible i[ inflation starts.

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Just another case of having your own logic used against you. He cut the dollar down from 100 to 60 odd cents, and assured the country that with the same old name and address on the back of the coin the devalued dollar was just as good as the old one.

Naturally a lot of ,",0: ";n;y carried the same argument further (justified by the fact that the President is authorized to cut the dollar as much farther down as he takes a notion), and asked the very pertinent question: "If a sixty cent dollar is as good as a one hundred cent dollar, why isn't a ten cent dollar as good as a sixty cent dollar, or a printing press dollar as good as either, so long as Uncle Sam's name is on the cover?"

Same measuring stick, it seems to me. Personally I don't agree with this conclusion, neither do I agree with the President's conclusion (that the sixty cent dollar is just as good as the one hundred cent dollar) upon which the latter is based. I think fooling with the dollar is fooling with dynamite. But Mr. Roosevelt started it, and now, like a boomerang, it comes back to fight him.

I don't understand money, I don't understand inflation, or just what causes it to go wild, or how it could be controlled. And I don't think anyone in Washington has the slightest understanding of this potential cyclone. Monkeying with TNT is a mild form of amusement in contrast with monkeying with money contents and money values.

But never mind about money. In the first place we haven't any, and inflation would do us about as little harm as anyone we know of. In the second place there is Hell to pay and now hot pitch has broken loose in the lumber industry in the form of the biggest strike in history.

Looks to me like that dear old Section 7-A of that equally delightful NRA is in full bloom on the Pacific Coast right now in the sawmill industry. Every time the lumber business shows signs of picking up, along comes something or other and knocks it for a double loop. It's that way right now'

There have been many recent signs of definite improvement all along the line in the lumber business. Building is picking up, credits are slowly relaxing, lumber has been selling rather more freely than in the past two years, and we were all getting highly hopeful, when along comes the Pacific Coast tie-up. +**<

The Coast Fir territory of the Pacific Northwest has been operating under a code, working code hours, under code conditions, and paying code wages. The hours are the shortest and the wages the highest in their histo.ry. The wages paid in the lumber mills of the Northwest are the highest paid in any part of the lumber producing world. And it was here the strike was called.

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Newly organized unions demanded rnuch shorter hours, almost double the prevailing code wage scale, and a closed shop. Nothing more. The wage scale demanded is 25 cents an hour, the weekly working time thirty hours. Result, practically all of the sawmills, planing mills, box factories, door factories, plywood factories, and shingle mills of the Washington and Oregon Coast territorlr, closed down.

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Several large concerns tried to bargain with their men, offering them slightly increased wage scale, but the offer was refused. It is regrettable that it was ever made. Those mills have been operating under a code for the past year, and LOSING MONEY. That is true of practically all the Fir mills everywhere.

So they are closed down. Some of them were closed by walk-outs, others by threats, others because the demands were too impossible to justify consideration. Fir lumber manufactured at 75 cents an hour would be just a stock of large, clumsy, white elephants. How could it be sold at the price that must be based on such a cost? Who

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