Mobilize for Peace

This week Bernard Baruch gave the Senate Foreign Relations Committee and the U.S. the benefit of an old man's experience and advice. As usual, it was so commonsensible it sounded daring. The nub of it (with familiar Baruch bells on): the time has come to quit horsing around and get to work.

Inferentially, Baruch was for ERP, but that was not enough. Peace, he said, cannot be legislated, or even bought with appropriations. But economic stability "can be brought into existence inside of two years, through an all-out production drive here and in the rest of the world." The Baruch program: 1) stabilize the world, 2) stabilize the U.S.

To achieve the first he recommended, among other things, that the U.S.:

P: Stand ready, for the next five years, to buy all the world's nonperishable materials which cannot find normal commercial markets anywhere else. Such a promise would galvanize European production, he argued, and bring frightened private capital out from under the bed.

P: Urge the countries of Europe to form an economic union; promise them flatly to go to war to protect them from an aggressor.

To achieve the second objective he recommended that the U.S.:

P: Reduce farm prices and guarantee fanners that those prices would not drop for three years.

P: "Stabilize" wages; control rents.

P: Clamp back 50% of the wartime excess-profits tax; postpone tax reductions another two years.

Did Baruch really believe that farm prices could be rolled back, and wages "stabilized"? He was not talking about what was politically expedient or even politically practical, but what he thought ought to be done. "We must stop inflation not to save Europe but to save America," he said. He offered this yardstick to measure any anti-inflation plan: "Let the public ask--whom does it hit? If it hits everyone, more than likely it will be a good program. If it taps here and there, touching one segment while exempting others, it will be a bad program."

"By inclination," he said, "I am opposed to government controls, except in wartime. However, we have no peace today. . . . You cannot save free enterprise if you let the system which protects it go to ruin. . . . The time has come to organize--to mobilize--for peace."

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.