Wanted: An Idea

A secretary jerked her thumb at a closed door in the White House one morning last week and coldly observed: "Behind that door there is developing the finest set of ulcers seen around these parts in years." The door led into the office of Presidential Adviser John Steelman. There a group of baffled experts, like ants around an overturned beetle, were pondering how to handle the Brobdingnagian problem of price control.

The President had set them at it. In summoning Congress to a special session, he had promised to recommend some "adequate measures" to deal with inflation. Now he had to produce. He had called in his advisers.

Clark Clifford had talked to Steelman, who talked to Secretary of Commerce Harriman and Economist Edwin Nourse. Steelman, with economists, retired behind the closed door. An Administration official sighed: "I'm afraid the President went a bit too far."

In a Whisper. Everybody knew that something should be done. Swollen prices could upset the domestic economy. And as the President pointed out last week--even while he reversed himself and put foreign aid ahead of the price situation--swollen prices would multiply the problem of foreign aid: there was no use in Congress' appropriating money for 100 million bushels of wheat if the money, by the time it came to be spent, would buy only 25 million bushels.

At week's end, only some old ideas had emerged from the closed doors. One set of ideas (Nourse's) called for allocation of scarce commodities, such as steel and grain; curbs on installment buying; curbs on speculation in the commodity exchanges; tightening of bank credit. Such fiscal reforms might help a little but they certainly had no political zing. The only other idea was the reimposition of rationing and price control, which Harry Truman recently described as manifestations of a police state. But in their extremity that was exactly what Democratic politicos were suggesting. The tactic was politically sound: put the measure up to the 80th Congress and let the G.O.P. take the blame if prices kept on spiraling. The Democrats knew that Republicans would not vote to reimpose controls.

The "Keystone." But the problem transcended politics. It belonged to everyone, from the housewife paying 85-c- a pound for butter up to Harry Truman worrying about the foreign aid program.

So far, all that the Republicans had suggested was that taxes be cut. Republicans were convinced that this would reduce prices in the long run. But it would do little, immediately, to dampen down the combustible factors which threatened to send prices soaring again.

One maverick-minded Republican did come up with another idea. Vermont's Senator Ralph Flanders recommended rationing of meat. "The price of meat is the keystone of the whole process of spiraling," he said. He thought rationing would help keep down the price without direct price control by keeping "demand in line." He was not optimistic. But he put it forward anyhow--"to see if anybody has got a better idea."

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