Down With Conspiracy

"The building trades are a vast conspiracy against every boy & girl who falls in love and wants to build a home."

This pungent language came last week, not from a New Dealing trustbuster, but from suave, 44-year-old William Burnett Benton, advertising millionaire (Benton & Bowles) and university vice president (Chicago), now executive secretary of the Committee for Economic Development. (C.E.D. is Big Business' biggest attempt yet to take the lead away from Government in postwar planning.)

Benton spoke at Cincinnati's Hotel Netherland Plaza, where the American Institute of Architects and the Producers' Council (building equipment manufacturers) last week gave a joint annual-convention banquet. Said he to the builders: 1) "Every policy of business that restricts employment or production should be re-examined"; 2) the building industry is "notorious" as the No.1 practicer of "every form of so-called monopolistic practices"; 3) it is also the kingpin of all industries in the economy of the U.S., because it normally accounts for half the nation's total new capital formation.

Trouble is, as Benton pointed out last week, everyone in the building industry knows all this but no one has yet tried to do anything about it. On that score he left the builders with an ominous thought: if the industry does not "clean its own stables" someone else probably will. And, said straight-talking Benton, "if it takes a Congressional investigation" to break the building trade's conspiracy against lovebirds, "many businessmen will be for it."

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