Great Debate

At war's end, how soon can U.S. industry be freed of rigid Government controls--and how much of it can be freed? On this important subject, the U.S. last week heard two important debaters: OPA Boss Chester Bowles and Dr. Williard H. Dow, white-haired, scholarly president of Michigan's Dow Chemical Co.

Once a successful advertising man, the jut-jawed, smooth-talking head of OPA shocked many a U.S. businessman by asserting in a speech, at Yale University: "The role of government must be greatly reduced after the war. . . . But . . . there is far too easy an assumption on the part of many that we have only to strip off controls and we'll go right back to all-out peacetime operations without a hitch. There are two things wrong with that view. It won't be easy--and we can't go back."

To avert a postwar depression, ex-Businessman Bowles proposed that wartime controls be replaced by a "broad and far-reaching" program to: 1) put a floor under wages and prices--in effect, a combined OPA and WLB in reverse; 2) remove any ceiling on public works. For the long pull he joined Alvin Hansen, Beardsley Ruml et al in proposing that Government shall keep the U.S. economy in balance by lowering taxes and increasing expenditures in slumps, upping taxes and reducing expenditures in booms. He declared flatly that government must always play the "central role" in the economy.

From Dr. Dow, whose company, almost singlehanded, saved the U.S. from a critical magnesium shortage (TIME, March 20), came a resounding snort. In Manhattan's Biltmore Hotel, after receiving the Gold Medal of the American Institute of Chemists, he cried: "We are being warned against the dangers of freedom. ... All of which is rot. We are being told that ... we must ease out of controls and that chaos would follow their sudden ending. By the very nature of our present controls we cannot ease out of them. We can only ease into permanent control. . . . Whatever may be the seeming dangers of throwing off our controls, they are as nothing in contrast to the dangers of being merely a tended herd."

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