At the Barricades

The gleaming, Santa Claus countenance of West Germany's roly-poly Economic Minister Ludwig Erhard darkened with fury. No more than four days after the triumphal end of an election campaign in which he made 86 speeches promising no price increases if voters stuck with Adenauer and free enterprise, the big Ruhr coal-mine managers' association had announced a stiff, $1-a-ton price boost. Berating the coal barons for "stupidity" that reflected "the political instinct of horses," Erhard told off 250 of them at an emergency meeting in Essen: "This has hit like a bomb. You have abused the government. Your price increase is out of the question.

1 will shoot at you with all my guns."

By such rages, tricks and cajolements, the cherub-cheeked minister has kept Germany on the path of free enterprise through five years of rising prosperity in an inflation-ridden world. The coalmen's price break threatened other rises from steel to bread; trade unions broke into a chorus of wage demands, topped by the 1,600,000-member Metal Workers Union's cry for a 10% boost.

Last week Erhard appealed to the six-nation European Coal and Steel Community at Luxembourg to withhold approval of the Ruhr coal-price hike. To back up the appeal, Erhard wheeled up his biggest price-defense weapon--his power to let more competing imports into the country. As a starter, he ordered his ministry to prepare schemes to slash rail freights on foreign oil and U.S. coal. At week's end the coalmen were still holding their prices up, and Erhard was stubbornly getting ready to fire the gun of low-priced imports that always in the past has knocked them down. Nobody was betting that it would not do it again.

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