Victory demands all our production of war materials- food, clothing, planes, and tanks. United States Government expenditures for armament in 1939 were 1.5 billion dollars; they expanded to 75 billion dollars in 1943, creating scarcity of metals, materials and manpower, and rising incomes. Every purchase we make is a claim on our Nation’s resources. Every article we use is part of our Nation’s precious supplies. Each worker and machine that is producing civilian goods is one less worker and one less machine producing ships and guns, uniforms and food for our fighting forces. Every price tag today is a weapon of war, for price control is a war measure.

Price control was not established for the purpose of permitting the public to buy things cheaply. It was not established to give customers any special advantage over merchants. But price control was established to do a number of absolutely vital wartime jobs.

Price control’s first job is to prevent people, with surplus money to spend, from pushing prices up in order to get goods and foods which are scarce.

Price control’s second job is to hold down the cost of all war materials so that the government will not have to borrow more or tax more heavily.

And here are some of the other important jobs price control is intended to do: Prevent profiteering; make available for taxes, war bonds and savings, money that would otherwise be spent in paying higher prices; keep people with fixed incomes from being squeezed to the wall by high prices; and finally, help prevent collapse at the end of the war when unemployment, during conversion to peace, reduces people’s ability to buy.

Price control is doing all these things. It is certainly not permitting merchants to charge all they can get. It is not giving consumers the low prices many of them would like. It is maintaining a balance to keep as many stores as possible selling as much as possible to as many people as possible at a time when there are less and less things for people to buy.

Suppose price control set the price of beef at 5 cents a pound. “That’s fine”, you say. “Then everybody could buy all the beef he wanted”. But the fact is no one would be able to buy any beef at all. Cattle raisers couldn’t afford to raise beef; packers couldn’t pay the costs of packing and shipping; stores couldn’t pay the cost of handling it. So you would have a wonderful bargain- on paper. But you would not get a mouthful of beef to eat.

Part of price control’s job is to make sure that you do get the necessities of life. It does this by holding a fair balance between what you pay and what it costs to produce things and bring them to you.

Price control is the ballast in the boat we are all in; ballast to keep the boat as steady as possible till the violent storm of war with its danger of inflation subsides.