Chapter VIII: Introduction: By PROFESSOR IRVING FISHER (6)

Although price control is a measure disapproved of by economists, experience has shown that for certain products, such as wheat and flour, it produced good results. In the case of bituminous coal, Professor Anderson of Harvard said that it had probably done much harm and little good, because the cut in price was too drastic. One good feature of the price control system was the ability to apply it to draft labor from non-essential industries to the production of munitions and necessities of life. It was possible to do this by refusing coal, copper, steel and freight cars to the non-essential industries. How the Food Administration came to be a general price fixing body is explained in the following article by a member of the Food Administration:

WHEAT AT $2.20 A BUSHEL

"There are many evidences that price fixing has come to lodge
itself as an unwelcome factor in the program of the Food
Administration. Price fixing came to be a fact even while
avoided as a theory, and eventually it has become necessary to
face it, if not to accept it, even as a theory. What are the
evidences that price fixing is essentially involved in the
program of the Food Administration? One piece of evidence lies
in the fact that when once you have fixed the price of one
commodity the condition is bound to be reflected in other
commodities. In fixing the price of wheat Congress fixed as
well, though not so explicitly, the price of corn, and hogs,
and sugar beets. The determining and administering of these
prices it left to the Food Administration.

"A further evidence that the Food Administration could not
avoid the onus of price fixing lies in the reasons for which
the Administration was brought into existence and the services
it was created to perform. The Food Administration is a war
agency. Its chief purpose is the feeding of warring nations,
our own nation and the Allies. All its other activities, its
conservation, its stabilization of trade processes, its
encouragement of production, are tributary to the one purpose
of segregating stocks of food for the effective prosecution of
the war. This latter purpose, in fact, takes the Food
Administration directly or indirectly into the market.... By