Recent experience has convinced me that the Congress must go further
in authorizing the Government to set limits to prices. The law of
supply and demand, I am sorry to say, has been replaced by the law of
unrestrained selfishness. While we have eliminated profiteering in
several branches of industry, it still runs impudently rampant in
others. The farmers, for example, complain with a great deal of
justice that, while the regulation of food prices restricts their
incomes, no restraints are placed upon the prices of most of the
things they must themselves purchase; and similar inequities obtain
on all sides.
It is imperatively necessary that the consideration of the full use
of the water power of the country, and also the consideration of the
systematic and yet economical development of such of the natural
resources of the country as are still under the control of the
Federal Government, should be resumed and affirmatively and
constructively dealt with at the earliest possible moment. The
pressing need of such legislation is daily becoming more obvious.
The legislation proposed at the last session with regard to regulated
combinations among our exporters, in order to provide for our foreign
trade a more effective organization and method of co-operation, ought
by all means to be completed at this session.
And I beg that the members of the House of Representatives will
permit me to express the opinion that it will be impossible to deal
in any way but a very wasteful and extravagant fashion with the
enormous appropriations of the public moneys which must continue to
be made, if the war is to be properly sustained, unless the House
will consent to return to its former practice of initiating and
preparing all appropriation bills through a single committee, in
order that responsibility may be centered, expenditures standardized
and made uniform, and waste and duplication as much as possible
avoided.
Additional legislation may also become necessary before the present
Congress adjourns, in order to effect the most efficient
co-ordination and operation of the railway and other transportation
systems of the country; but to that I shall, if circumstances should
demand, call the attention of Congress upon another occasion.