With the zeal of the sinner reformed, Charles Jackson Grayson Jr. goes around the country preaching that inflation cannot be defeated by price controls. Sad experience has taught the professor: he was Richard Nixon's price commissioner during the cold, post-freeze days of controls from 1971 through early 1973. Now this much-lettered man (Pennsylvania M.B.A., Harvard D.B.A., ex-FBI agent, ex-S.M.U. business school dean) is trying to sharpen what he considers America's most forceful anti-inflation weapon: productivity.
Price rises will slow down if America can get a larger output of goods and services from the same input of labor, capital and...