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Time to Stop? Test case of Defense v. Anti-trust is Arnold's suit against 22 major oil companies, whose pipelines he wants them to divorce. When the oil companies complained to the Defense Commission (which wants to increase U. S. pipeline capacity) a procedure was set up. with Commissioner Leon Henderson as liaison. The Commission is now studying the pipeline case, and Thurman has suspended prosecution until he hears from Leon. If the Commission decides the suit is a menace to defense, Arnold will give weight to the opinion. Beyond that, he has promised nothing. As Arnold showed no signs of relaxing his anti-trust drive this week, many an observer predicted it was time for a showdown. Since the Commission has no power whatever except from the President (whereas Arnold is backed by a 50-year-old law), only the President, who can fire Arnold, can decide.
Philosopher. That Arnold will not otherwise be tamed was clear from his book this week. Unlike earlier Arnoldiana, The Bottlenecks of Business is a sober, almost a passionate book. It has occasional flashes of his old clowning vein (he quotes limericks, etc.). But capitalism, which he once kidded as "the true faith," is now "the only type of economic structure in which government is free and in which the human spirit is free." Arnold regards an effective Sherman Act as vital to this freedom. In the course of describing his methods, explaining the Sherman Act, and taking bows toward the U. S. consumer, he reveals a newly serious belief in budget balancing, in the dangers of planning, in "the conservative Utopia of laissez faire." This sets Arnold apart from what is left of the New Deal.
Said Adam Smith, father of laissez-faire economics: "People of the same trade seldom meet together, even for merriment and diversion, but the conversation ends in a conspiracy against the public, or in some contrivance to raise prices." To plan-minded New Dealers like Jerome Frank, the lesson of Adam Smith's observation is that anti-trust laws can never be really enforced. To Trustbuster Arnold the words are simply a challenge, and a reason for larger anti-trust appropriations: "You cannot police a country of 130,000,000 people with a corporal's guard."
In arguing that the Sherman Act should not be adjourned for the sake of rearmament, Arnold is concerned not merely with catching "profiteers." He believes his prosecutions lower food prices, let Americans eat better, make healthier recruits. He winds up in an eloquent chapter which attributes the fall of the Weimar Republic, the collapse of France and the failures of Chamberlain all to the same source: a frozen price system, in which "vested interests" (whether industries, labor unions or lobbyists) put a "money value on restraints of trade and called them national wealth." If he has his way, the U. S. economy will at least emerge from the defense program as little changed as possible from the ways of life it is arming to preserve.