PART II

PLANNING FOR ABUNDANCE

by

HON. ROBERT G. ALLEN OF PENNSYLVANIA

HON. THOMAS R. AMLIE OF WISCONSIN

HON. JERRY VOORHIS OF CALIFORNIA

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In the first session of the Seventy-fifth Congress, four Members of the Congress, Hon. Maury Maverick, Hon. Jerry Voorhis, Hon. Robert G. Allen, and Hon. Thomas R. Amlie, simultaneously introduced an industrial expansion bill. A different number was given to each bill, but they are identical in content. Their remarks concerning this bill are included in the following pages of this monograph.

The industrial expansion bill went through several revisions and in its latest form appears as H. R. 7504, the Monopoly Control Act, introduced by Hon. Jerry Voorhis in the first session of the Seventysixth Congress.

It is not to be understood that the Congressmen who introduced the first act are supporting this last version, but as their statements concern planning for abundance and a positive program for industrial expansion, which is the subject matter of this last version of the industrial expansion bill, they are grouped in this section of the monograph.

REMARKS OF HON. ROBERT G. ALLEN, OF PENNSYLVANIA, IN THE HOUSE OF REPRESENTATIVES MONDAY, AUGUST 16, 1937

Mr. ALLEN of Pennsylvania. Mr. Speaker, on June 1 Representatives Amlie of Wisconsin, Maverick of Texas, Voorhis of California, and I jointly introduced in this House a measure known as the Industrial Expansion Act. This measure is the outgrowth of a great deal of painstaking work and innumerable conferences between the Members who introduced it. We not only contributed to it our own ideas but on many points we sought the assistance and advice of economists and political scientists who think in terms of society as a living, expanding organism. To the best of our ability we framed a measure in line with modern technological and economic developments and in harmony with human instincts. Because this is a new approach and a new departure in legislation, a prologue to the discussion of the bill seems pertinent.

Not even in a despotism, and much less in a democracy, can any legislation be long enforced which runs contrary to and violates primary human instincts. These instincts are: Self-preservation, which includes all that has to do with access to and mastery over the physical necessities of life; race preservation, which embraces mating, reproduction, and the rearing of offspring; and the instinct to push ever outward the horizons of knowledge, which include exploration, experimentation, education, and modern science. These primal instincts are far older than man-made laws and stronger than any sort of police powers. They are so deeply buried in the inner core of being that no religion has ever been able to dominate them, no legislation has been crafty or drastic enough to turn many for any length of time from life's destined way, and no dictator or tyrant has ever

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been able to seize enough power to bend and shape these instincts of the people to his will.

As true as that throughout the ages men have always been dominated by these common instincts, is also the fact that all men in all of human history have been gripped by one common fear-the fear of scarcity. Self cannot be preserved, the race cannot be propagated, and intellectual horizons cannot be extended if scarcity denies access to means of life; so scarcity has always been the common enemy and abundance has always been the dream of all mankind.

The lash that has driven man every step of that long, weary, blood-washed march of social evolution has been his longing to escape scarcity and want, and to achieve plenty and security. It has been the urge back of every migration since Cain traveled to the land of Nod to find himself a wife and a home, down to the last wheezing flivver loaded with "dust bowl" refugees headed for California. It was this fear and this hunger that led our savage ancestors to face the terrors of the unknown. It was this fear and this dream that led our ancestors across Asia, across Europe, across the Atlantic, and across America to the Pacific, which is the end of the trail for western migration.

The fear of want and the hunger for plenty fuse into one unconquerable human drive, and in its baser forms it is a terrible thing. It has been the breeder of all the wars and all the crimes that have ever blackened the earth, but in the final judgment its virtues will outweigh its sins; its achievements will stand forth as the dynamic. force and the never-fading light that has led man up from the pits of savagery to the highest type of civilization the race has ever known.

Not in our own country alone but in the whole civilized world, men and nations are stumbling and staggering about in the wreckage of an economic system that is changing. Scarcity is gone. Modern science and mass production methods have routed it, and a scarcity system falls when the driving force of scarcity is no more. Frantic with fear because we see that the old verities are no longer valid, we slash at our equally fear-crazed neighbors in wars, strikes, mob madness, vigilantes who would be the law, and moribund courts who would use dead laws to turn back the march of progress, and violate the primary instincts of men. Hunger and want, still-born hopes. and wasted opportunities result because we try to revitalize a system of scarcity that is gone.

THE INDUSTRIAL EXPANSION ACT

The Industrial Expansion Act, now presented for your consideration and action, is the first legislative measure ever offered in the Congress of the United States that gives due consideration to the technological developments which make an anachronism of an economic system based on scarcity. It is a measure which seeks to make possible by legal, constitutional methods the full utilization of all our machinery and manpower to increase production to a point where it will assure to all our people the comforts of life. It seeks to keep step with technological progress, rather than to turn back the march of time to an artificially created scarcity.