To the Editor of the Crimson:

Despite all of your propaganda, the students are not united unanimously behind your apparent front of solidarity. Here are the reasons:

First. The OPA does not prevent inflation. If a man wants a white shirt, the fact that the ceiling price is $2.50 is of no benefit, because there are no white shirts. If the retailer receives a shipment of shirts, he sells them to his old customers at a large bonus. And they are right to do so. They are trying to make as much money as they can; and at the same time they are morally resisting a tyrannous law--a law that tells them what to do with their own property.

Second. The idea that the OPA is of benefit to the poor who cannot afford to pay black market prices is simply absurd. Inflation is caused by scarcity: scarcity is caused by under-production; and a man who cannot make what he considers enough profit will not produce!

Third. The idea that prices will continue to go up is equally absurd. Most manufacturers cater to the majority, and most goods are mass-produced. A mass producer cannot ask more for his product than the majority can afford to pay. And if they can pay, they will. They will buy more, and more will be produced. Within a short time, the scarcity will disappear, and the prices will come down.

Conclusion. Why should a man who has money, whether he produced it or whether his father produced it, be penalized in favor of a man who has not got money? Do people who earn money have a duty toward those who won't? If so, why? No good reason has ever been advanced, except in double talk by the parasites who won't earn money. Such are the theorems that are destroying production in this country. The idea that the producers must be soaked to support the non-producers was not the idea that built this country, nor is it part of the idea of the pursuit of your own happiness. Look at history. Every state that instituted controls to cope with alleged emergencies stopped production and the empires declined and fell one after another.

Stop and reflect. Is your campaign against the price-gougers a result of your allegiance to a free country, or a result of your allegiance to an idea that at the present is looting the last remnants of freedom all over Europe? Thaddens L. H. R. Ashby '50a.