especially of "guns versus butter" the phrase is particularly inappropriate to us, as it was particularly appropriate to the German system. The Germans had to buy their butter in Denmark with foreign exchange, which they had to divert to the purchase of strategic materials. In this country the dairy industry is overbuilt, high fluid milk prices are stimulating production and curbing consumption, and driving milk products into the butter market. and it would take years of readjustment before the country's defence plants absorbed so many men as to drain farmers away from dairy farms.
On the other hand it is practically certain that there will be shortages of some other things. They may appear. to the consumer. in the form of higher prices. or else in the form of direct rationing. Steel may be a case in point Present capacity of round 85,000,000 tons is enough for the highest civilian tekings in American history plus 20,000,000 tons a year to defence, but so greatly has defence stimulated consumption that 1941 ideas of steel use may come wp against the blank wall of actual shortage in the form of inability to get civilian deliveries. This might effect. for instance, construction of plants for civilian consumption, also municipal and state construction programmes for schools and highways. In the last war such programmes were curtailed.
Text read from the printed page and cleaned; old type leaves the occasional error.