Forty Centuries of Wage and Price Controls

13

A Postwar Survey of Six Continents

GREAT BRITAIN: 1945–1968

Up to 1964, British incomes policy was aimed primarily at curbing inflation by checking the rise in wages. Soon after Atlee’s government took office after the Second World War, this process began. In 1948 the government issued qualitative guidelines stating the conditions which wage increases would have to satisfy in order to be declared in line with the public interest. The Trades Union Congress, working with its political wing, accepted these guidelines “with remarkable fidelity.”1

Nevertheless, this voluntary wage freeze led to disgruntlement in the unions over the course of time, since the cost of living was still rising despite the wage agreement. Restraint collapsed on many occasions, and in its September 1950 conference, the TUC formally quitted all agreements. The success of the first British experiment with wage guidelines was short-lived indeed.

In 1952, the chairman of Lloyds Bank in London put the results of controls over the British economy in a clear perspective:

There cannot really be any dispute about the superior efficiency of a properly working price system. . . . Rationing and controls are merely methods of organizing scarcity; the price system automatically works toward overcoming scarcity. If a commodity is in short supply, a rise in its price does not merely reduce demand but will also stimulate an increase in its supply. In this, the price system stands in direct contrast with rationing and controls, which tend to make it less profitable or less attractive in other ways, to engage in essential production than to produce the inessentials which are left uncontrolled.2

There was a long break without any controls (except for a short intervention by the new Council on Prices, Productivity and Incomes in 1957) until 1961, when a new balance of payments crisis urged the then Conservative party government to bring back wage restraint. The famous Macmillan “pay pause” was ordered for civil servants. The measure did not, however, achieve its expectations; it did not improve the morale of the private sector and irritated public employees. The Trades Union Congress, which the government hoped would follow the lead, said, “No deal.”

“Incomes Policy: The Next Step” was the title of a 1962 government White Paper which explained the next venture in incomes policy in the U. K. This was to limit annual wage increases to a maximum of about two percent.

The maximum was, however, a matter of academic interest only. The hourly average wage rate rose by about four and a half percent.

By way of compromise, the National Economic Development Council set a target of four percent growth for the British economy, and declared that wage increases of three or three and a half percent would not be inconsistent with the target. But this, too, was unsuccessful. The rate of growth was much less, and in 1964, average hourly earnings rose by over eight percent.3

The fact that wages so outstripped productivity might be one reason for the continued poor performance of that economy even today. As the London Economist underlined:

In the first five months of this year [1966] more people in Britain pushed up their earnings more steeply for less work than at any time since 1960. . . . This is what has happened to the incomes policy. . . . The plain fact is that since Labour took office in October 1964, hourly earnings have risen 2¼ times faster than that of output. . . .4

Something had to be done. And in 1966, the government ordered a complete freeze in wages and prices, salaries and dividends, to be followed by a period of “severe restraint” of six months or more. In the short term, the government achieved its objective, and the index of hourly earnings remained fairly stable at 169.8 (January 1965 = 100). “But,” as Eric Schiff complains, “in the following six months of ‘severe restraint,’ the pent-up pressure could no longer be fully restrained. The indexes of hourly earnings rose to 173.1 in May, for an increase of about 1.9 percent. . . .”5 And over the next two years the pressure continued, such that “Over the full year ending April 1968, according to the Annual Report of the National Board for Prices and Incomes6, hourly earnings had risen over 8 percent—hardly what had been expected after a year during which the general official rate for wage increases was zero.”7

FRANCE AFTER 1960

Eric Schiff summarizes the French experience with wage targets as follows:

The fifth regular Plan of Economic and Social Development, due to appear around 1960, could not be worked out according to schedule. Instead, an Interim Plan was set up, which. . . envisaged, for the immediate future, an annual increase of 4 percent in the average wage level. Had actual average wage increases in the years immediately following 1960 been approximately in line with this guidepost, rising unit labor costs as a cause of inflation would, in fact, have been removed. The rise in labor productivity actually achieved during those years would have sufficed to produce this result. But the actual annual average wage increases were too far above the guideline rate. In the five year period 1959 to 1963 they were, in this order, 6.2%, 7.1%, 7.9%, 9.5%, 7.9%. The updrift in prices continued.8

And in the Fifth Plan itself, new targets were agreed upon; an average rise of 1.5 percent in the general price level was set as the acceptable maximum. The average annual rise in the GNP deflator would be kept below 2.7 percent.

The Sixth Plan decrees that a 1.7 percent increase in industrial prices would be acceptable, equivalent to about a 2.5 percent increase in prices. There is, however, no mention of wage guidelines within the text of the Plan.

Prices in France have continued to rise in the 1970s: the consumer price index registered a 5.4 percent increase in 1971, and from thence the average increases have been edging up—6.0 percent, 7.4 percent, 13.6 percent, 11.8 percent. French authorities responded by implementing a three-month freeze on prices and wages, coupled with a 6.5 percent ceiling on wage and price increases in 1977. Le Monde commented that “the Barre [France’s Prime Minister] plan rather resembles the measures Giscard D’Estaing took in December 1972 and December 1973 when he was Finance Minister. . . .”9

The editor of Barron’s, Mr. Robert M. Bleiberg, (in his issue for April 18, 1977, p. 7) summed up the recent French experience very well when he wrote:

First comes the inevitable official denial. In mid-September, [1976] Dr. Raymond Barre, Finance Minister and Premier, gave a reassuring speech in which he promised that his anti-inflationary program would hinge on traditional fiscal and monetary restraints. Just four weeks later he unveiled a price freeze, which, in theory at any rate, lasted until the end of the year.

Like so many of its predecessors, the Barre program, regardless of what the unions profess to believe, is heavily weighted against capital and for labor. Thus, while prices are controlled by statute, wages are subject only to secondary, informal restraints. Finally, the program has led to painfully familiar results. After a few months of relative stability, largely reflecting a cut in the value-added tax, the price indices once again have begun to climb. According to a recent bulletin by S. J. Rundt & Associates, knowledgeable observers of foreign exchange and international trade: “After relatively moderate increases of 0.3% in both December and January, the retail price index in February shot up by 0.7%, and there is every indication that its climb in March and April will also turn out to be on the hefty side, partly because there have been substantial increases in wholesale prices which have yet to work their way through to the retail price level, and partly because the costs of a number of public services are scheduled to go up by 6½% in April.” To nobody’s surprise (except, perhaps, that of the powers-that-be), the French franc has been weak.

Prime Minister Barre has since embarked on a number of economic reforms which, if carried through, will considerably liberalize the French economy and earn for him a reputation as the French Ludwig Erhard. He has had the audacity to remove controls on bread, the price of which had been fixed by the French state since 1791. It will be interesting to watch the end result of the new French reform program.

CONTROLS ELSEWHERE IN EUROPE

“Austria’s economy at the end of World War II was characterized by low levels of production, excess money supply, and high rates of inflation.”10 In July 1945, price control was transferred to the Austrian government, and the law was immediately applied to foodstuffs, raw materials and services. The cost of living indices of officially controlled prices and the indices of net hourly earnings rose 14 percent between April 1945 and April 1946.11

In January 1946, wage control was assumed by the Austrian government, and the first wage and price agreement was concluded in 1947. New prices were established for food, rent, coal and public utilities. In each of the successive years until 1951, additional agreements were concluded. The consumer price index continued to rise. In 1949, it rose 22.1 percent. In 1950, it rose 14.6 percent. In 1951, it rose 27.6 percent. In 1952, it rose 13 percent.

In 1962 the government of Denmark adopted an incomes policy on a comprehensive scale. In the decade preceding the controls, the rate of inflation in Denmark had averaged about 2.5 percent per annum, although it had suffered wide fluctuations. But between 1958 and 1965, that country had the sharpest average annual rate of increase in unit labor costs of a group of thirteen Western countries examined by the U.N. Economic Commission for Europe.12 In the sixties, the cost of living index subsided once more, but large balance of payments deficits troubled the Danish government.

In 1963 the Danish Parliament took a series of wage and price measures to chill wage agreements (but not quite to freeze them) and that year was all quiet on the wage front. But in 1964 the wage and price spiral started to twist again; consumer prices rose by steadily increasing amounts: in 1964, by 3.1 percent, in 1965 by 5.4 percent, then 7 percent, then 8.2, then 8.0, with relaxation only in the early seventies.

The Dutch experience with wage controls has been painful. Up to 1959, the government laid down guidelines for wage agreements after examining the overall prospects for the economy. In that year, the system was changed by linking permitted wage increases to productivity levels in the particular sector.

Unfortunately this system proved too difficult to administer—for one thing, government and workers could never agree on the genuine productivity figures—and in 1963 the system was supplanted. The new approach was much like the old: a Central Planning Bureau and the Social and Economic Council examined the possibilities for wage increases, and their approved ceilings were mandatory, with transgressors being prosecuted. All that these limits tended to do, however, was to drive employers and employees to deal in undeclared wage transfers and to deter secondary workers from joining the labor force. A shortage of labor left the market very tight indeed. As Schiff again says:

Open “wage explosion” was not slow in coming. In the autumn of 1963 the government set a guideline of 6 percent for the average wage increase in the following year. But a number of employers, in open defiance of the guideline, offered higher wages. Attempts by the Board of Government Mediators to use its legal power to intervene were of no avail. The final overall result of the protracted wage bargaining of 1964 was an average wage increase of about 15 percent. . . .13

THE UNITED STATES: 1950–1969

Much the same picture could be seen when the United States imposed price and wage controls during the Korean hostilities. In June 1950, when the war began, the Consumer Price Index stood at 177.8. Haifa year later, when controls went into effect, the Index was at the level of 184.7. In September of 1952 when the pay freeze ended, the Consumer Price Index had reached 191.1. Apparently, that set of controls had no effect on the rate of inflation.

At that time, the Truman Administration believed that wage increases, in order not to be inflationary, must not exceed the trend of economy-wide productivity gains. One OECD survey of the period says:

The Kennedy Administration. . . elaborated the more explicit formulation that the general guide for non-inflationary wage behavior is that the increase in wage rates (including fringe benefits) in each industry is equal to the trend rate of overall productivity increase. The general guide for non-inflationary price behavior calls for price reductions if the industry’s rate of productivity increase exceeds the overall rate. . . it calls for an appropriate increase in prices if the opposite relationship prevails; and it calls for stable prices if the two rates of productivity increase are equal.14

These “guide-posts” were originally conceived to be purely for information’s sake, but eventually the government found itself giving out more and more information about rates of economic growth and productivity variation, and then it found itself increasingly involved in specific bargaining and pricing situations.

Prices rose once more in the mid-sixties, and confrontations between the government and the labor unions became more and more frequent. The guideline effort, at least in the form initiated in 1962, was given up for dead when in 1966 the airline mechanics refused a wage offer which was far in excess of the guidelines, but which was nevertheless approved by the government of the day. Thereafter, no definite guidelines were published and only rough suggestions were offered on an ad hoc basis to particular organizations.

The guideline policy was at best unhelpful and according to economist Arthur Okun, positively harmful. He says that the governmental attempts to influence private bargaining and pricing decisions accounted for a substantial portion of the acceleration in prices between 1968 and 1969, as the repressed inflation worked itself out.15

CONTROLS IN ARGENTINA

On the South American continent, similar controls were tried and failed. Perhaps the most celebrated inflation rate in that part of the world belongs to Argentina, despite the price-fixing attempts of the administration of Juan Peron. But his controls, which lasted (on and off) from 1946 to 1955, did not mollify it. As Congressman Philip Crane said in the House of Representatives on the subject of the United States’ Economic Stabilization measures:

In June 1947, the [Argentine] government instituted a program of fixing retail prices and seized factory stocks of clothing and shoes for distribution at these prices. Numerous price violators were arrested. Then, in an attempt to control prices, the Government began to subsidize foodstuffs in the 1948–49 period. It bought wheat from the farmers and sold it to the miller in an attempt to control the price of bread. The same policy was followed with regard to meat, cooking oils, and the milk supply. The controls did not work and in 1949 all public services, including railroads, increased prices. The cost of other commodities increased: Gasoline rose from 35 to 60 centavos per liter, bread from 50 to 80 centavos per loaf, meat from 1.80 pesos to 2.50 pesos, and clothing prices soared.16

At the end of the 1940s, Peron supported increases in wages although he tried to keep them down as far as possible. An example of the ineffectiveness of this policy was his grant of a sixty percent wage increase to workers in the important sugar industry. The military also received substantial increases, and this sparked off a new round of pay demands.

Despite his control of the General Confederation of Labor, Peron could not continue to hold down wages; his demand in 1954 that wage increases should be tied to a very low target precipitated an epidemic of wildcat strikes in many industries. And because of his failures, Peron lost support in the country, and resigned under military pressure on September 19, 1955.

ISRAEL: THREE DECADES OF CONTROLS

Israel has experienced almost uninterrupted, serious inflation ever since its birth in 1948; yet despite this, it has had a history of extensive wage and price controls.17

The first measures were enacted in April 1949 when the government announced that the new republic would set maximum prices for most goods and have rationing for “essentials,” such as, clothing, food, and raw materials. Whereas these controls were originally accepted with relief by the population, the underlying, continued growth in the money supply meant that constant inflationary pressure led to increases in costs and squeezed the profit margins of producers. Gradually a black market began to form in a sizable number of price-regulated goods.

During 1949 and 1950 the official prices of some essentials were actually reduced in absolute terms, thus exacerbating the shortages and forcing more goods onto the black market. As more people found that they had to trade on the black market, their real cost of living became less and less reflected in the official cost of living index. By enlarging the relative size of the black market, the price reductions (as always, well-intended) actually increased rather than reduced the cost of living.18

The price controls also induced large influxes of imports as the rationing system for domestic goods led to more and more people buying foreign substitutes. Then, to make matters worse, the domestic supply of agricultural produce was badly hit by a drought in 1951.19

Eventually the government was forced to reassess its policy and in 1951 prices were allowed to move upward and monetary policy was tightened.

In operation, the price controls had revealed all the familiar signs of a slip into arbitrary state power. A large bureaucracy (3,000 officials for a population of 1.4 million) was recruited to administer the controls; the public was encouraged to turn in violators; to catch evaders, road blocks were set up, mass arrests were made, and special courts were established to try them.20

The controls also diminished the efficiency of the economy by precipitating the cartelization of some sectors of industry and encouraging people to engage in such activities as barter, in-kind transactions, quality reductions and the other standard types of evasion.

Between 1951 and 1953 the relaxation of controls led to a rise of 150 percent in the cost of living official index. But this overstated the real increase for the vast majority of the public, because they had previously been trading on the black market and paying far higher prices than the official cost index indicated.21

Thus, price controls at first made the official cost of living index understate the real cost of living and then made it overstate it. Nevertheless, by 1953 the annual inflation rate was down to 28 percent, according to official figures.

The subsequent period (1956–1961) was an era of steady growth and falling unemployment. By 1959 price control had been completely abolished although fiscal measures had come into use to manipulate some prices and, to an extent, this was a disguised form of price control.

Further inflationary monetary policy in the period after 1960 led to an ineffective devaluation in 1962 and a call for voluntary wage restraint. In 1963 wages and prices were officially frozen although average wages rose 10.5 percent; in 1964 wages were subjected to a 5 percent guideline (but still rose 11 percent). The squeeze on profits that this imposed led to a recession during 1966.22

From 1967 to 1969 there was a rigorously applied wage freeze. The government capitalized fully on patriotic emotion arising from the six-day war and this particular period in Israeli history appears to have been the only one for which proponents could claim any success for wage-price controls. However, it must be noted that the national unity induced by the war and the presence of high unemployment and fiscal restraint were special factors which doubtless helped considerably.23

After 1969 inflation rose again and culminated in 1971 with the devaluation of the currency and the reinstitution of wage and price controls. Despite the government’s announced intention to limit price increases to a 4–8 percent annual range, inflation continued rising and excess money was diverted, as it had been from 1963–65, into the property markets. At one point, construction firms were sometimes selling new apartments two to three years in advance, but upon the advent of controls they held back. The selling prices of second-hand apartments, which were unregulated, thereby skyrocketed.24

By 1972 the failure of these controls was clear and they were removed.

In the mid-1970s Israeli inflation has been particularly severe, rising to nearly 40 percent in 1974. Since then the world slump has had the effect of mollifying Israeli inflation to a great extent. In summary, the experience of Israel can be seen to be another case of the failure of wage and price controls. Israeli history has been marked by a rate of inflation considerably higher than the international average for industrial countries, which in turn has been the result of lax monetary policy and considerable distortion in the economy during the time that controls were in force. The extent of the distortion and of the misallocation of resources has been directly related to the severity and duration of controls.25

AUSTRALIA: A FREEZE THAT FAILED

From 1921 to 1953 Australia had an “incomes policy” of a sort. The Australian basic wage was adjusted automatically, every quarter, as the consumer price index changed. In April 1975, the indexing of wages was renewed and still continues although it is a system which has been controversial in recent years.

From the end of the Second World War to 1973 there was no active policy of government price controls. The Prices Justification Tribunal was established in 1973; this was the first attempt at price controls (this time on a voluntary basis) in almost three decades.

On April 13, 1977, the Australian government imposed a “freeze” on prices and wages which lasted just 41 days. It was widely denounced as one of the most dismal attempts to control prices in the long and unhappy tradition of wage and price controls. An Australian economist, Peter Samuel, concisely summed up this short and foolish episode of Australian economic history.

The proximate causes of the “thaw” of the “freeze” lie in its inherent absurdity. No one had thought how to freeze prices determined flexibly by auction and tender every day—such as the prices of a whole range of food products, building jobs and contracted services. What to do about imports whose prices are beyond anyone’s powers to “freeze”? And what about price rises “in the pipeline”, approved by government regulatory bodies, or notified, but not yet in effect?

Some large shopping chains, foolishly seeking popular acclaim and publicity boldly announced they would pay no more for any of their stocks, whereupon it not surprisingly transpired that they quickly started to run short of many lines. There was enormous confusion about the details of how the freeze was supposed to work.

It was originally said that the freeze was to be dependent on everyone agreeing to stop raising prices and wages; that business would not be expected to freeze their prices if the costs of inputs were not also frozen. It was also declared to be voluntary. Both principles were quickly abandoned. One business which declared that it could not abide by the freeze on prices, was viciously denounced and threatened with retaliatory action. The unions denounced the scheme and it was quickly clear that the whole thing was a chaotic gimmick, lots of noise and little thought or action. Its end was acknowledged on May 24th, just 41 days after its inauguration. The Arbitration Commission and the unions put the final torpedoes into an already sinking hulk and few mourned its disappearance.

The major lesson to be learned is that many of our leaders and opinion-makers live in a mental world of medieval delusions. They sometimes denounce the market economy as “nineteenth century economics”, but their thinking is far more primitive. In imposing such madness as the “freeze” they reveal themselves captive to primitivist notions of the existence of objectively “just” prices and wages and guild-type concepts of regulation. Historians of economic thought would probably date their thinking as somewhere in the fourteenth century.26

EGYPT: THE WHEEL OF HISTORY TURNS FULL CIRCLE

Forty and fifty centuries ago, Egypt’s rulers instituted a plethora of government controls over economic activity; the pharaohs attempted to keep down the price of food in times of shortages, with but limited success.

The successors of Ramses II who rule from the modern capital of Cairo are facing the same economic problems that have plagued governments since the beginning of recorded history.

Egypt in 1977 had a GNP of $11 billion a year but was struggling to subsidize its citizens to the extent of $1.2 billion in cash (which went to lower the prices of food and other necessities); in addition the state-owned industries lost over $1.37 billion the previous year.27

Price controls have resulted in extreme shortages of fruits and vegetables in the cities. Farmers refuse to bring goods to market if they can’t receive a fair price for their labor and investment, as they have refused from time immemorial. The artificially low price of bread has resulted in people in the cities going hungry and has had some unforeseen side effects.

According to The Washington Post:

A staple of the Egyptian diet is a rough loaf of bread made with coarse flour that sells for a few pennies because it is heavily subsidized by the government. Its weight and price are fixed by law.

Some bakers are cheating by shorting the weight without cutting prices and using the extra flour to make higher-profit items like pastries. In rural villages, according to newspaper reports, peasants who in the past baked their own bread are buying in markets because the subsidy makes it cheaper. But the real problem is that the subsidized bread is so cheap that cattle breeders are using it for fodder.

It’s about a third the price of hay, which is so expensive it has been driving up the price of meat, and since the bread can be purchased in unrestricted amounts, it’s going to the animals instead of to the people.

In a wry commentary on this situation, a newspaper cartoon depicted a group of barnyard cows eating round loaves of bread, with one of them observing, “This people food isn’t any good unless it’s washed down with 7-Up.”

The government cannot cut the bread subsidy because that would drive the price up beyond the reach of many families, especially urban workers, who depend on it. But it is looking for ways to control abuses.

The Ministry of Supply authorized an increase in the flour allocations to all provinces, and ordered surveillance teams to inspect the bakeries and make sure they produce authorized products at full capacity.

Egyptian bureaucrats began to wonder if something was wrong in 1975, we are told.

“We started to review the thing,” an informed official of the Ministry of Economy said, “when we realized that the fancy cake sold at the Hilton Hotel to rich tourists was made with subsidized flour, subsidized sugar and subsidized shortening.”29

The government is now looking into various ways to solve a number of problems which have arisen because of their price and wage control system. An official has been quoted as saying that “. . . the system’s prohibitive costs and its susceptibility to corruption make some reforms imperative.”30 As we all know, of course, everything moves slowly in the bureaucracy, and Egypt’s civil servants have only had several millenia to work on the problem.

FOOTNOTES

1. E. H. Phelps Brown, “Guidelines for Growth and for Incomes in the United Kingdom: Some Possible Lessons for the United States,” G. P. Schultz and R. Z. Aliber (eds.), Guidelines, Informal Controls, and the Market Place (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1966) p. 154.

2. Newsweek, September 8, 1952, p. 78.

3. David Smith, Incomes Policy: Some Foreign Experiences and their Relevance for Canada (Ottawa: Queen’s Printer for the Economic Council of Canada, 1966) p. 123, Table 5–5.

4. The Economist, July 2, 1966, p. 15.

5. Eric Schiff, Incomes Policies Abroad, Part 1 (Washington, D. C.: American Enterprise Institute, 1971) p. 11.

6. National Board for Prices and Incomes, Productivity, Prices and Incomes for 1968 and 1969 (London: Her Majesty’s Stationery Office) p. 3.

7. Eric Schiff, op. cit., p. 11.

8. Eric Schiff, Incomes Policies Abroad, Part2 (Washington, D.C.: American Enterprise Institute, 1972) p. 7.

9. Le Monde, from The Guardian English section (London, October 3, 1976).

10. International Monetary Fund, Staff Papers, Vol. XX #1, March 1973, p. 172.

11. Ibid., p. 173.

12. United Nations Economic Commission for Europe, Incomes In Postwar Europe: A Study of Policies, Growth, and Distribution (Geneva, 1967) Chapter 3, p. 4.

13. Schiff, Incomes Policies Abroad, Part 1, op. cit., p. 19.

14. OECD Report by the Secretary General, Inflation: the Present Problem, December 1970, Annexes B, p. 88.

15. Arthur K. Okun, “The Controlled Experiment of 1969,” Appendix to Inflation, the Problems and Prospects Before Us (Charles C. Moskowitz Lecture, 1970).

16. Congressman Philip M. Crane, “The Economic Stabilization Act,” Congressional Record, December 9, 1971.

17. We are indebted to Donald L. Losman’s article, “Inflation in Israel: The Failure of Wage-Price Controls,” in The Journal of Social and Political Studies, Spring 1978, for many of the facts and figures in this section.

18. D. Patinkin, Studies in Monetary Economics (New York: Harper & Row, 1972) p. 78

19. Nadav Halevi and Ruth Klinov-Malul, The Economic Development of Israel (New York: Frederick A. Praeger, 1968) p. 258.

20. Alex Rubner, The Economy of Israel (New York: Frederick A. Praeger, 1960) p. 57.

21. Yoram Weiss, “Price Control in Israel,” Economic Review(The Bank of Israel) March, 1971, p. 73.

22. Carol S. Greewald, “Price-Wage Controls: The Israeli Experience,” New England Economic Review (Federal Reserve Bank of Boston) January-February 1972, p. 3.

23. Ibid., p. 8.

24. Abba Lerner and Haim Ben-Shadar, The Economics of Efficiency and Growth (Cambridge: Ballinger Publishing Co., 1975) p. 96.

25. Donald L. Losman, op. cit.

26. Peter Samuel, “Much Ado About Nothing: The Australian Wage and Price Freeze, April 1977,” in Sudha Shenoy (ed.) Wage-Price Control: Myth and Reality (Turramurra, Australia: The Centre for Independent Studies, 1978) pp. 254–55.

27. The Washington Post, January 30, 1977, p. A16.

28. Ibid., April 29, 1978, p. A16. On page 10 of this book, we cited an historian who wrote about price controls in Egypt in 306 B.c. in these words: “There was a whole army of inspectors. There was nothing but inventories, censuses of men and animals. . .”

29. Ibid., January 30, 1977, p. A16.

30. Ibid.