PRICES: Flimsy Evidence

For months, OPA and the National Retail Dry Goods Association have wrangled over price ceilings. Last week OPAdminister Chester Bowles sharply charged Lew Hahn, the Association’s general manager, with using “unchecked flimsy evidence . . . in a sorry effort to break down effective control over inflation.”

The “flimsy evidence,” said Bowles, was a display of dresses, dry goods, toys, etc., which N.R.D.G.A. has. been exhibiting to Congress. It contrasts well-made articles, put out by established firms whose manufacture has been supposedly smothered by low ceilings, with shoddy merchandise which consumers were forced to buy from new manufacturers at higher, OPA-sanctioned prices.

When N.R.D.G.A. refused to give Bowles the names of the manufacturers, he did a little investigating of his own, assisted by Mrs. Chase Going Woodhouse, Connecticut’s Democratic Congresswoman.

Out of nine of N.R.D.G.A.’s exhibits which OPA has been able to trace, seven were phony, said Bowles. Example: a shoddy $5.50 iron was a poor version of a shiny, solidly built product which the New York manufacturer had originally shown OPA to geb a favorable ceiling. OPA now has him in court.