the Judicial Department of our government. All these are necessary to safeguard Liberty.
If the Act be wrongly interpreted, plainly it would violate the Constitution by taking property for private use through some governmental agency, and no standard is attempted to be given, by an ex post facto determination, put into effect after the vendor had made his guesses as best he could. Moreover, as has always been the case in such attempts against Liberty, it would terrorize those producers or sellers of necessaries (who are not exempted by the Act), by threats of punishment, cruel and despotic beyond reason. Treating of this subject, Professor Laughlin in his work on "Money and Prices" well says:[1] "It is a means of supplementing individual incapacity and want of success by assessment upon efficient and successful members of society. This is Socialism pure and simple. It is following the tendency to look to the State for aid when individual effort begins to be distasteful; it removes the incentive to industry from those weaklings who need to know that success is not the fruit of idleness and shiftlessness. To let such as these feel that their inefficiency may be condoned by the collective efforts of society is to penalize thrift and put a premium on failure. To legislate in favor of the inefficient at the expense of the efficient is to put demagoguery on the throne and discourage the very qualities on which the stability and moral growth of society always have, and always must, depend. Think of a civil polity which in the interest of one set of persons should undertake to regulate the prices of goods in the country's markets—whenever intemperate overtrading has been followed by a commercial
- ↑ Laughlin's "Money and Prices," Chap. VII (see pages 187 to 192).
