best be described as a stretch of the imagination, he contended that the OPA and the

Federal government could potentially extend its power to cover the entire aspect of

production and decide what type of goods a company produced. He claimed that, if

OPA is extended, "Not you not your employees not both of you together will run

your business. That will be attended to by some starry-eyed cosmic planner in

Washington. And if you don't appreciate the ineffable advantages... you are just one

of those people who are 'too damn dumb' to understand.""50 The importance of

centralized planning stressed by some New Deal supporters was anathema to

Brownell and most Republicans.

 The controversy over the OPA grew larger as the economy shifted from

wartime to peacetime, and Brownell made the Truman demobilization program a

frequent target of criticism. Brownell criticized the pace of the demobilization effort

and the looming possibility of inflation. The problem, as the Chairman saw it, came

when consumers had plenty of liquid capital, but an inadequate supply of domestic

goods. "The nation now has huge surplus supplies of bombers, of guns, of shells, of

fighter planes, of tanks, of bombs and of warships," Brownell wrote in completely

logical fashion. "But few American consumers want to buy tanks or warships." He

asserted that increased federal spending to create public works jobs, under the WPA

formula, led to an increased circulation of capital and made inflation a painful

certainty. Price controls, he reasoned, worsened the situation, as they stifled

production and profits, both of which were necessary to reconvert successfully to a

peacetime footing. After a strong rebuke of Democratic deficit spending and

Truman's proposed sixty-six billion dollar budget for fiscal year 1946, Brownell


50 Ibid.