MILK PRICE-FIXING.

Auckland Star, Volume LXV, Issue 106, 7 May 1934, Page 6

MILK PRICE-FIXING.

IMPORTANT AMERICAN JUDGMENT. Perhape Au-cklanders do not adequately appreciate tlio importance of their Milk Council, which has decreed that a vendor must not, on pain of losing life license, supply a customer with more milk than the customer pays for. Judging from recent reports from the United States, Auckland Ls experiencing some of the delights of what Rooaeveltian Americans call the "New Deal." The jingle of eighteen cents on the counter of an oljAcure grocery in Rochester, New York, I one day last April was echoed in the Supreme ! Court of the United States, in booming headI linos, in reams of editorials (says the '"Literary j Digest" of March 17). Out of that trivial purchase of two quarts of milk has come another mighty pillar for the New Deal. Leo Nebbia sold the milk to Jedo del Sigmore for eighteen cents and threw in a five-cent loaf of bread. He was fined five- dollars for disobeying the ruling of the New York Milk Control Board, which fixed the minimum price «£ milk at nine cents a quart. He had violated a law passed by the Legislature to protect an industry in the interest of the public welfare. Affirming the judgment by another five-to-four decision, the Supreme Court, in an opinion written by Justice Roberts and concurred in by Chief Justice Hughes and Justices Brandeis, Stone and Cardozo, held that "the ! Constitution does not secure to anyone liberty ! to conduct his business in such fashion as to I inflict injury upon the public at large, or upon any substantia] group of the people." Joining with Justice Mcßeynolds, who wrote the minority opinion, Justices Sutherland, Van Devanter and Butler asserted that "the Legislature cannot lawfully destroy j guaranteed rights of one man with the prime purpose of enriching another even if for the moment this may tscem advantageous to the public" Public Good Paramount. But the majority held that the public good was paramount in time of emergency. Other points in both opinions are: From the Majority Opinion. — "The Constitution does not secure to anyone- liberty to conduct his business in such fashion as to inflict injury upon the public at large, or upon any substantial group of the people. . . . Neither property rights nor contract rights are absolute; for government cannot exist if the citizen % m-ay at will use his property to the detriment of his fellows, or exercise his freedom of contract to do them harm. Equally fundamental with the private right is that of the public to regulate it in the common interest. ... So far as the requirement of duo process is concerned, and in tl»e absence of other Constitutional restriction, a State is free to adopt whatever economic policy may reasonably be deemed to promote public welfare, and*to enforce that policy by legislation adapted to ite purpose. . . . Price control, like any other form of regulation, is, unconstitutional only if arbitrary, discriminatory or demonstrably irrelevant to the. policy the Legislature is fireo to adopt, and hence an unnecessary and unwarranted interference with individual liberty." "Takes Away Consumer's Liberty." From the Minority Opinion.—''Not only does the statute interfere arbitrarily with the rights of the little grocer to conduct his business according to standards long accepted—complete destruction may follow; but it takes away the liberty of 12,000,000 consumers to buy a necessity of life in an open market. . . . The power thus to regulate private business can bo invoked, only under special circumstances. It may be so invoked when the Legislature is dealing with a paramount industry upon which the prosperity of the entire State in large measure depends. It may not be invoked when we are dealing with an ordinary business, essentially private in its nature. . . . This is not regulation, but management, control, dictation—it amounts to the <~ sprivation of the fundamental right which one has to conduct his own affaire honestly, and along customary lines." The similarity of the issue which, was at etake in this American case, on -which the highest Court in the land has pronounced, and the issue implicit in 'the case of the Auckland .m^j^TvdoiSd^wo^^i^SbOj.iSO^i^o^ced.