Editorial opinion
What's the secret?
Everything about this University
seems to be a secret. The Board
of Trustees holds closed
meetings. No one can get the nitty
gritty facts about the budget. And
when was the last time you saw
John W. Oswald, your University
president?
Whenever the University raises
tuition, Oswald apologizes, saying
that he does not like it but that it is
unavoidable. It has been so
unavoidable that tuition has
doubled since 1968.
But has it really been that
unavoidable? The people who
know, the people who prepare the
University's budget, are not per
mitted to let students see the in
formation they need to prove that
increases are unavoidable.
Is the tuition increase necessary
because the state legislature did
not give the University all the
Step right up! Today is your last chance to take
advantage of a great special offer brought to you by
the State College Area League of Women Voters.
Every day this week, League volunteers have
been conducting Centre County voter registration
at the Glennland Building on S. Pugh Street, less
than a block from campus.
The deadline for registering in town without a trip
to Bellefonte is 6 p.m. today. You have just a few
more hours to get your ticket to all the benefits of
being registered to vote locally:
—The chance to vote in the community where
you live.
—The chance to participate in making the local
d:Collegian
DIANE M. NOTTLE
Editor
BOARD OF EDITORS: MANAGING EDITOR, Steve Ostrosky; EDITORIAL EDITOR, Barb
White, NEWS EDITOR, Glenda Gephart; ASSISTANT NEWS EDITOR, Ben Weller; LAYOUT
EDITORS, Jan Chaplick, Cathy Cipolla; COPY EDITORS, Steve Auerweck, Nancy Postrel,
Terry Walker, SPORTS EDITOR, Rick Starr; ASSISTANT SPORTS EDITORS, Turn Panaccio,
Jeff Young. PHOTO EDITOR, Ed Golomb; ASSISTANT PHOTO EDITOR, Ed Palse,
CARTOONIST, Tom Gibb; WEATHER REPORTER, Brian Thomas
REVOLUTION
CAUSES CHANGE
The Revolutionary War began when
citizens were unjustly taxed, As students who
are unjustly taxed, we can collectively wage a
new kind of revolution. We can register to
vote. We should remember that our silence
will permit an unjust tax to continue. Your
passivity and apathy will permit a kind of
tyranny here in Centre County to persist.
TO VOTE IS REVOLUTIONARY
Ell
Taxation without representatiOn is tyranny.
Eil
For info: Call US
***********
money it requested? Or is the
tuition increase necessary
because there is fat in the Univer
sity budget? State legislators have
said they feel the University is not
operated nearly as efficiently as it
could be and the budget is not
nearly as tight as it could be.
Is that fat there? Are the tuition
increases unavoidable? The Un
dergraduate Student Government
is trying to find the answers to
these questions and establish
priorities for the distribution of
University funds.
USG would like to set up a
tuition study commission com
posed of three administrators,
three faculty members and three
students.
Commission members would
have the privilege of seeing that
top-secret budget information so
they can find out if Penn State
Special offer
LAST D
137 S. Pugh
political decisions that affect your life.
—The chance to vote in the May 2 t primary elec
tion for your party's candidates for governor, U.S.
Senate and House of Representatives, and state
Senate and House.
—And many, many more.
Even if you miss out on this offer, the League will
give you another chance at no extra cost. Voter
registration will also be held 11 a.m. to 5 p.m.
tomorrow in the Nittany Mall Community Room.
So sign up now. No box tops, no reasonable fac
similes needed. Just go down to the Glennland
Building today.
Register to vote in Centre County.
CYNTHIA A. ASHEAR
Business Manager
L****l
really should have the third highest
tuition of the country's 69 land
grant institutions.
Three days ago USG President
George Cemusca sent a letter to
Oswald asking him to appoint the
three administrators for the com
mission. Cernusca has received no
reply.
If the tuition increases are
necessary, Oswald should be glad
to appoint the three administrators
because the commission will
establish his credibility. If Oswald
refuses to appoint them, it will be
similar to President Nixon's saying
he is doing his own Watergate in
vestigation and does not need the
assistance or hindrance of
another agency.
The decision is Oswald's. But
the ' secret will be out, no matter
what he decides.
Grievance policy
Members of the University community
who wish to file formal grievances over
any content of The Daily Collegian
should address correspondence to the
Collegian's Committee on Accuracy and
Fair Play in care — of the executive
secretary of Collegian, Inc., publisher of
The Daily Collegian.
Grievances may be sent to Curtis
Reeve, c-o The Daily Collegian, Box 487,
State College, Pa. 16801.
A letter arrived from a Chicago reader
the other day, and clipped to it was a
Reichsbanknote for elnhundert mlllionen
mark. The paper was of poor-quality
magazine stock, while the money itself
was worth so little the government had
only printed one side of it.
The bill's sender wrote: "In 1923 I
worked in Germany on a construction
job, and we got paid twice a week. The
paymaster carried a suitcase full of
money like the one bill I am enclosing. It
sure could happen here. I feel sorry for
many people like myself. I worked 45
years with the same firm, never got
union wages, but saved a little money.
Each year the purchasing power of my
savings is getting less and less. Did it
pay for me to save all. those years?"
Prices are not yet going up so rapidly
that people have to be paid twice a week
so they can get to the grocery store
before their wages lose their purchasing
power, but the rate of the price rise is
accelerating. At the same time, the
amount of inflation that the government
finds normal or acceptable has been
growing and growing.
During the Eisenhower years a 2.5 to 3
percent rise was thought necessary to
maintain full employment and
prosperity. In the Kennedy years that
moved up to around the four percent
plus level, and into the five to six percent
range! under Johnson. Now with an
actual inflationary rate that could be as
high as 15 to 16 percent, they'd• be
delighted to settle for 10 percent a year.
Nevertheless, what goes up doesn't
necessarily have to come down, and
Murray Rothbard, the right-wing
libertarian economist, doesn't think
prices will. "This year is more like 1927
than 1929, but the key difference is that
then we were still on the gold standard,
and so they could deflate the money.
The government today will never deflate,
so I don't think we'll get a classic 1929
crash but something more like the 1923
German thing."
Rothbard points out that the Nixon
Administration made a stab at checking
the increase in the money supply, but
when the inevitable recession began to
hit them they panicked and went back to
cheap money. No government,
Republican or Democrat, is prepared to
take a recession, even the quick one that
Rothbard estimates is all that would be
necessary. "If we really had a free market
recession, it would be over before people
bellyache about it," he says, comparing
the performance of the economy now
with its laissez-faire past, when
recessions were very sharp but of short
duration.
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dollar dilemma
It's government intervention, he
asserts, which has lengthened them and
which made 1929 and the Depression an
object of such fright, even for those too
young to remember. Rothbard thinks we
have the savings and borrowing power to
take a quick unemployment snap to get
the inflationary infection out of our
system, but he's poking around with a
non-debatable topic. Even though it
requires more and more inflation to
crank up proportionately fewer and fewer
jobs, no one in Washington, with a few
exceptions like Sen. Proxmire of
Wisconsin and Arthur Burns, the
Chairman of the Federal Reserve, are
willing to contemplate a change from
policies and practices that are serving us
less and less well with each successive
announcement of the monthly money
figures.
Increasing the money supply looks
sexy at the early stages of inflation
because, Rothbard believes, prices don't
rise as fast, at first, for the reason that
people are saving their money and
waiting for prices to come down. Then,
when it becomes obvious prices never
will drop again, the rush to buy and
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borrow is on, a rush that gets more
frantic as people learn how hard it is to
protect their money.
Only a few people are .Wealthy enough
to do this. The rest suffer even with cost
of-living escalator clauses, which give
little protection but encourage more
inflationary throwing of money around.
A very small minority, of course, can
make money from the shrinking dollar;
and they are the bankers who get first
crack at the newly printed money,
because the first spenders get to buy at
the old, lower prices. By the time the
money gets to the rest of us, the sellers
have caught on and the prices have
caught up to the cheapened dollar.
This form of robbery was bad enough
in the old days, when the government
printed greenbacks. But now money is
created even faster and more deceptively
without a printing press by giving banks
the power to create credit, which is the
power to lend money that doesn't exist.
"Under these circumstances," Rothbard
remarks, "it would be better to have a
king. At least he'd own something and
have an incentive to protect it."
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