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that point. I knew that the price of cotton went up when there was a shortage of cotton, the boll weevil, or some other disaster. I did know that much, but I didn't think too much about that.
None of these things that I suggested to Roosevelt were in my mind a filled-out, thought-out plan. They were props to be introduced in an emergency. Some of them, like public works, were to be considered as short term emergencies. The other things, or most of them, I thought of as being suitable for an industrial economy, necessary for an industrial economy, and matters which were practical because they had been tried out and found successful in industrial economics, such as England and Germany. They had been found practical and effective in some of the states of the United States. Others which had never been put into law were nevertheless in practice in certain of our industries voluntarily, and were much more drastic than anything we would have thought of introducing as legislation - the whole retirement system of the General Electric Company, for instance. They had a kind of old age pension and unemployment pension in the retirement system and were much more drastic in their charges upon the industry than anything we thought of proposing for law. So we had examples to look at, knowing
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