[Milsurplus] Tax Dollars At Work, summary

[Hubert Miller]

Sounds to me, regarding WW2, that at first there was wholesale dumping or destruction, but around 1948, the War Assets Administration
came into being, to try to systematically dispose of the surplus for value. I think i'm going to look into these dates some more, as well as
one can anyway. I have seen some of the W.A.A. prices on individual electronic units and at first, the prices were totally unrealistic, way
high. That's such a contrast to a few years earlier when the value was judged to be nil :  "Over the side!"   The W.A.A. prices i have seen
that DID seem like bargains were for ships or aircraft. I have a list of prices for ships somewhere. I could have afforded to buy a Liberty
ship to live on, but the space rent and yearly hull maintenance would have been a killer. I read that Paul Mantz bought a whole airfield
full of excess ( excess ) aircraft, had almost all scrapped, but kept one or two for his own use.   W.A.A. seems to have kind of gone nowhere
and around 1948 the surplus dealers in the U.S.A. were buying by the lb. instead of the W.A.A.'s optimistic and unrealistic per-unit or
per-lot prices.

I have heard times before that there were agreements between U.S. manufacturers and the military that items maybe competitive to their
civilian output could not be repatriated. I tend to disbelieve this and i call it a folk myth but i'm open to more evidence. I did see one
article in a late WW2 Radio News magazine that expressed  concern over how to deal with massive stocks of surplus production.

Gordon Elliot White in his "Surplus Sidelights" articles in CQ magazine recounted a couple episodes where surplus dealers bought some
item from one government agency, for some low per lb. price, and sold the same item for retail prices to another government agency.

I read somewhere else that Gandhi, the India independence movement leader, had criticized the postwar destruction of material which
would have been useful for poor countries, items such as trucks and bulldozers, for example. Maybe so. I should note that i'm not one
of the Gandhi worshippers; i'm aware of his advice to British and to European Jews in the face of Nazi violence.  Nonviolence doesn't
work as a tactic, for example, when faced with a charging grizzly bear.
-H


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