National Bankruptcy and Disaster Inevitable Result of Roosevelt's Solving Unemployment, Agree Sinclair, Fish

President Roosevelt's method of solving unemployment and the depression as shown by the figures of the A. F. of L. will inevitably lead to national bankruptcy and disaster, Upton Sinclair and Hamilton Fish, Jr. '10, agreed in a debate last night held under the auspices of the Ford Hall Forum. On the question "Resolved, That production for use shall supplant production for profit," the two speakers differed widely. First to speak, Sinclair took the affirmative, reiterating the principles of his Epic Plan.

"To make good citizens and willing workers into bums and beggars is a social crime, now being committed wholesale in the United States," he charged.

"I am just as much a socialist as over, but what I propose to the business men and taxpayers of America is to put the unemployed to work for themselves. Mind you, I don't propose to have them compete with private industry.

"Under the present system," Sinclair continued, "all that the business men are doing is paying out dole in taxes, which the unemployed return by spending in their stores. Thus, the national debt is rising by the billions, and these greedy business men will have to pay this debt in increased taxes."

Congressman Fish, admitting the existence of faults in the capitalist system as it now stands, saw a remedy for the more flagrant abuses in the future in such measures as the Securities Act and the abolition of tax-exempt bonds with a view to putting capital into the hands of industry rather than into those of the government.

As a solution for the specific situation today, he advocated the reestablishment of the sound principles of American government which have put the country's laboring class in a position of greater comfort than in any other country in the world. Such principles, he continued, will lead to greater confidence and that, in turn to business conditions from which reform may most effectively be made.