Don't Feed Black Market Greed, a 1946 OPA ceiling-price poster

Don't Feed Black Market Greed is a May 1946 Office of Price Administration poster signed by Robbins. A huge caricatured mouth swallows a list of scarce goods, from meat and nylons to new and used cars, above the order "Pay no more than ceiling prices" (NAID 514140).

What the sheet prints

The villain is a mouth. It has a long pointed nose and chin and no body, and into it flows a band of goods typed out like an inventory. Red dollar signs, struck through with arrows, fly toward it. The text is short.

don't feed black market greed

PAY NO MORE THAN CEILING PRICES

meat, nylons, butter, irons, electric toasters, washing machines, refrigerators, glass, cement, brick, lumber, new cars, used cars

UNITED STATES OFFICE OF PRICE ADMINISTRATION WASHINGTON 25 D. C. INF-P2727 (5-46)

How to read it

The OPA code on the imprint, INF-P2727 (5-46), dates the printing to May 1946, months after the shooting war ended. The list tells you what was short: building materials, appliances, cars, food, stockings. The poster's answer to the shortage is to name a moral fault, greed, and to tell the buyer not to feed it.

The archive tags it with scapegoating and fear appeal. The scapegoat is the right word. A personified mouth standing in for a market problem is an old device, and readers should notice that the drawing points at a vice, greed, rather than at a price, a supply, or a rule.

The liberty reading

Here the record is honestly open to two readings. One is that ceiling prices protected ordinary buyers while factories converted back from war work. The other is that a legal maximum below what buyers would pay is itself a cause of the black market the poster condemns, and that the government was blaming sellers and buyers for a gap its own rule created. This site takes the second reading as the one to keep in view: a price control enforced by asking citizens to police each other's purchases puts a heavy load on voluntary exchange. Both readings agree that the poster settles nothing with evidence. It settles it with a mouth.

Related sheets: Help your OPA fight inflation and Report over-ceiling prices to the OPA, both 1946, in the FRAME archive.