Yet in the face of the airlines’ unanimous approval of the Act, an objective study of the testimony raises a serious question as to its soundness. Sifting out the wheat from the chaff, one could not help wondering whether Solomon himself, with the aid of all of his wives, could have administered such a document. Providing as it does for economic regulation of privately owned industries by political appointees, the Act flies in the face of the fundamental fact that politics and economics function under different basic precepts; in the one the ballot box calls the turn, in the other the cold arithmetic of an inescapable financial statement. But if the airlines’ endorsement of “reasonable regulation” proved open to question, the testimony before the Committee left no doubt that recent regulation had been, in fact, wholly unreasonable. It developed that the Civil Aeronautics Board had cut the mail rates in 1945 to a point well below the actual cost of transporting the mail. Furthermore it had authorized widespread duplication of existing services and had subsidized these duplicating services in competition with those already established. And when this action resulted in crippling losses, the Board compounded its blunder by making retroactive increases in mail which had the effect of putting the whole rate structure on a cost-plus basis. Captain Eddie Rickenbacker, of Eastern Airlines, voiced the position of the “Big Four” when he said, “The confused state of mail rates destroys all incentive for economy and efficiency—it discourages good management and high performance. It puts a penalty on accomplishment, and rewards the wasteful and inefficient.” Another diagnosis of the airline ills was offered by Harold A. Jones, a member of the Civil Aeronautics Board itself, when speaking before the San Francisco Advertising Club. The airlines, he thought, were ill from a “mysterious disease known as ‘subsiditis,’” which disease he ranked “somewhere between bubonic plague and leprosy.” However his shotgun diagnosis lacked clinical confirmation before the Senate Committee by his boss, Joseph J. O’Connell, Jr., chairman of the Civil Aeronautics Board. “We are not in a position,” testified Mr. O’Connell, “to give an accurate estimate as to the amount of the total air-mail pay bill which represents fair compensation for the carriage of the mail, and that portion that represents subsidy.”