Felix Frankfurter

“ We are relieved from a consideration of any such question because Congress chose not to make ceiling price the measure of 'just compensation.' It is therefore an inescapable judicial duty to explore the elements relevant to just compensation even for the taking of property which, as to voluntary transactions, is subject to price control. The standard of just compensation is not mechanically to be replaced by ceiling prices. ”

“ It takes us some distance neither wholly to accept nor wholly to reject price ceilings as just compensation. The complications introduced by the displacement of free market prices by controlled prices serve to intensify the usual wariness against undue generalizations in ascertaining the value of specific property taken for public purposes. ”

“ We need not decide whether costs exceeding the ceiling price are always relevant to just compensation or the extent to which they may qualify the ceiling price. It is enough to hold that, if Commodities' costs, fairly measured, were greater than the ceiling price for pepper, it is fair to take them into account. ”

“ II. The Court of Claims appears to have recognized as a component of just compensation the right of a property owner to withhold his property for some future opportunity of enhanced realization, even though he be in the same boat with all other owners for whom the ceiling price is a fair measure. In its bearing upon our immediate problem, recognition of such a 'retention value' as part of the contemporaneous value of what was taken would have required the power to 'divine prophetically' the war's end and the lifting of controls by Congress as well as the state of the pepper market thereafter. ”

“ The diffused loss of profit throughout the nation's economy must be borne as a part of the common lot. Of a different order of loss would be a taking of the pepper at ceiling prices, if the ceiling price was far below the cost of the pepper to Commodities and such cost was incurred in the normal course of long-term holding operations. ”

“ But such price regulation is the imposition of the will of outsiders and not the distillation of freely directed wills guided by self-interest. The norm of price fixing by government is thus very different from the usual price fixing by free exchange. Governmental price fixing carries its own valid titles for respect by the courts. But it does not carry that title of self-determination, as it were, which is implied by a free market price. ”

“ The replacement of the free jostling of the desires of buyers and sellers by government edict is no doubt due to the realization that under the abnormal circumstances of war a free market in the sense of being uncontrolled is not a fair market. ”

“ It is significant that Congress provided in § 4 (d) of the Emergency Price Control Act that 'Nothing in this Act shall be construed to require any person to sell any commodity * * *.' 56 Stat. 28, 50 U.S.Appendix, § 904 (d) , 50 U.S.C.A.Appendix, § 904 (d) . This protective provision is peculiarly applicable to sellers who had acquired nonperishable property by way of reasonable investment at costs above the ceiling price. ”