Washington, March 7.

BEWILDERED business men, fully aware that the government has the power of virtual confiscation and that they must comply with the edicts of the NRA, are nevertheless frankly asking how they are going to fulfill the request of the administration that hours be shortened and wages not merely spread among more workers but actually increased.

The Blue Eagle campaign last summer had for its object the fixing of a minimum wage and pledged business to make equitable readjustments" above the minimum for all other workers. But today many people who were not in the minimum wage class are working shorter hours and getting less in their pay envelopes than before.

The government's new plan is to increase the total amount to be given labor. This is to be accomplished by an increase in the pay envelopes all along the line. This means added costs. It also means less profits for stockholders. The latter aspect will not cause much gnashing of teeth or weeping nowadays, for stockholders as a class are supposed to be a relatively small number of persons anyway. They are expected to benefit some day when prosperity comes back.

But the problem is not with those businesses which now have profits, it is with those that are on the edge of the red or on the deficit side already. The only remedy suggested hereabouts is that so called marginal producers shall have some special immunity. Thus small businesses and individual proprietors of little shops are not expected, according to various plans under consideration, to do what the large businesses are supposed to do.

In other words what is being discussed is a form of penalty on efficiency or size, a government dole or subsidy to those who are unable to compete with other units in the same line of business. This may come in the form of special grants or exemptions from working hours or wages or it may come in the extension of capital credit through the enlargement of the credit system now being widely discussed.

It has been evident from the beginning that sooner or later "planned economy" would come flatly up against the question of distinguishing between the efficient and the inefficient, between the people who through years of advertising or successful merchandising have built up a certain volume of business and those who have been hanging on, hoping some miracle would happen by which they would get a larger and larger share of their competitors' volume. But with government aid it will mean that arbitrarily the amount of volume will be allocated so that the total will somehow be more widely distributed.

Just how this can be accomplished without a more drastic control of every aspect of business, especially wage levels, than is in operation today is a mystery. Indeed, the chances are that the planned economy schemes will never work successfully until government control has been extended to include regulation of all phases of competition. The alternative--for the President himself has asked for substitute plans--is being pressed very hard by various economists.

At one of the group meetings of the code authorities, Dr. Hettinger, one of the NRA's own economists, in a frank debate with General Johnson questioned the soundness of the latter's request that hours be decreased and payrolls augmented too. The objection made was against any inflexible rule or percentage. It was asserted that the consumer industries are in good shape and that less than ten per cent of the unemployed today are from those consumer businesses, whereas reliable figues show that 90 per cent of the idle originally were at work in heavier industries or service businesses related to them.

Just how the heavier industries can be stimulated is one of the big questions that has been on the administration's table for many months without any apparent interest in the subject until about a month ago.

There are estimates to the effect that about $20,000,000,000 of business of a replacement character is available the moment capital markets can be revived. The amendment of the securities act and the establishment of an intermediate credit system are two steps which have been delayed but which are deemed essential to the reopening of the heavier industries.

The administration is making a servey of the problem in the hope of finding in what channels capital can be most useful. It would be private industry borrowing rather than government spending on public projects. If the theory is sound, then many millions of workers can be absorbed in the so-called durable goods industries and this in turn would aid the consumer-businesses and permit the payment of higher wages.

Most of the business men who come here concede the importance of increasing purchasing power and they do not argue for more than a fair return on capital. But what they keep asking is how rigid rules and laws can permit business to develop or expand at all. The 30-hour week bill in its present form is a big obstacle, in the opinion of most of the industrial and business delegates here for the big NRA meetings, and there is reason to believe that General Johnson's opposition to a flat 30-hour week is shared by the President, who wants all such questions worked out by the NRA with sufficient power and authority to make whatevere modifications or changes are necessary as the government acquires more experience in the matter of regulating industrial units.