ABSTRACT
A national "policy" often emerges as the result of an accretion of numerous individual decisions, subject to different pressures, and made over a long time, rather than from plans and goals formulated by a governing body. The consequence of such a process is that the policy, formed after the fact, takes on some of the contradictions accumulated over separate and disparate decisions. Our present materials policy falls into this category; it is a piecemeal affair.
