WEBVTT

NOTE Regulation and Public Utilities

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So, or rye whiskey. So then in the 1880s, when blended whiskey becomes this first discover, instead of speaking, they started taking these whiskeys and blending them, he thought it was evil, it was adulteration, sin, because whiskey means pure whiskey, and any blending then becomes evil and sinful and adulteration. It should be outlawed. If they were outlawing blended whiskey, it's a schmuck, a really bizarre point of view, but it fits in with the definition. Somehow, the definition has to be fixed forever. It means you can't innovate. You can't innovate in business.

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If you ever change the name, the name always has to be whiskey means pure rye and can't

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mean a blend.

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So this freezes the status quo, it means you can't compete, you can't innovate very well.

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And this, of course, is the purpose of the whole thing.

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Anyway, on sugar, he says that the United States should be self-sufficient in sugar,

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it should outlaw sugar imports.

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He calls for very high power upon sugar imports.

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And notice there's a very little sugar in the United States, it's not economic, there's no sugar in the United States, essentially it's much more economic to import sugar over the Dominican Republic and Cuba, Hawaii, which is then not U.S. property, etc., etc.

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He says, no, no, you have to have self-sufficiency in sugar, so he, of course, joins the Republican Party, but the Republican Party wasn't the party of pietism and pie tariffs,

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and it immediately fits in beautifully with the Republican ideology.

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He becomes a state chemist for the state of Indiana and he calls for passing a law regulating

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the manufacture and sale of chemical fertilizers to try to restrict that.

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And then he starts going into the sugar manufacturing business himself.

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He buys a defunct sugar plant, beet sugar plant, and tries to organize a glucose plant

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in Indiana.

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It always flops, the guy's a total flop-a-roo, a terrible entrepreneur, and tries to make

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sugar from sorghum cane, that doesn't work either.

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January 1883, by this time he's one of America's leading sugar chemists and he gives a speech

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before the Indiana State Board of Agriculture and he says, quote, the consumption of sugar

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is a measure of progress in civilization.

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He thundered, quote, childhood without candy would be heaven without hearts, unquote.

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And then these days, of course, everybody's anti-sugar, it brings a beautiful note, childhood

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without candy, it would be heaven without harps.

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He then added without any trace of irony that nothing is ever gained for a cause by an overstatement

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of its claims.

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He also kept pushing the idea of manufacturing sugar from sorghum, which is one of his big

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shticks that he flopped as an entrepreneur of this.

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He kept pushing that for many years until it finally became a total flop-a-roo to try

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to get government aid and government subsidies for this and so forth and so on.

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At this point, the Federal Commission of Agriculture had one department, one agricultural chemist and they fired him.

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He was an obstreperous, notorious character named Dr. Peter Kodyer. He was a big pro-sorghum fan and one of the specialized, subsidized sorghum.

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So the sorghum growers were apparently politically powerful, so when they kicked him out, they wanted to replace him with some kind of also pro-sorghum,

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and they got Wiley in as the Department of Agriculture chemist, the chief chemist in 1883.

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He then takes over and becomes a federal government official from then on.

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So he immediately agitates for protective tariff for foreign sugar, subsidies for domestic

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sugar and all that.

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He was asked, by the way, this question, interestingly, a typical racist Republican at that time, he

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was asked, what would happen if foreign sugar growers, they were put out of work by a high

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American protective tariff?

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and he said, the native, he said, quote, suddenly lolling in the sun, can look up and see coconuts

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and bananas, he will not starve nor freeze, let him eat coconuts, typical attitude of the

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Republican Party toward the third world, period, and in scientific work for the part of agriculture

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he spent most of his time and energy trying to subsidize the sugar industry, searching

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for methods to produce sugar from sorghum, wasting on a lot of research funds in this

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by the way, his sorghum experiments were custom flops, even though he was a big shot, he gained more and more of a big shot during the 1880s

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his experiments were like trying to get sugar out of sorghum with custom flop-a-roos

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this by the way often happens in the world, you find out people flop all the time, yet they keep rising and eminent as they flop

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they become bigger shots with each failure

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he got congressional appropriations all the time from Senator Plum of Kansas

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Well, he came from Kansas. Kansas had a lot of sorghum growers, and so of course he kept feeding Wiley funds to try to help out the sorghum people in Kansas, sorghum farmers.

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Anyway, but he kept growing in eminence, and when Cleveland came in 1884, he wasn't kicked out for some reason.

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Cleveland appointed Wiley's old friend as the commissioner of agriculture and he got the guy to keep him in office even though he was a Republican

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and by the mid 1890s it was clear to everybody, even Wiley, that sorghum was not the way out

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he couldn't produce sugar from sorghum with any kind of economic, economically

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he blamed the misfires not on his own crazy schemes nor on his own consistent string of research failure

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He didn't blame him on the subsidy or the whole idea. He blamed him on the fact that sugar tariff wasn't high enough yet to keep increasing the prohibit foreign sugar.

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So his other big shtick was, one of the big things was to subsidize the American sugar industry and keep out foreign sugar.

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His other big thing was to outlaw impure products, what he called impure.

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And he meant things like, let's say, changing definitions, like when whiskey was impure.

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He also was the main guy behind the outlawing of olium margarine.

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The olium margarine was a big new thing in the 1890s, let's say.

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Looks like butter, tastes like butter, is much cheaper.

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Therefore, of course, the butter interests were headed by the Wisconsin dairy people, one of the outlaws.

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Why are they, of course, leading the pack? It's an evil thing. It's adulteration.

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It's changing the definition. It's not really butter. You kind of confuse the public.

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And so they levied a special tax on olium margarine.

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As a matter of fact, only a margarine until the 1940s was illegal.

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You had to sell it white, because you couldn't make it have it look like butter.

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And so you could buy a margarine in the stores with an icky white sort of gray color,

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along with it you had a tube of yellow color.

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You could squirt the yellow tube over and make it look like butter.

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Since World War II, the stranglehold of the butter interests, dairy interests, was broken.

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We couldn't have decent-looking only a margarine.

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He tasted okay but looked terrible, you see. Of course, the butter interests knew that and they wanted to keep it, don't outlaw the idea of yellow oil and margarine.

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Of course, Wiley is behind with leading the pack in this thing.

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So, why did he call for a National Pure Food and Drug Act? Pure food to outlaw these so-called impurities, outlaw changes really, competition with butter, competition with oil products.

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But he was not alone, he was joined with this idea of a national pure food and drug app by a whole bunch of the organized retailers, organized wholesale grocers, organized retailers, organized food interests, for example, the organized grocers, the National Grocers Association had a convention in 1888, they called for a law, quote, to protect the honest businessman from the competition of the adulterator. What they meant by adulterator was not poison or anything, or fraudulent,

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The dairy producers said they wanted protection for such fraud as oleomargeron, corn and hog roasters, and wanted protection against adulterated lard, as they called it, different kinds of lard, which competed with heavy butterfat lard, heavy greasy lard, and of course, so the dairy interests wanted to have this outline, the roastering interests, and intellectuals, technologists, like Wiley, wanted to have cushy jobs for inspectors, for chemists,

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would test and see whether it was adulteration, quote-unquote.

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The adulterated law, the law against adulterated law passed the Senate, the House, but it failed

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in the Senate because of the cottonseed oil interests who were making law of cottonseed,

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new kind of law which is better and tastier or whatever it is, cheaper, whatever the thing

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is, and of course they managed to stop that.

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At any rate, after many years of this agitation, with Teddy Roosevelt coming in, they finally got their way, this whole organ on the farm interest, the grocery interest, the dairy interest, et cetera, plus Wiley and his technologists.

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By the way, speaking for one of these bills, before the Franklin Institute scientific body, Dr. Wiley conceded that only a small part of food adulteration injures the consumer.

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He wasn't worried about that. He didn't say they poisoned the consumer. There's nothing to that, he said.

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He said, he was more worried about the consumers spending their money in ways that he widely

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considered unwise.

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He was trying to defend our pocketbook.

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He said, the poor were purchasing food, quote, was ostensibly pure and nutritious, but in

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reality valueless.

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The idea is you outlaw food that technology is considered not valuable, like outlawing

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junk food.

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I knew kids in Virginia were raised on Coca-Cola instead of milk.

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What are you going to do?

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Outlaw Coca-Cola.

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But see, his concern for the consumer's pocketbook is very much like doctors, like physicians

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who want to outlaw what they consider quack cures, because the public is wasting their

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money on them.

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Not because it harms the public.

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They say they're wasting their money and it's not really valuable.

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Well, their concern for the consumer's pocketbook doesn't extend to their own money, of course.

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They want to be the only ones fattening on the consumer.

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They don't want any competition in rating the consumer's pocketbook.

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And so, in the name of helping the consumers, protecting them against oleomarginine, protecting

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against Coca-Cola, whatever happens to me, against blended whiskey, the idea is to cartelize the existing status quo, freeze the status quo, so to speak.

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Yeah, as I say, Wiley considered a fraudulent to call blended whiskey, whiskey.

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He said, no, no, the term whiskey must be confined to straight whiskey, it's impure.

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Beach Sugar Association, of course, they all love Wiley, all these guys, the sugar people, of course, are crazy about him.

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Anyway, when Penny Roosevelt comes in,

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he of course pushes this, and the Pure Food and Drug Act, which Wiley had been agitating for for twenty-five years or so, was finally passed.

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And of course when it was passed,

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Roosevelt obviously appoints Wiley as the Food and Drug Commissioner,

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the educator for that and Wiley reaches the summit of existence in 1906

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as our first food and drug commissioner

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interesting thing is what happens, he gets his comeuppance though, Wiley, he's kind of cute

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here he was a big sugar fan

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as we know

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with the big love of his life

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the first thing that Wiley calls for after he gets to be commissioner of the

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food and drug commissioner

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that was saccharin

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saccharin was of course the big competitor of sugar

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and none of the nonsense about saccharin causing cancer then, the saccharin just didn't like saccharin

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He says we have to outlaw saccharin, it's impure, it's adulterous, and it so turned out that Teddy Roosevelt used to have to take saccharin in his coffee every morning, he was one of the early saccharin people, so he had a big clash on this, and Teddy Roosevelt said this guy's a nut, he's trying to outlaw my saccharin, so what he does is, not only does he point a higher board than the department of pass on this Teddy Roosevelt, and he finally, in a special

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So he goes over Wiley and he appoints a new commission, a new board of the society's matters.

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As chairman of the board, he appoints Ira Remsen, the guy that discovered sacra, the inventor of the discoverer of sacra, the special dig at Wiley.

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So Wiley gets his comeuppance at long last, and as I say, it was Wiley, it was a great poetic justice for Wiley to be hoisted on the part of sacra, the big sugar thing.

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The biographer, if you're interested in reading about Wiley, there's an interesting biography of him by a guy named Anderson called Health of a Nation.

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Anderson, of course, loves Wiley, thinks he's the greatest God since Jesus practically, but he had an interesting summation of Wiley.

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He said about Wiley, quote, Science filled a void left by loss of faith.

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In other words, here he grows up as a pious Campbellite, he loses his religion, but he becomes a salvation by science.

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Science full of void left by loss of faith. Perhaps Wiley's views stem from his

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heritage of evangelical Christianity, a heritage whose theological superstructure

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had lost its meaning for him, but his burning zeal for social justice remained.

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I mean, he's crushing everybody else, imposing his power on everybody else

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through government. He can call that social justice. I've got another name for it.

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Anyway, that's the basic fact. And Wiley is really typical of all these

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guys, all these progressive intellectuals and technocrats. It's a good case study.

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Okay, well, last time the National Civic Federation was the main organization, as Weinstein points

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out, which provided the impetus for what you can call corporatism or the new dispensation

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of government-industry partnership or welfare-statism or welfare-warfare-statism.

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It was first founded in Chicago, the Chicago Civic Federation back in 1898, I think.

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and they had a conference on trusts and we generally liked it, etc., and finally became

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a, was organized in 1900 out of that Chicago conference, went national, so to speak, to

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the National Civic Federation and was organized by Ralph Easley, he was a former school teacher

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and journalist and executive director of this outfit.

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The Chicago Civic Federation, which is the start of all this, first came about, began

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because of a guy, a very interesting Englishman, a very important English journalist named

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William T. Stead, who was the editor of the London Times, which still is, in those days

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certainly was the most influential English organ, and sort of reflected government opinion.

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And the editor at that point of the reviewer views, he became editor of London Times a

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little bit later, anyway, he was a big corporatist type, he was essentially a friend and disciple

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of Cecil Rhodes, organized the secret, in those days the secret Rhodes organization,

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and both fellowships and both society to push the idea of one of the British Empire and

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two of general statism, state and capitalist, capital government, partnership and intervention.

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He's also a big, he came to Chicago, he's a big pietist of course, he came to Chicago

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to denounce vice, gambling and prostitution and he, as we'll see a little bit later, this

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This also comes in with urban progressive reform, a progressive period, a big urban

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reform situation.

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I'm about to close that door.

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Who are these jerks?

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It's not a hall of higher learning.

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Okay.

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And we'll see either today or probably the next time that the urban reform comes along

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with us, along with the general corporatist welfare state idea, the idea of cleaning up

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of Cities and essentially purging ethnic liturgicals and working class types and seizing control

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by pious businessmen, upper class businessmen. The Weinstein book talks a lot about that

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of course, we'll get into that a little bit later. Anyway, it was a mass meeting in November

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at Chicago Civic Center Club in November 1893, where Stead was railing against prostitution

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against Prostitution and Vice, etc. and he formed the so-called Civic Church in London

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and he tried to set the same thing up in Chicago and they were interested in this

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and they set up the Chicago Civic Federation as a result

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the president of the Chicago Civic Federation was Lyman Yage

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who later became Secretary of the Treasury, head of the First National Bank of Chicago

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and a big Rockefeller person, in other words

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you have to realize that Rockefeller was a dedicated Baptist all his life

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and so this was fitted in very nicely with pious concerns and the secretary of this after

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was the same Ralph Easley, a later founder of the National Civic Federation. So it gets

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its start in 1893, 1894 after instead, yeah, first National Bank of Chicago. That was by

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name Gage who was the president of this thing and Easley was the executive director. Gage

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He later became Secretary of the Treasury under McKinley when McKinley became President.

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And another thing about Stead is that he was a disciple of John Ruskin who was a big art

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critic and medieval socialist and was somebody who was very pro-state, very anti-capitalist.

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Yeah, that's the guy. No, that's the guy named Gage. He was the president of the Chicago

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Civic Federation. Instead of being an Englishman, he was simply inspired by the Chicago Civic

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Federation. He spoke and so forth, and then he got the, he inspired these businessmen

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in Chicago to set up the Chicago Civic Federation and continue the great work that Stead has.

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Stead was like an evangelist. He comes to Chicago, he puts everybody up, they form this

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in this organization and he goes back to England, okay, sorry that was, Stead was on the executive

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committee of Cecil Rhodes, what happened was at Oxford, Cecil Rhodes was also influenced

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by Ruskin and this idea of new form medieval socialism so to speak, and Rhodes instead

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formed in 1891 a secret society called the Circle of Initiates and which Rhodes was the

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I'm the leader of the executive committee, and most powerful people in England became

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members of this group, this secret group, including Lord Rothschild, who essentially

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helped finance it.

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We now have the Rhodes, of course, the big diamond magnate, so Rhodes helped finance

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it, and also Rothschild.

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They have a Rhodes-Rothschild secret society devoted to promoting British imperialism number

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one and two, statism, in other words, domestic statism, domestic welfare state, state control

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of Industry, and so forth, and so on.

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Anyway, the new economists, guys like Jencks, of what he mentioned, and Cummins, a corporatist

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economist, spoke at this conference, the Chicago Civic Federation Conference in 1900, a conference

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on trusts, and this inspired, I'd say, the success of this inspired easily in these guys

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to set up a national, to go national, set up a national civic federation, to push this

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and this thing on a large scale.

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They had in this National Civic Federation all the big business interests, the Rockefellers,

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the Morgans, the Rothschilds, they're all dumb-wits, they're all involved in this thing.

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Because even though they had differences of opinion on what the state should do, what

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the government should do, they all agreed on government intervention as a key thing.

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The, for example, by 1903, it was only founded in 1900, by 1903, the National Civic Federation

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included representatives of one third of world large American corporations. In other words,

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all corporations that were over 300 that had more than $10 million of assets, one third

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of them were involved in the National Civic Federation. George Perkins of course was heavily

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involved in it, being Morgan's main political person.

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And a whole bunch of people, Elihu Root, William Howard Taft, later president, Teddy Roosevelt

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I think himself was in it, the whole gang was in it, everybody was in it.

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Anyway, there was a clash, interestingly, between them and the National Association

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of Manufacturers, which also started about the same time, which in those days was a small

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business group.

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Nowadays, of course, it includes large as well as small business, but the NAM began

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as a small business anti-union group and they soon had big clashes, the NAM being much more

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of a laissez-faire asset at the time, and Easley writes an interesting and revealing

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He says, he condemned the NAM, he said, our enemy, he says, our major, our enemies, he

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writes this to a friend and supporter of the National Civic Federation, he says, quote,

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our enemies are the socialists among the labor people, it means the Marxists, etc., and the

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anarchists among the capitalists, what he meant by anarchists was NAM, in other words, laissez-faire

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and their advocates on capitalism, which he referred to as anarchists.

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So they saw themselves as a third force, and by the way, all the intellectuals saw themselves

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as a third force.

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On the one hand you have laissez-faire, which they consider to be outmoded or too competitive

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or whatever.

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On the other hand you have Marxian socialism, which is rising up in Europe, which they were

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against because it was essentially for some worker-proletarian oriented, allegedly anyway.

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So they saw themselves, these people, as a third force between Marxism, Leninism on the

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on one hand and laissez-faire capitalism on the other. This is the third way, the way

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of government industry cooperation, of cartelization, of general monopoly, corporatism as we can

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call it. And this same idea, so this idea is now in the air, it's being held by the

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Morgans, even by the Rockefellers, the whole most big businessmen in the United States

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and also in Western Europe. And we have to realize that same sort of thinking is going

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on in England and France and Germany, et cetera, that we have a third way and a way where,

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which the, instead of having class struggle, you don't have laissez-faire competition,

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and you don't have class struggle by politarying a capitalist, what you have is the nation,

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the organic nation, headed by the strong state, running everything, healing everything, collaborating,

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molding all forces together, headed by big government, the king, the president, whoever

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happens to be, and collaborating through associations of businessmen, associations of unions, associations

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and Intellectuals to Run the System, essentially the corporate state, as Mussolini would later

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call it.

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So this idea is now in the air in Western Europe and the United States.

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I mentioned before, it really starts in Germany with Bismarck and the German cartelists, the

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first real modern compulsory cartel system in the 1870s and 80s, where all the firms

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Professors are forced into a cartel association, forced to abide by the state-dominated price

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and production decisions.

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The cartel is run by the German government.

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And the intellectuals at the time, the German professors who were handing out the PhDs and

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American graduate students were going to, were calling themselves, Gustav Schmoller,

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the famous professor of history and economics at the University of Berlin, said very proudly,

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we at the University of Berlin, our function is to be the intellectual bodyguard of the

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House of Hohenzollern.

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In other words, the intellectual bodyguard of the emperor, of the dynasty.

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So this is a very frank statement, in other words, the function of intellectuals is the

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apologists for the government, apologists for the state, state is supposed to be absolute,

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running everything, interfering in everything, controlling everything, and the function of

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intellectuals is to propose it, to propagandize for it, apologize for it and help run it.

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This is the great blend of throne and order again, I don't know if I mentioned it last

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time.

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which has throughout history, has a throne and all, we have the king and the government and the president, whoever that happens to be, running everything politically, taxing, controlling, building up power, etc.,

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and the church or the intellectuals apologizing for it, helping the planet and getting part of the loot in return from the state.

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In the case, of course, the new guilds coming out, intellectuals and technocrats, they also get restricted entry into the field, restricted entry into medicine, into engineering or whatever,

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The law doesn't increase their income through state privilege.

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We can talk about medicine a little bit later on, how this thing works in medicine.

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It's a real scandal.

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This is what happened in 1910 with the famous Flexner Report, which totally transformed

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the medicine in the United States.

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At any rate, in the case of unions, the laissez-faire people were against unions.

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The National Civic Federation were in favor of unions.

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Union, we've already seen unions hardly exist except in craft unions, except in small building

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trades and small craft unions.

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The National Civic Federation people have different visions, they believe in large unions,

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they wanted big unions so as to run the labor force, the organized labor force in collaboration

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with big business and big government, in other words, to be sort of like the transmitting

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orders to the working class, so to speak.

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And World War I, as we'll see, the federal government essentially created mass unions

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of the United States, almost de novo, through World War I collectivists, through orders

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of World War I collectivism.

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And another thing that unions helped do is to cartelize the system.

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For example, to leap ahead a bit, the 1930s when the Wagner Act created, brought into

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to Affect Mass Industrial Unions of the United States, John L. Lewis of the United Mineworkers

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Union, a coal, by Tumans Coal Industry, what he essentially did was, he essentially understood

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about the demand curve and went up it, in other words, you have the demand curve for

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labor, and this is wage rates, and the quantity of labor higher, he understood if you, if

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you increase, you jack up wage rates, you will unemployed, disemploy a whole bunch of

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people, he was a favor of it, he didn't care, but Lewis' view is, what you do is you jack

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He'd check up wage rates for these union workers of seniority, people in the coal mines who

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had like 20 years seniority.

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That's all he cared about, to maximize their income.

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He didn't care about the unemployment for the younger workers and for those who were

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coming up, you know, people who were growing up and wanting to be coal miner people.

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He collaborated with the coal mining industry because they then, what they did is they collaborated

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the idea of pushing out wage rates so as to essentially put out of business all the smaller

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So what you had in other words was a cartelization through the industrial unions or industry-wide

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unions, deliberately putting out of business a whole bunch of coal miners for the benefit

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of the employers, the large coal miners, and causing unemployment for the younger co-workers

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of that seniority.

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And John L. Lewis understood this really well and did it, in other words a pure monopolistic

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It's often thought by many people that unions and businesses are always clashing, but they're

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not necessarily clashing, sometimes they have common interests, such as screwing the smaller

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coal mines, and that sort of thing.

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It's the same way with the Teamsters Union, for example, the Teamsters Union bitterly

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fought the idea of trucking deregulation a few years ago, and when deregulation came

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came in in 1978, the Teamsters fought along with the large trucking people, fought the

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idea they didn't want to have small trucks coming in, mom and pop trucks, because they

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obviously are not going to join a union, so they fought bitterly against it, a mighty

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collaboration between the large trucking interests and the Teamsters' union.

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So this happens all the time, you should understand that, understand the way the real world works.

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So at any rate, so as a part of this drive, the National Civic Federation starts pushing

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for workmen's compensation laws, it seems to be very progressive, if a worker gets injured

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on the job, the government should pay for it through the alleged insurance or whatever

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through the various firms kicking into a fund, yeah, they promoted unions, they also promoted

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of Workman's Compensation Laws.

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You probably do, I don't really know that much about British history.

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I think they had, I don't know if they had the exact, the name wasn't the same, probably

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the same sort of thing, you know, I would think so.

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Yeah.

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Yeah.

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Yeah, yeah.

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I'm trying.

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Well, what happened in the coal industry is that the 19, well, there's a special situation

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with the, after World War I. After World War I, it was really wacky because the pound,

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the pound sterling was always 487, $4.87, had been for a hundred years.

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World War I comes with general inflation. Everybody goes off the gold standard and inflates

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in order to pay for the war effort. Every country, including the United States, which

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only partially went off the gold standard. At any rate, at the end of course, we only

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had war for 18 months. In Europe, there was war for four years. At the end of the war,

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by 1920 or so, the pound had sunk on the free market to about 320. Everybody wanted to get

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back to the gold standard. It was generally agreed to have a sound international financial

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systems to go back to the gold standard. The rational thing would have been done, bring

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on the cut their losses, okay, the pound is appreciated from 487 to 320, they go back

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to the gold standard at 320, okay, that's it. That would have been perfect, nothing

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would have been no problem, would have been great. Instead of that, these jerks, and one

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of the craziest, wackiest and most unproductive or counterproductive decisions in 20th century

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history, said we have to go back to the gold standard at the original par of 487, because

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that's what it always was, London was always 487, the old pound must be restored and also

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they kept the prestige of the pound and they wanted to reestablish London as the great

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financial center of the world because the United States of New York was coming up fast.

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In order to do that they insisted on going back to 487, a totally wacky and nutty decision.

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And no economist, I don't think any economist in England said let's go back to 320.

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Some said we should have irredeemable paper money, most of them said we have to go back

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So, in other words, this meant, of course, that British exports, if you go back at 487,

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British exports are now unsellable because they're now at a very high price, and you're

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going back at a highly overinflated pound, means a product which would be, let's say,

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one loafer, whatever it is, one widget, which would originally cost 320 in the United States

354
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and now cost 487 because they're going back at a highly overvalued pound.

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So in other words, it's a very deflationary decision.

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In order to make this viable, it would mean they have to have an internal deflation.

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They have to contract the money supply and lower domestic prices so as to make the exports

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competitive.

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The major export is coal and the other one is textiles, how I got into this thing, because

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coal was their big export, and textiles.

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So in other words, they deliberately placed a tremendous burden on the coal industry and

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on the textile industry because they were now uncompetitive.

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They would have had to have deflation.

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They didn't want deflation. They wanted an inflate. They hear the British government

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insist, one, on going back to a pound, very overvalued pound, which would have required

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a big deflation to have the export competitive. Instead of that, they inflate. So they have

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a, they're totally screwed up. They have a totally, very, very odd situation. In order

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to make this sustainable, they have to try to get every, so in other words, England had

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a depression all during the 1920s. Everybody else had a big boom in the 20s. England had

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a big depression, heavy unemployment, especially in coal and then textiles, the export industry.

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and the way they try to solve this is to force everybody else to inflate, so they wouldn't lose gold, force the United States to induce the United States to inflate, to force us, they suckered us into it through the Morgan connection, JP Morgan connection, the countries in Europe which they ran through the League of Nations, they forced to inflate, Bulgaria and all these countries, they literally arm-twisted to get them to inflate so the England would gain exports, it was a horrible situation, self-defeating and precipitated, finally the collapse

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The Unionism came about in England during World War I because of massive unemployment

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Unemployment Insurance, where unemployment insurance is almost equivalent to the wage

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rate.

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If you had a wage rate of $10, $3 an hour, you've got an unemployment insurance of $3

376
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an hour for a long, long time, which helped the union sustain a high, high wage, excessively

377
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over market wage rate.

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What you have to realize is unemployment insurance and welfare also, what they do is subsidize

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unemployment.

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They create unemployment basically, but they prevent pressure of the unemployed upon union

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wage rates or minimum wage rates.

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So anyway, that was the cold situation.

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So anyway, they pushed for what Workman's Compensation was, looking very progressive

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and humanitarian.

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What it really meant was to put burdens on smaller firms which haven't got, just to write

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00:34:23.080 --> 00:34:26.880
out the, to pay fixed costs, to write out the forms and everything, is an excessive

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of Cost Burden on the smaller competitors of these bigger businesses.

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So the name of humanitarianism you put, you again help to cartelize the system by placing

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high costs on small firms.

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For example, take the liquor industry, the liquor industry is always complaining about

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high taxes and properly so, however, the liquor industry is in favor of very high taxes on

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stills.

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In other words, you pay essentially a fixed cost, a fixed fee per still, it was the still

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rate of liquor.

395
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So if you pay a fixed court, whatever the fixed court is, let's say $5,000 is still,

396
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I don't know what it is, let's see something like that, this means of course Seagrams can

397
00:35:01.280 --> 00:35:08.760
pay it pretty easily or Jack Daniels, but Hiram Jones in West Virginia can't pay it,

398
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he only makes about $2,000 a year, he can't pay a $5,000 a year fee.

399
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This drives Hiram Jones into an illegal moonshine production, in other words the moonshiners

400
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are a product of this fixed fee by which the big liquor companies squeeze the smaller firms

401
00:35:23.000 --> 00:35:30.440
is out of business, they have a high fixed cost per distillery, per still, deliberately

402
00:35:30.440 --> 00:35:34.640
done in order to screw the poor small competitors, the poor moonshiners, and then force them

403
00:35:34.640 --> 00:35:35.640
to illegal production.

404
00:35:35.640 --> 00:35:39.600
So in other words, what you have to look at the welfare state, and we'll be giving most

405
00:35:39.600 --> 00:35:42.960
of the rest of the term will be examples of this, in other words, examples of situations

406
00:35:42.960 --> 00:35:48.620
where alleged welfare state situation where big business gets together to impose government

407
00:35:48.620 --> 00:35:51.840
regulation in order to screw their smaller competitors, to drive smaller competitors

408
00:35:51.840 --> 00:35:54.520
and then they started out a business one way or the other, either officially drive them

409
00:35:54.520 --> 00:35:59.440
out of business like medical licensing or imposing high fixed costs on them one way

410
00:35:59.440 --> 00:36:03.400
or the other.

411
00:36:03.400 --> 00:36:06.360
And with the National Civic Federation what they would do is they would push for this,

412
00:36:06.360 --> 00:36:13.360
they would write a model law, their experts would help write a model workman's compensation

413
00:36:13.360 --> 00:36:15.760
law and then they'd start lobbying for it in every state.

414
00:36:15.760 --> 00:36:19.760
And state governments of course like this because they get, the work is cut out for

415
00:36:19.760 --> 00:36:21.160
them, they don't have to write the legislation.

416
00:36:21.160 --> 00:36:25.520
is written for them by the National Civic Federation, they just adopt it.

417
00:36:25.520 --> 00:36:30.160
So another reason for this is the liability question.

418
00:36:30.160 --> 00:36:36.800
And the common law, if you're a worker and you get an accident on the job, your employer

419
00:36:36.800 --> 00:36:44.200
is liable only if the worker himself is not responsible or if another worker is not responsible

420
00:36:44.200 --> 00:36:48.880
or the employer is not liable if you voluntarily assume the risk.

421
00:36:48.880 --> 00:36:53.440
In other words, if you're a high-wire construction person and you fall off, obviously you've

422
00:36:53.440 --> 00:36:57.240
assumed the risk, you know what's going on, the employer's not liable.

423
00:36:57.240 --> 00:37:00.840
So in this kind of common law structure, usually employers, most accidents, employers were

424
00:37:00.840 --> 00:37:01.840
not liable.

425
00:37:01.840 --> 00:37:07.360
Well, the government started changing the laws about 1900, so it's to make employers

426
00:37:07.360 --> 00:37:09.920
liable for more and more accidents.

427
00:37:09.920 --> 00:37:12.880
As a result, the employers started pushing for work with compensation legislation, they

428
00:37:12.880 --> 00:37:16.860
wouldn't be liable, and they let the fund pay for it.

429
00:37:16.860 --> 00:37:27.740
So that was another reason for it, at any rate.

430
00:37:27.740 --> 00:37:33.420
Another aspect of progressive reform I want to mention is the so-called public utility

431
00:37:33.420 --> 00:37:34.420
question.

432
00:37:34.420 --> 00:37:39.500
Again, this is now, for many years, up until very recently, it was considered that public

433
00:37:39.500 --> 00:37:43.140
utilities have to be either government-run or government-monopolized because of the natural

434
00:37:43.140 --> 00:37:44.980
monopoly that's called.

435
00:37:44.980 --> 00:37:48.700
It's not a monopoly of gas and electric, it's not a national monopoly, it's a lot of nonsense.

436
00:37:48.700 --> 00:37:52.540
There's no reason why Con Ed has to have a monopoly of all electricity sold in the city

437
00:37:52.540 --> 00:37:54.580
of New York.

438
00:37:54.580 --> 00:37:57.420
Columbia University, for example, generates its own electricity.

439
00:37:57.420 --> 00:37:58.420
That's legal.

440
00:37:58.420 --> 00:38:02.180
You can have your own generator for your own building.

441
00:38:02.180 --> 00:38:06.420
It's illegal, however, for Columbia University to sell electricity to the guy across the

442
00:38:06.420 --> 00:38:07.420
street.

443
00:38:07.420 --> 00:38:08.900
You know, probably they could do it cheaper than Con Ed.

444
00:38:08.900 --> 00:38:14.900
It's illegal because Con Ed has a territorial monopoly on all sales of electricity and

445
00:38:14.900 --> 00:38:17.940
and Gas.

446
00:38:17.940 --> 00:38:24.240
So most of course this stops, it restricts all kinds of technological innovation.

447
00:38:24.240 --> 00:38:28.220
If Connet has a monopoly on all New York City electricity, it means there's no incentive

448
00:38:28.220 --> 00:38:32.580
for anybody to discover a way to have better decent, more efficient decentralized electricity

449
00:38:32.580 --> 00:38:33.580
because it's illegal.

450
00:38:33.580 --> 00:38:37.980
Most people are not going to waste their time trying to invent something which turns out

451
00:38:37.980 --> 00:38:40.340
to be illegal.

452
00:38:40.340 --> 00:38:46.860
So at any rate, the idea of monopoly privileges for public utilities only comes down in the

453
00:38:46.860 --> 00:38:47.860
progressive era.

454
00:38:47.860 --> 00:38:48.860
It's not eternal.

455
00:38:48.860 --> 00:38:50.860
It comes in about 1900, 1905.

456
00:38:50.860 --> 00:38:55.180
It first was established by the National Civic Federation in a commission on public ownership

457
00:38:55.180 --> 00:38:56.820
of public utilities.

458
00:38:56.820 --> 00:39:05.260
And the idea is, this is true for trolleys, buses, gas and electric, and for telephones.

459
00:39:05.260 --> 00:39:11.300
The idea is this, you create a monopoly privilege by the government, nobody else can compete

460
00:39:11.300 --> 00:39:16.980
in this area, and then you set the rates, you regulate the rates so as to guarantee

461
00:39:16.980 --> 00:39:20.700
a certain fixed rate of profit, try to guarantee it anyway.

462
00:39:20.700 --> 00:39:26.580
The rates are based, the rate of profit is based on the value of capital, so let's say

463
00:39:26.580 --> 00:39:33.100
it's 8%, let's say the capital invested in this electric company is a million dollars,

464
00:39:33.100 --> 00:39:42.220
And you set the rate so as to get 80,000 profit, right, 80,000 all-year profit.

465
00:39:42.220 --> 00:39:45.900
The higher the value of the capital, the higher the government fixes the rate, the Public Utility

466
00:39:45.900 --> 00:39:47.540
Commission fixes the rate.

467
00:39:47.540 --> 00:39:51.620
So it's the interest of each firm, each electricity firm or a trolley firm or whatever, to keep

468
00:39:51.620 --> 00:39:54.300
the value of the capital as high as possible.

469
00:39:54.300 --> 00:39:56.260
So the government will then jack up the rate.

470
00:39:56.260 --> 00:40:02.700
Well, the value, on orthodox accounting principles, the value of capital is based on how much the

471
00:40:02.700 --> 00:40:09.980
So if you pay a lot of money for the equipment, it's fixed at that price, and if you don't

472
00:40:09.980 --> 00:40:13.900
depreciate it much, it just stays there, and you can set the rate on that basis.

473
00:40:13.900 --> 00:40:17.780
As a result, Con Ed, for example, never depreciates their capital, they try not to depreciate

474
00:40:17.780 --> 00:40:22.220
their capital at all, because if you depreciate, it means the value of the capital goes down,

475
00:40:22.220 --> 00:40:27.220
and you have to lower their rates, it's a totally crazy system.

476
00:40:27.220 --> 00:40:30.340
Most firms, for example, like IBM, is depreciating all the time, they want to depreciate very

477
00:40:30.340 --> 00:40:34.540
very fast, so they got a lot of funds, they can plow back money to new equipment, so it

478
00:40:34.540 --> 00:40:40.620
won't be obsolete, but Con Ed or AT&T before deregulation, they weren't interested in depreciation

479
00:40:40.620 --> 00:40:44.300
because if they depreciated, they have to lower the value of their capital and the government's

480
00:40:44.300 --> 00:40:48.980
rates would go down, I mean the rates the government set would go down, so as a result

481
00:40:48.980 --> 00:40:52.980
Con Ed almost never depreciates, Con Ed is still hanging on in 1910 equipment because

482
00:40:52.980 --> 00:40:57.500
if they depreciate the equipment, the official orthodox accounting value of their capital

483
00:40:57.500 --> 00:41:00.140
goes down, they have to lower their rate.

484
00:41:00.140 --> 00:41:03.960
So that's one of the reasons why you have these damn blackouts all the time, that is

485
00:41:03.960 --> 00:41:09.780
operating an equipment 60 years old, it's their economic interest to do so, contrast

486
00:41:09.780 --> 00:41:15.260
the free market firms, the interest is to keep up a competition and get as innovative

487
00:41:15.260 --> 00:41:16.260
as possible.

488
00:41:16.260 --> 00:41:21.780
Not if however, if you're a regulated monopoly like the public utility system.

489
00:41:21.780 --> 00:41:26.540
Stress today the fact that progressivism goes not just on the federal level as we've been

490
00:41:26.540 --> 00:41:36.540
are talking about, but also on the state and local level. The whole revolution in the United States, state and local as well as federal regulation.

491
00:41:36.540 --> 00:41:44.540
Last time I mentioned public utilities, there's no reason why public utility has to be monopolistic.

492
00:41:44.540 --> 00:41:50.540
There's no natural monopoly. It should come about naturally, not by government fiat.

493
00:41:50.540 --> 00:42:01.220
What happened was the utilities began to realize this was a good thing and get a monopoly franchise

494
00:42:01.220 --> 00:42:07.780
for 20 or 50 years duration or something and get the utility commission to grant a cost

495
00:42:07.780 --> 00:42:15.020
plus or a profit, set the rate at a return which would guarantee a profit on its capital

496
00:42:15.020 --> 00:42:17.780
investment.

497
00:42:17.780 --> 00:42:26.660
The, and this was pushed by the National Civic Federation and other organizations, electrical

498
00:42:26.660 --> 00:42:33.100
utility manufacturers, for example, to push for government monopoly, so-called utility,

499
00:42:33.100 --> 00:42:36.380
public utility regulation, public utility status.

500
00:42:36.380 --> 00:42:41.500
The, one of the first guys on this, coming to this conclusion was Charles Yerkes, who

501
00:42:41.500 --> 00:42:50.700
He was a big Chicago attraction magnate, which meant especially bus and trolley, and he came

502
00:42:50.700 --> 00:42:55.660
to the conclusion that he'd be more profitable with a government monopoly than a free market

503
00:42:55.660 --> 00:42:57.380
company.

504
00:42:57.380 --> 00:43:08.620
So what he did is he found out that he couldn't, he would get monopolies for 20 years of monopoly,

505
00:43:08.620 --> 00:43:14.860
and he found out he had a whole bunch of monopoly franchises and trolleys, et cetera, but each

506
00:43:14.860 --> 00:43:22.860
time he had to bribe the city councilman every time it got renewed, and so every couple of

507
00:43:22.860 --> 00:43:26.420
years they'd have a new set of bribes, in other words the renewal would come up, and

508
00:43:26.420 --> 00:43:32.700
he couldn't float 20-year bonds because the bondholders couldn't be guaranteed that he

509
00:43:32.700 --> 00:43:35.420
and they keep getting this monopoly status.

510
00:43:35.420 --> 00:43:46.420
So what he did is he had some bills introduced in the Illinois Legislature in 1897, a premature

511
00:43:46.420 --> 00:43:52.580
person here, which would extend the beginning of the progressive movement, so quote unquote

512
00:43:52.580 --> 00:43:57.260
progressive movement and utility franchises, instead of having a 20-year monopoly, have

513
00:43:57.260 --> 00:44:04.260
have a 50-year monopoly and instead of having the city council set the rates, the rates

514
00:44:05.660 --> 00:44:10.340
would be set by quote non-partisan unquote state utility commission which would be objective

515
00:44:10.340 --> 00:44:16.300
and scientific and blah blah blah. This by the way as we'll see today, one of the big

516
00:44:16.300 --> 00:44:22.820
goals of progressivism and economics and industry is to quote take something out of politics

517
00:44:22.820 --> 00:44:28.820
In other words, take blank out of politics. You can fill in the blanks.

518
00:44:28.820 --> 00:44:38.820
Elective utilities, telephones, post office, almost anything can be taken out of transportation.

519
00:44:38.820 --> 00:44:43.820
Taking out of politics means that the government runs it, or runs it in connection with a monopoly company,

520
00:44:43.820 --> 00:44:47.820
without any public, without any check by the taxpayers or the voters.

521
00:44:47.820 --> 00:44:55.820
It then becomes a sort of hermetically sealed outfit for the tally.

522
00:44:55.820 --> 00:44:57.820
What makes it a monopoly?

523
00:44:57.820 --> 00:45:03.820
AT&T wasn't indeed a monopoly. It was put in by the federal government.

524
00:45:03.820 --> 00:45:07.820
The Federal Communications Commission is regulating it.

525
00:45:07.820 --> 00:45:11.820
It was a guaranteed monopoly. It was allegedly because telephones are supposed to be a natural monopoly.

526
00:45:11.820 --> 00:45:16.820
The only case, there might have been a case for that in 1890, although even then you couldn't release.

527
00:45:16.820 --> 00:45:21.820
I mean, if something is a natural monopoly, let it be formed naturally, not by government coercion.

528
00:45:21.820 --> 00:45:29.820
The argument was, if you've seen movies about 1900, movies about that period in Mexico,

529
00:45:29.820 --> 00:45:33.820
everybody had ten phones on their desks, they had ten different phone companies.

530
00:45:33.820 --> 00:45:37.820
Well, I mean, so it's more convenient to have one phone company.

531
00:45:37.820 --> 00:45:42.100
And on the other hand, of course, phone companies can interlock with each other, nothing prevents

532
00:45:42.100 --> 00:45:47.100
them from calling on each other's line and have an interconnecting cable.

533
00:45:47.100 --> 00:45:58.740
It's okay, but it's free competition within that, in other words, it's like using a public

534
00:45:58.740 --> 00:46:03.660
road, in a sense, you pay a fee on the same line, it doesn't really make any difference,

535
00:46:03.660 --> 00:46:10.660
you can have a competition anyway, although one of the problems for the AT&T monopoly

536
00:46:11.740 --> 00:46:17.740
not only to keep out, prevent other companies from using phones, for example, data interconnect,

537
00:46:17.740 --> 00:46:22.740
when monopoly was eliminated about 10 years ago, 10-15 years ago, it gave rise to an entire

538
00:46:22.740 --> 00:46:27.540
new industry called a data interconnect industry, you know, different phone systems, first within

539
00:46:27.540 --> 00:46:33.620
each corporation, closed circuit TV from New York, Chicago, it was all prohibitive, it

540
00:46:33.620 --> 00:46:41.980
because of the damn monopoly. Eliminating that monopoly gave rise to this whole industry.

541
00:46:41.980 --> 00:46:51.660
Also you could have other communication systems where it couldn't occur because it was illegal.

542
00:46:51.660 --> 00:46:58.380
Technologically you can eventually have all sorts of phone type, communication type systems

543
00:46:58.380 --> 00:47:04.180
like TV, face-to-face TV from different cities and stuff like that, all sorts of things could

544
00:47:04.180 --> 00:47:05.180
happen.

545
00:47:05.180 --> 00:47:09.300
Once you eliminate a monopoly, you allow that to take place.

546
00:47:09.300 --> 00:47:13.540
So you might have eventually, I don't know, you could go into some phone booth and call

547
00:47:13.540 --> 00:47:16.500
somebody up and have a face-to-face TV conversation.

548
00:47:16.500 --> 00:47:20.620
It's technologically feasible, just not much in demand yet.

549
00:47:20.620 --> 00:47:25.620
And all sorts of stuff could occur, just satellite communication, don't know what else, except

550
00:47:25.620 --> 00:47:55.620
was prohibited by the AT&T monopoly, unfortunately that's now over, unfortunately they went too far, not only did they eliminate the monopoly, they also broke up AT&T, there's no reason for that, breaking up the New York phone system and the AT&T system, preventing the same assets and having a local and interstate phone, no reason for that, that was just destruction on behalf of a crazy economic theory, yeah they wanted to have a, they want to be able

551
00:47:55.620 --> 00:48:01.500
This is forcing you to have another company even if you don't want it.

552
00:48:01.500 --> 00:48:06.460
Most people will be happy to continue with AT&T, both domestic and interstate, they just

553
00:48:06.460 --> 00:48:13.340
can't do it because AT&T is not allowed to participate in local phone stuff anymore.

554
00:48:13.340 --> 00:48:14.340
That went too far.

555
00:48:14.340 --> 00:48:19.220
That was the antitrust stuff, but the real thing that liberated the phone industry was

556
00:48:19.220 --> 00:48:23.460
eliminating the FCC monopoly about 10, 15 years ago.

557
00:48:23.460 --> 00:48:34.460
So at any rate, so of course now you can have hundreds of phone conversations on the same

558
00:48:34.460 --> 00:48:40.380
cable, there's no reason not to have, technologically it's very easy, you don't have to have 50

559
00:48:40.380 --> 00:48:44.940
different phones.

560
00:48:44.940 --> 00:48:48.940
So what Yerkes wanted to do as I say is to have, set up a quote, non-part of the commission

561
00:48:48.940 --> 00:48:54.500
have a 50-year monopoly for his company, so he wouldn't have to keep bribing the city

562
00:48:54.500 --> 00:49:00.980
councilmen every couple of years. It would have reduced his bribery costs. However, he

563
00:49:00.980 --> 00:49:06.140
came a cropper because he didn't... part of the mystique of urban progressivism, as we'll

564
00:49:06.140 --> 00:49:11.300
see in a minute, attacks so-called corruption. And he was, of course, attacked as being a

565
00:49:11.300 --> 00:49:16.540
corruptor and a bribery type, so his bill was defeated in 1897, only to be resurrected

566
00:49:16.540 --> 00:49:24.780
as a so-called progressive tactic ten years later.

567
00:49:24.780 --> 00:49:29.100
So Learning from Yerkes is a board of programs, Samuel Insull, later was accused of being

568
00:49:29.100 --> 00:49:37.580
a crook in the late 1920s, probably unfairly, Samuel Insull starts the idea of progressivism

569
00:49:37.580 --> 00:49:43.860
learning from Yerkes, Yerkes is his mentor in Chicago, starts the idea of monopoly public

570
00:49:43.860 --> 00:49:51.220
Electrical Utilities.

571
00:49:51.220 --> 00:49:56.180
In his presidential address before the National Electric Light Association in June 1998, he

572
00:49:56.180 --> 00:50:01.100
urged his fellow electrical utility magnates to get the industry regulated by state commissions

573
00:50:01.100 --> 00:50:05.980
with full power, fixed rates and quality of service, and he stressed the government's

574
00:50:05.980 --> 00:50:11.060
rate-making power rather than monopoly, although monopoly was there, he was more sensitive

575
00:50:11.060 --> 00:50:17.860
One of the public relations of poor Yerkes was obviously just all out for the bribe.

576
00:50:17.860 --> 00:50:23.140
So most of the utility magnates said, no this is a terrible thing, it's violating laissez-faire,

577
00:50:23.140 --> 00:50:29.140
but he got a few supporters and he set up an association committee on legislative policy

578
00:50:29.140 --> 00:50:35.060
and he got in charge of Chicago Edison and Commonwealth electorate and was pushing this

579
00:50:35.060 --> 00:50:39.100
and of course as I was saying, in about ten years this became the general public utility

580
00:50:39.100 --> 00:50:54.100
of the Doctrine. Once again, Wisconsin, National Civic Federation, Wisconsin was the leader

581
00:50:54.100 --> 00:50:59.660
in this whole state progressivism, including public utility monopoly, headed by the Wisconsin

582
00:50:59.660 --> 00:51:05.100
economist Richard T. Ely, who's the big so-called progressive, John R. Commons as a disciple,

583
00:51:05.100 --> 00:51:26.100
Ely was also a big shot pietist type, post-millennial pietist, in other words he believed that the

584
00:51:26.100 --> 00:51:31.740
way to achieve salvation is through, first the government has to, first we have to have

585
00:51:31.740 --> 00:51:36.980
and Millennium and then Jesus will come and this means again that and he does it through

586
00:51:36.980 --> 00:51:42.140
government, through government action. A great quote from Ely is that government is God's

587
00:51:42.140 --> 00:51:46.940
major instrument of redemption. In other words, he achieves salvation through government action,

588
00:51:46.940 --> 00:51:55.940
through government control, etc., etc. Commas was his disciple, student and so on and so

589
00:51:55.940 --> 00:52:00.020
on. Now here's Weinstein quoting out from the book what you should have read but anyway

590
00:52:00.020 --> 00:52:05.060
Wainstein quotes about public utility, it's a good quote, he says, by 1909 many industry

591
00:52:05.060 --> 00:52:09.780
people within public utilities have begun to look favorably on regulation by state commissions

592
00:52:09.780 --> 00:52:15.020
and understand the advantages of taking utilities regulation out of politics, once again. Taking

593
00:52:15.020 --> 00:52:20.980
out of politics means that you have your own kept board, so-called nonpartisan board to

594
00:52:20.980 --> 00:52:27.180
do it and not really regulated by the people. For example, the postal service has been taken

595
00:52:27.180 --> 00:52:32.060
We used to have a post office. The head of the post office used to be the chairman of

596
00:52:32.060 --> 00:52:35.900
the Democratic, Republican, National Committee, a big politician, and he'd staff the post

597
00:52:35.900 --> 00:52:39.900
office with all his tools. That's the way most of the patronage jobs at the local level

598
00:52:39.900 --> 00:52:44.080
were postmasters. You're a loyal Democrat or a loyal Republican, you have to be a post

599
00:52:44.080 --> 00:52:47.540
master. In order to fix up the post office, the post office every year has had a deficit.

600
00:52:47.540 --> 00:52:51.220
The post office, of course, also, the only outfit I can think of in the United States

601
00:52:51.220 --> 00:52:55.140
where not only does the price go up every year, but the quality of the service goes

602
00:52:55.140 --> 00:52:59.060
Usually in private industry, even if the price goes up because of inflation, at least the

603
00:52:59.060 --> 00:53:04.260
service goes up, the quality goes up, and the postal service, every year the quality

604
00:53:04.260 --> 00:53:07.660
is going down, every year it gets, it takes longer and longer to get a mail, a letter

605
00:53:07.660 --> 00:53:08.660
delivered.

606
00:53:08.660 --> 00:53:13.580
When I was growing up in the 1930s, we used to get two mails a day, two deliveries a day,

607
00:53:13.580 --> 00:53:18.020
every house, every apartment, every house, two a day without a sale, now you're lucky

608
00:53:18.020 --> 00:53:24.800
if it's one a day, and Saturday often they drop out, things like that.

609
00:53:24.800 --> 00:53:28.440
So it takes longer and longer for a letter to be sent, as you well know.

610
00:53:28.440 --> 00:53:32.800
It used to be, when I was growing up, within New York City, the price was two cents a stamp.

611
00:53:32.800 --> 00:53:40.120
It makes like, say, 16 cents now, an equivalent of an eight-fold increase in prices.

612
00:53:40.120 --> 00:53:44.560
Three cents a stamp for regular first-class mail, of course, now it's much higher.

613
00:53:44.560 --> 00:53:46.360
Not only is it much higher, but the service is worse.

614
00:53:46.360 --> 00:53:50.240
We used to have air mail as a special thing, that's been eliminated now.

615
00:53:50.240 --> 00:53:52.440
Everything goes by air, and therefore everything is slower.

616
00:53:52.440 --> 00:53:57.200
A few years ago, in order to grammatize the inefficient postal service here, some guy took

617
00:53:57.200 --> 00:54:01.840
a letter in Philadelphia and rode a horse from Philadelphia, dressing up on a Paul Revere

618
00:54:01.840 --> 00:54:07.400
uniform, and rode a horse to Washington and lived with a letter by hand from the horse.

619
00:54:07.400 --> 00:54:09.400
It took about ten hours, something like that.

620
00:54:09.400 --> 00:54:18.280
Grammatizing, in fact, takes about two weeks to get by, high-speed electronic postal service.

621
00:54:18.280 --> 00:54:24.720
So a few years ago, the Postal Service, in order to make it more efficient, they took

622
00:54:24.720 --> 00:54:25.720
it out of politics.

623
00:54:25.720 --> 00:54:30.240
They created the Postal Service on a so-called business basis, which means the Congress can't

624
00:54:30.240 --> 00:54:31.240
do anything about it.

625
00:54:31.240 --> 00:54:32.240
It can't get to it.

626
00:54:32.240 --> 00:54:36.200
In other words, you seal off the funds, you seal off the administration, and from then

627
00:54:36.200 --> 00:54:41.360
on, even the voters and the taxpayers can't do much about it, hermetically seal off.

628
00:54:41.360 --> 00:54:45.360
It's called taking it out of politics, making it a business-like basis.

629
00:54:45.360 --> 00:54:47.440
So the voters can't get to it.

630
00:54:47.440 --> 00:54:52.440
The same thing was done with the transportation authority in New York, a miserable, rotten subway system.

631
00:54:52.440 --> 00:54:55.440
It was taken out of politics about 20 years ago.

632
00:54:55.440 --> 00:54:59.440
They set up the transit authority, the metropolitan transportation authority on a so-called business-like basis.

633
00:54:59.440 --> 00:55:03.440
It means the state legislature and the voters can't get to it. It's a steal-off.

634
00:55:03.440 --> 00:55:06.440
It's an oligarchically self-run oligarchy.

635
00:55:06.440 --> 00:55:12.440
And the first payment goes to the bondholders, by the way.

636
00:55:12.440 --> 00:55:17.840
What happened was they nationalized the subway system and intersupplies in the 1930s, took

637
00:55:17.840 --> 00:55:18.840
it over.

638
00:55:18.840 --> 00:55:24.160
They were losing money because the government was fixing the fare of five cents, and of

639
00:55:24.160 --> 00:55:29.040
course this wasn't fixed with five cents since 1900, so they were losing money as prices

640
00:55:29.040 --> 00:55:36.280
went up, costs went up, and the city government took over the subways, IRT and BMT at a very

641
00:55:36.280 --> 00:55:42.280
high price, big subsidy to the stockholders, the stockholders loved it, and then these

642
00:55:42.280 --> 00:55:46.280
They became New York City bondholders and then got first lien on every subway revenue.

643
00:55:46.280 --> 00:55:50.280
In other words, the first guys who get paid off, even if there's a big subway deficit,

644
00:55:50.280 --> 00:55:53.280
the bondholders get paid off off the top.

645
00:55:53.280 --> 00:55:58.280
And they get paid off at an increasingly higher rate because the interest rates in those days are like 3%.

646
00:55:58.280 --> 00:56:02.280
Now, of course, they refinance. The bonds refinance is 20% or 12% or something.

647
00:56:02.280 --> 00:56:10.280
The city's subway riders and bus riders are total hawkish bondholders from the last 50 years.

648
00:56:10.280 --> 00:56:14.280
This is called putting it out of business, this is called taking the subway system out of politics.

649
00:56:14.280 --> 00:56:19.280
At any rate, continue on.

650
00:56:19.280 --> 00:56:25.280
The underlying principles of the regulatory legislation support a responsible private ownership,

651
00:56:25.280 --> 00:56:29.280
and the experts appointed to the new commissions were almost invariably conservative in that

652
00:56:29.280 --> 00:56:32.280
they did not question the framework of the utilities industry.

653
00:56:32.280 --> 00:56:37.280
The result, therefore, was to introduce stability in the industry and to quote, raise public morality, unquote,

654
00:56:37.280 --> 00:56:44.280
This was a move of discriminatory rights, a move of competition, as we well know now.

655
00:56:44.320 --> 00:56:49.720
The electric utility industry was the major trolley, so the major backers of this.

656
00:56:49.720 --> 00:56:55.360
By the fall of 1913, Ralph Easley, the head of the National Civic Federation, wrote to

657
00:56:55.360 --> 00:56:58.980
President Seth Lowe, president of the National Civic Federation,

658
00:56:58.980 --> 00:57:02.720
At the great success of the drive for public utility regulation, twenty-five years ago

659
00:57:02.720 --> 00:57:06.840
he exulted that we would have regarded this as a species of socialism.

660
00:57:06.840 --> 00:57:11.840
But now, utilities are submitting with many railways even embracing regulation joyfully.

661
00:57:11.840 --> 00:57:17.560
Okay, so this is the most joyful regulation, in other words, businessmen became more and

662
00:57:17.560 --> 00:57:22.560
more to see the monopolistic advantages of this kind of regulation.

663
00:57:22.560 --> 00:57:29.560
Okay, in the National Civic Federation, all the big shots, all the Morgans, Morgan himself,

664
00:57:29.560 --> 00:57:35.440
the Morgan Partners, Carnegie, Rockefeller, Charles Francis Adams, the whole Mark Hanna,

665
00:57:35.440 --> 00:58:05.440
The whole gang was involved in this thing, plus the politicians, Cleveland Taft, Teddy Roosevelt, Eli Hill Root, and Samuel Gompers of the AFL, everybody was involved in this thing, one big happy family of the top, George Perkins of course, top corporate and leadership and union leadership. I guess I already quoted easily saying, the socialists among the labor people and the anarchists among the capitalists, and these are laissez-faire types.

666
00:58:05.440 --> 00:58:22.440
Okay, and I'll get to the Workman's Compensation again, we're also pushed by the same people.

667
00:58:22.440 --> 00:58:30.440
When I get to the local government, well, here's a great quote, I can't avoid it, from the National Civic Federation,

668
00:58:30.440 --> 00:58:40.440
Frank Muncie, the publisher of Harper's Publishing Company and Harper's Magazine, wrote a letter to Teddy Roosevelt in January 1912 and he said, quote,

669
00:58:40.440 --> 00:58:49.440
is the work of the state, that means the government, is the work of the state to think for the people and plan for the people, to teach them how to do, what to do, and to sustain them in the doing.

670
00:58:49.440 --> 00:58:57.440
The function of the government is to run everything. And this is a typical state corporatist progressive at work.

671
00:58:57.440 --> 00:59:05.400
When you get to local government, again the theme is, local and state government, local

672
00:59:05.400 --> 00:59:07.200
government, to take everything out of politics.

673
00:59:07.200 --> 00:59:12.040
When I was growing up in the 1930s, the big slogan was, it doesn't matter whether Republican

674
00:59:12.040 --> 00:59:15.000
or Democrat gets elected because there's no such thing as a Republican or Democratic way

675
00:59:15.000 --> 00:59:16.000
of sweeping the streets.

676
00:59:16.000 --> 00:59:20.480
In other words, all problems become technical, there are no political problems anymore, no

677
00:59:20.480 --> 00:59:25.520
value problems, everybody's supposed to agree on all values, so all matters of at least

678
00:59:25.520 --> 00:59:29.360
local government become technical and if all matters are technical and not

679
00:59:29.360 --> 00:59:34.480
valuational, not political, who should take care of them but technocrats, economists,

680
00:59:34.480 --> 00:59:39.180
social workers, engineers, etc. etc. This leaves a power vacuum for these guys to

681
00:59:39.180 --> 00:59:43.520
take over and run everything and the basis of so-called non-political, there's

682
00:59:43.520 --> 00:59:46.320
no such thing as non-political government, that's the whole point I'm trying to

683
00:59:46.320 --> 00:59:49.720
make here, but they're trying to do is to take government out of politics is what

684
00:59:49.720 --> 00:59:54.320
really matters to them. They don't quite say that because it sounds too idiotic but

685
00:59:54.320 --> 00:59:58.120
So basically what they're doing, the progressive dream is to take all government decisions

686
00:59:58.120 --> 01:00:02.320
out of politics, make it scientific, quote unquote, and of course if it's scientific

687
01:00:02.320 --> 01:00:08.480
it means that the bureaucrats run it, it means the taxpayer pays up, everything is monopolized

688
01:00:08.480 --> 01:00:14.240
in the name of so-called efficiency or so-called non-profit, non-partisan.

689
01:00:14.240 --> 01:00:18.400
Everything becomes non-partisan, street sweeping, local government, all these things become

690
01:00:18.400 --> 01:00:21.320
allegedly only technical problems, they're not technical problems, they're all value

691
01:00:21.320 --> 01:00:26.960
Problems, government and political period. Citizens are not engineers, they're not garbage

692
01:00:26.960 --> 01:00:33.520
disposal experts. So if all government decisions are scientific or technological, it means

693
01:00:33.520 --> 01:00:36.520
there's no room for voting. The public is not supposed to vote, they're supposed to

694
01:00:36.520 --> 01:00:41.160
ratify the decisions of the technocrats. So this whole thing is an ideological, deeply

695
01:00:41.160 --> 01:00:46.920
ideological doctrine in the name of non-ideology by the progressives. And it comes at a time

696
01:00:46.920 --> 01:00:51.480
I remember when, after 1896, there was no laissez-faire political party.

697
01:00:51.480 --> 01:00:55.600
Political parties themselves were becoming unimportant, there was no choice, no real

698
01:00:55.600 --> 01:01:01.500
ideological choices anymore after 1900, and so this leaves a power vacuum for the progressive

699
01:01:01.500 --> 01:01:10.920
technocrats and big business types, their allies, to take over.

700
01:01:10.920 --> 01:01:18.560
In local government, this meant, and generally it meant, trying to eliminate, trying to play

701
01:01:18.560 --> 01:01:24.920
down and minimize the decisions of the voters, and minimize voters, the role of voters.

702
01:01:24.920 --> 01:01:27.640
So how do you do that?

703
01:01:27.640 --> 01:01:31.880
Because voters are, can be, of course, they're not part of this whole clique.

704
01:01:31.880 --> 01:01:32.880
Voters can be disruptive.

705
01:01:32.880 --> 01:01:33.880
Voters can be a pain in the neck.

706
01:01:33.880 --> 01:01:36.760
They can disrupt, dislodge all these technocratic decisions.

707
01:01:36.760 --> 01:01:40.600
Therefore, you're trying to play down the role as far as possible, first of all by making

708
01:01:40.600 --> 01:01:46.120
Minimizing the two parties about the same as they were after 1900 basically, both centrist

709
01:01:46.120 --> 01:01:51.320
statists and they were neither very fanatical, they were both basically progressive, both

710
01:01:51.320 --> 01:01:56.040
in favor of the corporate state or state corporate capitalism or whatever you want to call it.

711
01:01:56.040 --> 01:02:01.200
So you minimize the role of voters by having both parties about the same, that's been achieved

712
01:02:01.200 --> 01:02:08.960
more or less, and you also minimize the amount of, the range of votes, for example part of

713
01:02:08.960 --> 01:02:13.120
One of the progressive drives after 1900 was the so-called short ballot movement.

714
01:02:13.120 --> 01:02:18.240
In the old days, people used to vote on every office, like a hundred different... you have

715
01:02:18.240 --> 01:02:22.800
a ballot and you have a hundred different things you can vote on.

716
01:02:22.800 --> 01:02:25.440
The idea of the short ballot movement, people don't know how to vote, therefore you should

717
01:02:25.440 --> 01:02:29.200
limit their voting to the top of the ticket, governor, lieutenant governor, blah, blah,

718
01:02:29.200 --> 01:02:30.200
blah.

719
01:02:30.200 --> 01:02:34.040
More or less, this has been achieved, you're not able to vote on it anymore.

720
01:02:34.040 --> 01:02:37.560
and even now we can vote on judges

721
01:02:37.560 --> 01:02:41.460
and the technocrats are trying to get rid of that, they're always saying

722
01:02:41.460 --> 01:02:47.980
the government, the public is not qualified to vote on judges, therefore they shouldn't do it, the judges should be appointed by the Bar Association or whatever

723
01:02:47.980 --> 01:02:51.720
the public should only vote for the governor who appoints judges, you see, this is a

724
01:02:51.720 --> 01:02:53.980
this is the doctrine

725
01:02:53.980 --> 01:02:56.660
allegedly scientific doctrine, it really is

726
01:02:56.660 --> 01:03:00.580
the limit, to minimize the scope of the public and have any choice at all

727
01:03:00.580 --> 01:03:07.580
It's true that judges are experts and the public isn't. On the other hand, the judges rule over the public. The public should have some kind of a role in picking them, therefore.

728
01:03:07.580 --> 01:03:15.580
We're choosing our rulers, so to speak. It's not just like choosing a lawyer or engineer in the abstract.

729
01:03:15.580 --> 01:03:29.580
So the short ballot movement, in the name of expanding democracy, in the name of giving the public, having the public a better choice or something like that, essentially restricting democracy by shortening the ballot.

730
01:03:29.580 --> 01:03:36.580
Another thing that happened was the arrival of the so-called Australian ballot.

731
01:03:38.580 --> 01:03:43.380
Before that, this is by 1900, before that the ballot was secret, but what you did is

732
01:03:43.380 --> 01:03:47.300
you see everybody distributed their own ticket, in other words, let's say there's six candidates

733
01:03:47.300 --> 01:03:48.460
for an office.

734
01:03:48.460 --> 01:03:51.220
Each candidate had his own ticket, his own color, let's say.

735
01:03:51.220 --> 01:03:56.300
If I'm running for governor on the independent labor ticket, let's say, I give you a green,

736
01:03:56.300 --> 01:04:02.020
I distribute green tickets. You take whichever ticket you want and put it in the box. There

737
01:04:02.020 --> 01:04:08.020
was no official ballot. So what the Australian ballot did, in the name of so-called reform,

738
01:04:08.020 --> 01:04:12.380
it eliminated that. The ballots are now supplied only by the government. In other words, the

739
01:04:12.380 --> 01:04:17.060
government has a ballot like that. And the government restricts the number of names on

740
01:04:17.060 --> 01:04:20.900
it. So if you're in a third party, if you're any third party and you're trying to get on

741
01:04:20.900 --> 01:04:24.980
the ballot, it's a big headache to get on it. You have to take, you know, get ten thousand

742
01:04:24.980 --> 01:04:26.620
Signatures, the Petition, blah, blah, blah.

743
01:04:26.620 --> 01:04:30.620
In the old days you didn't have to get, there was no single ballot, so this means a government

744
01:04:30.620 --> 01:04:36.180
monopoly ballot, and thereby restricts voting to two major, basically the two major parties.

745
01:04:36.180 --> 01:04:40.500
It's very difficult for any third party to get on and out, because the government, since

746
01:04:40.500 --> 01:04:45.380
the government runs the ballot and decides who gets on it, it makes the decisions as

747
01:04:45.380 --> 01:04:48.940
to, you know, signatures and all that, and they try to raise it as much as possible.

748
01:04:48.940 --> 01:04:49.940
Each state is different.

749
01:04:49.940 --> 01:04:50.940
Yeah.

750
01:04:50.940 --> 01:05:00.940
Now, shortening the ballot is keeping the ballot minimal. In other words, shortening the ballot means shortening the number of electoral offices, increasing the number of appointed offices.

751
01:05:00.940 --> 01:05:05.940
In other words, shortening the number of elections.

752
01:05:05.940 --> 01:05:15.940
In other words, see, in the old days, I'd say the public used to vote on, say, 50 different jobs, let's say.

753
01:05:15.940 --> 01:05:21.940
Now it's only like five. All of us are now appointed by the governor or whatever, or the mayor, something like that.

754
01:05:21.940 --> 01:05:28.940
See, you eliminate the number of elective offices. So, alright, you have a government monopoly ballot.

755
01:05:28.940 --> 01:05:33.940
You also have registration requirements. There were no registration requirements in the old days.

756
01:05:33.940 --> 01:05:39.940
In the old days, everybody could vote. What you'd do is you'd say, my name is Murray Rothbard, I live on a certain address and I vote, period.

757
01:05:39.940 --> 01:05:48.940
There's no registration. Registration came in as a deliberate attempt to restrict, particularly, city voters.

758
01:05:48.940 --> 01:05:52.940
For example, in New York, the first registration requirement was only for New York City.

759
01:05:52.940 --> 01:05:57.940
Rural people, upstate, didn't have to register. The idea is to restrict evil voters in New York City.

760
01:05:57.940 --> 01:06:00.940
In other words, ethnic liturgical voters, as I'm going to answer to.

761
01:06:00.940 --> 01:06:05.940
This is part of the Wasp Piatist Move for Domination.

762
01:06:05.940 --> 01:06:13.060
So registration requirements come in to reduce the number of votes, voters, remember I talked

763
01:06:13.060 --> 01:06:16.620
about how the republicans try to eliminate, restrict the immigration, well this is one

764
01:06:16.620 --> 01:06:18.940
way to do it, if you don't want to restrict immigration, you want to restrict the number

765
01:06:18.940 --> 01:06:23.540
of people who can vote by registration requirements, and also eliminate alien votes, in the old

766
01:06:23.540 --> 01:06:28.100
days aliens could vote, there were no restrictions, you didn't have to be a citizen to vote, of

767
01:06:28.100 --> 01:06:32.700
course this is now eliminated, so only citizens can vote, and then the increase in the amount

768
01:06:32.700 --> 01:06:36.500
All this is to reduce the amount of time you have to spend before you even become a citizen.

769
01:06:36.500 --> 01:06:45.180
All this is to reduce the amount of voting, only citizens can vote.

770
01:06:45.180 --> 01:06:49.500
So these are the deliberate attempts to restrict democratic choice, is what it amounts to,

771
01:06:49.500 --> 01:06:55.060
to limit it, to make the ballot short, to have a monopoly ballot, have registration

772
01:06:55.060 --> 01:06:57.780
requirements, to eliminate alien voters.

773
01:06:57.780 --> 01:07:02.140
So this is very cunning, but at the same time they claim they're expanding democracy by

774
01:07:02.140 --> 01:07:04.140
by having the primary system.

775
01:07:04.140 --> 01:07:08.140
There's a lot of discussion now on political scientists about this,

776
01:07:08.140 --> 01:07:10.140
because it's become pretty obvious what's happened.

777
01:07:10.140 --> 01:07:13.140
In the old days, when political parties were important,

778
01:07:13.140 --> 01:07:16.140
the political parties then chose their own candidates,

779
01:07:16.140 --> 01:07:18.140
Democrats, Republicans, whatever,

780
01:07:18.140 --> 01:07:20.140
and chosen either by convention or by state committee vote,

781
01:07:20.140 --> 01:07:22.140
didn't make any difference.

782
01:07:22.140 --> 01:07:25.140
But this meant that only a party activist could vote.

783
01:07:25.140 --> 01:07:30.140
The party activists were the ones, the party members and activists were the ones who chose the candidate.

784
01:07:30.140 --> 01:07:36.100
The primary system, compulsory primaries, which is a progressive move, allegedly to

785
01:07:36.100 --> 01:07:41.380
expand American democracy, and now, of course, we have primaries for everything.

786
01:07:41.380 --> 01:07:44.380
This is supposed to make everything much more democratic, but it really doesn't, because

787
01:07:44.380 --> 01:07:48.920
it means that any schmoke can vote in a Democrat or Republican ticket, you only have to sign

788
01:07:48.920 --> 01:07:52.180
up as a Democrat or Republican, you don't have to be an actual activist member.

789
01:07:52.180 --> 01:07:58.060
So this means anybody can get the nomination, it means that nomination is decided by public

790
01:07:58.060 --> 01:08:03.660
like relations, by TV ads, by money, whatever it is, it means the role of a party as such,

791
01:08:03.660 --> 01:08:10.500
the party as a mechanism for gathering, collecting ideas and principles gets eliminated, the

792
01:08:10.500 --> 01:08:14.820
political party is now just a shell, Democrats and Republicans, the party don't mean anything,

793
01:08:14.820 --> 01:08:20.300
it's all because of the cursory primary system, it's all up for grabs, and this is now admitted

794
01:08:20.300 --> 01:08:25.100
by most political scientists, these are terrible things, they think it all came in the 1960s,

795
01:08:25.100 --> 01:08:30.660
it really started coming in 1900 with the progressive, the whole primary concept

796
01:08:30.660 --> 01:08:32.580
and this was deliberately done

797
01:08:32.580 --> 01:08:36.420
to destroy the role of the political party as an ideological

798
01:08:36.420 --> 01:08:38.180
and vote-gathering movement

799
01:08:38.180 --> 01:08:40.380
in other words, as a group which means something

800
01:08:40.380 --> 01:08:45.780
the idea is to make the party meaningless and leave a power vacuum for technocrats

801
01:08:45.780 --> 01:08:47.140
and progressive

802
01:08:47.140 --> 01:08:52.300
so-called non-partisan scientists

803
01:08:52.300 --> 01:09:02.300
This is all accomplished, it was all done very cleverly, and one of the things they try to do most is to eliminate the great war on the cities.

804
01:09:02.300 --> 01:09:11.300
By this time, the cities are almost all ethnic, although the cities are mostly liturgical, mostly Irish and Italian and Polish, etc.,

805
01:09:11.300 --> 01:09:17.300
and the rural areas are mostly WASP, getting them out of the point where this is more and more true.

806
01:09:17.300 --> 01:09:26.300
These cities become a focus of attack by wasp-pietists as being sinful per se, as being nests of evil and sin.

807
01:09:26.300 --> 01:09:33.300
The whole rural versus urban thing really comes in about this time as an attack on urban ethnics.

808
01:09:33.300 --> 01:09:39.300
And one of the things which becomes most important now, again, for wasp-pietists is to smash the saloon,

809
01:09:39.300 --> 01:09:47.300
and the prohibition to eliminate the saloon as a political power of ethnic politics.

810
01:09:47.300 --> 01:10:00.300
Since most ethnic, most Italian, Irish, etc., Catholic people, the neighborhood saloon still is the focus of politics.

811
01:10:00.300 --> 01:10:08.300
Most of the socializing gets done in the saloon, and the saloon keeper becomes the major, the ward healer becomes the political power.

812
01:10:08.300 --> 01:10:18.020
And so if you outlaw that, you can smash the liturgical politics.

813
01:10:18.020 --> 01:10:27.540
So prohibition gets restored now as a big objective.

814
01:10:27.540 --> 01:10:33.620
Another thing to do is to try to eliminate city voting altogether, eliminate the mayor

815
01:10:33.620 --> 01:10:36.980
and put in the non-political, quote-unquote, city manager.

816
01:10:36.980 --> 01:10:43.260
This is the result of the so-called city manager movement, or city commission movement.

817
01:10:43.260 --> 01:10:46.060
Very powerful, took over most of the small cities in the United States.

818
01:10:46.060 --> 01:10:49.660
It didn't win out in New York or Philadelphia or Boston, but in most of the small cities,

819
01:10:49.660 --> 01:10:53.660
Dayton, Ohio, and also Galveston, Texas, and now have city managers.

820
01:10:53.660 --> 01:10:57.940
The city manager gets a high salary, the mayor gets almost no salary, the mayor gets 20 bucks

821
01:10:57.940 --> 01:10:58.940
a year or something.

822
01:10:58.940 --> 01:11:02.180
The mayor therefore has very little power, the city manager is in there full-time, gets

823
01:11:02.180 --> 01:11:07.180
and he has his own bureaucracy in there and runs everything mostly to his own liking.

824
01:11:07.180 --> 01:11:14.180
Again, this is the political power by the bureaucrat, by the technocrat bureaucrat taking over from the voters.

825
01:11:14.180 --> 01:11:20.180
Voters almost no say in this anymore, it's eliminated, very indirect.

826
01:11:20.180 --> 01:11:24.180
Another thing that happens is the nationalization of the public school system.

827
01:11:24.180 --> 01:11:30.180
The public schools until about 1900 were essentially, first of all, they were not compulsory outside New England and the Yankee area.

828
01:11:30.180 --> 01:11:35.340
In the South, there's no compulsory attendance laws.

829
01:11:35.340 --> 01:11:39.080
And second of all, the public school, remember the idea of the public school as a Protestantizing

830
01:11:39.080 --> 01:11:43.180
device, this comes in even much more now with progressives.

831
01:11:43.180 --> 01:11:47.220
If you can't get the Catholic adults, Catholic adults are hopeless and steep in sin, therefore

832
01:11:47.220 --> 01:11:51.780
get the kids, Christianize the Catholics as they call, you get to force the kids into

833
01:11:51.780 --> 01:11:55.540
the public school system and then Protestantize them to the public schools.

834
01:11:55.540 --> 01:12:01.260
So there's a big drive for public school, expansion of the public school system in New

835
01:12:01.260 --> 01:12:09.500
York and the South and every place else, post-re-public school attendance, there's an informal requirement

836
01:12:09.500 --> 01:12:13.300
in most jurisdictions, in order to be a public school teacher you had to be a Protestant

837
01:12:13.300 --> 01:12:14.300
church member.

838
01:12:14.300 --> 01:12:18.940
It was not official, it was unofficial but just because it was important.

839
01:12:18.940 --> 01:12:23.900
In San Francisco we had a constant fight for 50 years between the Catholics and the Protestants

840
01:12:23.900 --> 01:12:29.900
in San Francisco, control of the public school system, control of the city in general, the public school in particular.

841
01:12:29.900 --> 01:12:41.900
Behind the public school drive are the upper class and wasps, upper class business people and wasps, many places coincidental.

842
01:12:41.900 --> 01:12:49.900
So another thing about public schools is when you force Catholics into it, and Christianize them, quote unquote,

843
01:12:49.900 --> 01:12:55.900
And two, business people began to use the public schools as a device to socialize their costs.

844
01:12:57.900 --> 01:13:00.900
This is an important form of subsidy we have to realize.

845
01:13:00.900 --> 01:13:04.900
One way in which the government subsidizes business is by socializing the cost of business.

846
01:13:04.900 --> 01:13:08.900
In other words, taking over some of the costs and loading it onto the taxpayer.

847
01:13:08.900 --> 01:13:14.900
For example, in the time of slavery in the South, slavery would not have been efficient, would not have been economic, I should say.

848
01:13:14.900 --> 01:13:17.900
Because one of the problems of slavery is that slaves tend to run away.

849
01:13:17.900 --> 01:13:22.100
You have a problem with slaves running away, you don't have capital equipment, machines

850
01:13:22.100 --> 01:13:24.820
don't decide to run away, slaves do.

851
01:13:24.820 --> 01:13:28.780
So in order to get the, in order to minimize the cost of enforcement, the slave masters

852
01:13:28.780 --> 01:13:34.020
loaded onto the shoulders of the average white taxpayer in the South by having so-called

853
01:13:34.020 --> 01:13:40.420
slave patrols, the slave patrol draft.

854
01:13:40.420 --> 01:13:46.620
Every Southerner was required to join a slave patrol for two weeks out of a year or something.

855
01:13:46.620 --> 01:13:50.740
Slave patrols patrol the highway, the roads at night, and catch slaves who have run away.

856
01:13:50.740 --> 01:13:53.180
Slave patrols are like five people on the patrol.

857
01:13:53.180 --> 01:13:57.420
Every black person had to have an identity card, something like South Africa, in other

858
01:13:57.420 --> 01:14:00.820
words, you have to have an ID card, in this case from your master telling you where to

859
01:14:00.820 --> 01:14:03.420
go, allowing you to go on this particular road.

860
01:14:03.420 --> 01:14:07.260
If you didn't have an ID card from your master, you were immediately seized by the, if they

861
01:14:07.260 --> 01:14:12.260
didn't know who your slave master was, the slave patrol people were drafted, by the way.

862
01:14:12.260 --> 01:14:15.980
So the way they got their jollies was, every once in a while they'd find a slave who didn't

863
01:14:15.980 --> 01:14:19.020
have an ID card, they didn't know who the slave master was, and they would then own

864
01:14:19.020 --> 01:14:22.940
the slave, assume homestead ownership of the slave and sell the slave at auction and get

865
01:14:22.940 --> 01:14:23.940
the proceeds.

866
01:14:23.940 --> 01:14:28.700
This is the way they got their little boodle, part of the loot.

867
01:14:28.700 --> 01:14:32.860
So in the same way, in a sense the same way that the slave masters were able to load the

868
01:14:32.860 --> 01:14:37.620
slave patrol costs onto the shoulders of the average white person in the South, in the

869
01:14:37.620 --> 01:14:42.180
same way, the public school system socialized a lot of business costs.

870
01:14:42.180 --> 01:14:47.260
For example, businessmen began to want to send a lot of salesmen to South America.

871
01:14:47.260 --> 01:14:49.860
They said, why don't they get their businessmen to learn Spanish?

872
01:14:49.860 --> 01:14:52.620
Well, how do they get the kids and the guy to learn Spanish?

873
01:14:52.620 --> 01:14:55.580
They either have to train them themselves at their own course or they also get the public

874
01:14:55.580 --> 01:14:57.140
school system to teach them Spanish.

875
01:14:57.140 --> 01:14:58.140
What the hell?

876
01:14:58.140 --> 01:14:59.140
Load the course onto the taxpayer.

877
01:14:59.140 --> 01:15:04.460
So the national NAM and other business groups began to agitate that public schools should

878
01:15:04.460 --> 01:15:09.180
teach Spanish so that then they can take the guy who's already trained in Spanish.

879
01:15:09.180 --> 01:15:13.180
You're loading the course onto the taxpayers, that amounts to.

880
01:15:13.180 --> 01:15:18.180
So with all this, in addition to that you have the education, professional educationists,

881
01:15:18.180 --> 01:15:24.300
who, John Dewey and other so-called progressives, who are talking about the new theory of progressive

882
01:15:24.300 --> 01:15:28.660
education, every individual, instead of becoming an individual, learns to be part of a group,

883
01:15:28.660 --> 01:15:32.340
part of a collective, so to speak, and fits into the collective.

884
01:15:32.340 --> 01:15:35.660
And this of course suited very well, this new kind of progressive doctrine, you fit

885
01:15:35.660 --> 01:15:41.060
into the collective, whatever it is, government or business agency, we're not causing any

886
01:15:41.060 --> 01:15:42.060
trouble.

887
01:15:42.060 --> 01:15:45.860
So you have a whole municipal reform movement.

888
01:15:45.860 --> 01:15:48.620
Part of the public school movement, by the way, I think in the old days public school

889
01:15:48.620 --> 01:15:50.220
used to be decentralized.

890
01:15:50.220 --> 01:15:54.860
The school boards were voted on by each neighborhood, the parents of each neighborhood, they would

891
01:15:54.860 --> 01:15:56.540
vote for the school board in that neighborhood.

892
01:15:56.540 --> 01:15:59.940
This is the general way in which most schools were operated.

893
01:15:59.940 --> 01:16:05.180
This was considered inefficient, too democratic, too much in control of the parents, the theory

894
01:16:05.180 --> 01:16:08.280
The theory of progressive educators was that only educationists know how to teach a kid.

895
01:16:08.280 --> 01:16:09.280
Parents know nothing.

896
01:16:09.280 --> 01:16:14.100
Educationists know everything because they got a PhD in education, a teacher in college.

897
01:16:14.100 --> 01:16:18.900
So you have a total graph of power on the part of the educationists and part of the

898
01:16:18.900 --> 01:16:24.140
graph of power was that you minimize the voting procedure, first of all you have a huge school

899
01:16:24.140 --> 01:16:29.660
board covering the whole city and then a school board hopefully appointed by the superintendent

900
01:16:29.660 --> 01:16:36.060
of Schools, or appointed by the mayor, it eliminates the parent's role altogether.

901
01:16:36.060 --> 01:16:40.700
In other words, the whole idea was to have huge districts, where the parents wouldn't

902
01:16:40.700 --> 01:16:45.420
know who the administrators are anyway, and have the mayor, you have to elect the mayor,

903
01:16:45.420 --> 01:16:47.980
there's no way you can get around that, but you have everything then appointed by the

904
01:16:47.980 --> 01:16:48.980
mayor.

905
01:16:48.980 --> 01:16:53.420
The mayor appoints the superintendent, the school board, everything becomes a cozy technocratic

906
01:16:53.420 --> 01:16:56.140
thing with the parents having no say in the matter.

907
01:16:56.140 --> 01:17:01.580
This, of course, is what happened after the 1900s, probably a progressive situation.

908
01:17:01.580 --> 01:17:06.980
The 1960s was a slight move away from this, in the so-called New Left period, where New

909
01:17:06.980 --> 01:17:11.980
York, for example, we now have regional school parent elections with a tremendous, after

910
01:17:11.980 --> 01:17:17.300
a tremendous blockage, a tremendous opposition by the trench teachers unions who were battling

911
01:17:17.300 --> 01:17:18.300
this to the hilt.

912
01:17:18.300 --> 01:17:23.700
At any rate, this is an ideological drive in the name of so-called value-free science

913
01:17:23.700 --> 01:17:28.700
and financial value for your education, to grab control of the kids on the part of the

914
01:17:28.700 --> 01:17:37.700
professional educationists, or in with upper-class lost types, those things fitted in beautifully.

915
01:17:37.700 --> 01:17:43.700
Also another thing about urban reform is, in addition to city manager, you make, before

916
01:17:43.700 --> 01:17:49.700
that, before 1900, you had the ward district, for example the legislature in New York City

917
01:17:49.700 --> 01:17:55.240
the so-called Board of Aldermen and you had very a lot of each small neighborhood have

918
01:17:55.240 --> 01:17:58.800
its own aldermen you have like 400 people in the Board of Aldermen it means that everybody

919
01:17:58.800 --> 01:18:03.140
more or less knew their aldermen so you have a certain amount of democratic check on a

920
01:18:03.140 --> 01:18:07.360
situation you can put pressure on your aldermen where you knew who he was you put pressure

921
01:18:07.360 --> 01:18:13.100
on him in order to take power out of the hands of ethnic liturgical Irish, Etanian, et cetera

922
01:18:13.100 --> 01:18:18.380
ethnics in the name of so-called efficiency the progressives then changed all that to

923
01:18:18.380 --> 01:18:25.380
very big, very small city council. Instead of 400 people, you have 20 people. You reduce

924
01:18:25.380 --> 01:18:31.240
that and you run them preferably at large for the whole city. First of all, nobody knows

925
01:18:31.240 --> 01:18:35.340
any of your representatives. Second of all, it's very costly to run an at-large election.

926
01:18:35.340 --> 01:18:38.780
It means to run for the whole of New York or the whole of San Francisco costs a lot

927
01:18:38.780 --> 01:18:42.940
of money. You have to be quite wealthy or have wealthy backers to do it. To run from

928
01:18:42.940 --> 01:18:47.580
East Bay Ridge costs very little. To run from the whole city costs a lot.

929
01:18:47.580 --> 01:19:00.580
In this way, they deliberately got rid of most of the working class, poor or working class and ethnic supporters or ethnic administrators and shifted the control of the city through a few upper class WASPs, upper class WASP businessmen.

930
01:19:00.580 --> 01:19:10.580
This is all done deliberately. I'll quote a few things, but Weinstein has a lot of this and there are other sources if you're interested.

931
01:19:10.580 --> 01:19:17.580
There's all sorts of data on this thing. It was done in Pittsburgh and Des Moines, etc.

932
01:19:17.580 --> 01:19:23.580
There are data about how originally, say, Pittsburgh had a lot of working-class aldermen.

933
01:19:23.580 --> 01:19:29.580
Then they shift this thing and you wind up with a few upper-class physicians.

934
01:19:29.580 --> 01:19:34.580
And the name again of efficiency.

935
01:19:34.580 --> 01:19:43.700
So this is done in Rochester, George Eastman does it, sets up a recent codex, sets up a

936
01:19:43.700 --> 01:19:50.620
Bureau of Municipal Research, in the name of so-called good government, business-like efficiency.

937
01:19:50.620 --> 01:19:55.620
It's all done in order to get the shift of political power from liturgical, working-class

938
01:19:55.620 --> 01:20:03.580
liturgical and liturgical machine to upper-class businessmen, it all fits the ethnic and the

939
01:20:03.580 --> 01:20:08.220
economic will fit in.

940
01:20:08.220 --> 01:20:10.940
In Pittsburgh, for example, the

941
01:20:10.940 --> 01:20:13.180
drive for civil reform

942
01:20:13.180 --> 01:20:17.820
was led by the Civic Club and the Voters League, which were both upper-class WASP groups

943
01:20:17.820 --> 01:20:23.220
and essentially businessmen, bankers, corporate officials and their wives and physicians.

944
01:20:23.220 --> 01:20:29.780
There's usually one or two kept physicians in this group who come in as

945
01:20:29.780 --> 01:20:33.260
allies.

946
01:20:33.260 --> 01:20:37.620
So in general, before the progressive reforms, cities were decentralized, there were confederations

947
01:20:37.620 --> 01:20:43.060
of local wards, they were quite democratic, there were local working-class representatives

948
01:20:43.060 --> 01:20:49.220
and middle-class representatives, in Pittsburgh, for example, in 1910, before the reform period,

949
01:20:49.220 --> 01:20:55.660
the city council consisted of about 300 members or so, of which two-thirds were small business

950
01:20:55.660 --> 01:20:59.660
manner workers, in other words, two-thirds were either employee clerks, laborers, or

951
01:20:59.660 --> 01:21:06.180
Rosers and things like that. After the reform movement took over, you have almost all were

952
01:21:06.180 --> 01:21:16.180
big businessmen, professional managers, and lost types. There's all sorts of data on this

953
01:21:16.180 --> 01:21:22.460
to deal with. In city after city, Pittsburgh and Galveston and Dayton, et cetera, et cetera.

954
01:21:22.460 --> 01:21:26.700
In Pittsburgh, they didn't want, many of these cities didn't want to have a city manager

955
01:21:26.700 --> 01:21:31.780
for City Manager Reform. What they did is in the United States, what you have to realize

956
01:21:31.780 --> 01:21:36.100
is that cities are a pure tool of the state. I mean, constitutionally, the state has total

957
01:21:36.100 --> 01:21:40.660
power over every city within the state. So in Pennsylvania, for example, and Pittsburgh

958
01:21:40.660 --> 01:21:44.300
resisted the idea of this progressive reform, the Pennsylvania legislature simply ordered

959
01:21:44.300 --> 01:21:48.300
Pittsburgh to do it. They just took over Pittsburgh. They seized Pittsburgh, kicked out the mayor,

960
01:21:48.300 --> 01:21:54.660
kicked out the school board and put in their own people. So, for example, Pittsburgh got

961
01:21:54.660 --> 01:22:00.060
The governor simply appointed, kicked out a city council, appointed a new city council

962
01:22:00.060 --> 01:22:05.940
based on its at-large voting, and of the nine people in it, they had six upper-class businessmen

963
01:22:05.940 --> 01:22:11.940
and two upper-class doctors, and one KEP union official, and the school board they appointed,

964
01:22:11.940 --> 01:22:16.300
the state appointed in order to change this whole school board thing, they again had ten

965
01:22:16.300 --> 01:22:23.140
big businessmen, one upper-class doctor and one KEP union official, so totally different

966
01:22:23.140 --> 01:22:30.820
from the way it had been elected before that.

967
01:22:30.820 --> 01:22:38.060
One of the ways in which they did this, one of the areas of agitation was so-called corruption,

968
01:22:38.060 --> 01:22:46.180
reform versus corruption.

969
01:22:46.180 --> 01:22:52.860
So one thing we have to realize is that this is really an ideological attack on the big

970
01:22:52.860 --> 01:22:59.860
On the big city machines, which are pro-corrupt unquote, actually they're no more corrupt than others, they're just more visible.

971
01:22:59.860 --> 01:23:07.860
I mean, for example, if some small town in upstate New York is corrupt, it's very small. New York City is corrupt, as we've seen recently. It's huge.

972
01:23:07.860 --> 01:23:14.860
Hundreds of millions of dollars get siphoned off. So big city corruption is more visible.

973
01:23:14.860 --> 01:23:44.860
and also it's more, it's more visible in other sense. See, the guys who are doing it, if you have a reform group, you give a business a contract above cost, it's less visible than say, something like Lindenauer, just taking money out of the tilt, more rapish in the case of Lindenauer. It's more visible, so to speak. It's less smooth, put it that way. So we have then, as the use by the reformers of the corruption charge, much of which is, I think,

974
01:23:44.860 --> 01:23:51.860
It's misfiring. For example, in the big business machines in the 1900s or so, instead of having

975
01:23:54.100 --> 01:23:56.940
a big welfare system, you had a lot of poor people, you had more poor people than you

976
01:23:56.940 --> 01:24:01.500
have now, proportionally. You didn't have any welfare state. What you had was Tammany

977
01:24:01.500 --> 01:24:08.140
Hall, let's say, which is the New York, Manhattan Democratic Party known as Tammany Hall. The

978
01:24:08.140 --> 01:24:11.860
way they would take care of the poor is they had like a private welfare mechanism by the

979
01:24:11.860 --> 01:24:16.860
This is sort of a party structure. In other words, they give away free turkeys at Christmas or Thanksgiving.

980
01:24:16.860 --> 01:24:23.860
They have turkey dinners for the poor, handled by a democratic party, a local democratic party. It's kind of lovable.

981
01:24:23.860 --> 01:24:29.860
So you have sort of a private welfare state organized by the democratic party.

982
01:24:29.860 --> 01:24:34.860
This way, of course, they buy the vote. In other words, the people would be grateful to the local democratic party and vote democratic.

983
01:24:34.860 --> 01:24:40.860
In a sense, there's nothing much wrong with that. It's sort of like a tit-for-tat situation where they fix...

984
01:24:40.860 --> 01:24:49.860
They fixed traffic tickets. When I was growing up, for example, a local Democratic clubhouse person would fix traffic tickets and also fix jury service.

985
01:24:49.860 --> 01:24:56.860
He didn't want a jury summons. He handed it to your local Democratic leader and he would quote, take care, unquote, of the jury summons.

986
01:24:56.860 --> 01:25:01.860
This is, I suppose, corruption. It's also helpful corruption. It's helpful to the public. It's getting the public off their neck.

987
01:25:01.860 --> 01:25:11.860
and also alleviating poverty, in many extent, out of essentially non-governmental, at least it's not funded by a tax payer, it's funded in general, I guess, from government office.

988
01:25:11.860 --> 01:25:20.860
So it's kind of a raffish kind of corruption, which is not nearly as unfortunate, I think, as a non-corrupt big government, so to speak.

989
01:25:20.860 --> 01:25:24.860
There were the worst things in the world of corruption, one of them is incorruptible government.

990
01:25:24.860 --> 01:25:30.860
In communist countries now, for example, the only way they can operate at all is by having a huge amount of corruption, by bribery and so forth.

991
01:25:30.860 --> 01:25:37.860
Another thing they did was, as a result of this reformed government, they had a much bigger government pool of taxes to have municipal garbage disposal, municipal construction, new sewers, new bridges, contracts for businessmen, and much more money to play around with.

992
01:26:00.860 --> 01:26:07.460
with welfare departments, playgrounds, all these things now come in with so-called non-corrupt

993
01:26:07.460 --> 01:26:11.540
reform government. In other words, reform government turns out to be much bigger government

994
01:26:11.540 --> 01:26:16.900
than non-reform. I'll just give you one quote before the break. H. L. Mencken, my favorite

995
01:26:16.900 --> 01:26:22.900
writer, was a German-American growing up in Baltimore, had a great story in his autobiography

996
01:26:22.900 --> 01:26:29.340
of his attitude to reform, he said, was set by him when his father was a small cigar manufacturer

997
01:26:29.340 --> 01:26:44.340
He said his father had a cigar factory in Baltimore. He hung out a sign in 1885 outside a factory, saying August Mencken and Brothers.

998
01:26:44.340 --> 01:26:52.340
He called in his corrupt city councilman, so-called corrupt city councilman. He said, look, here's 20 bucks. For 20 bucks you keep the government off my neck forever.

999
01:26:52.340 --> 01:27:01.340
In other words, the agreement was you pay the city councilman 20 bucks, in return for which he takes care of all easement fees, license requirements, all the rest of this crap.

1000
01:27:01.340 --> 01:27:10.340
As Mencken said, this is in full settlement forevermore of all present and privilege fees, all permanent and privilege fees, easement taxes and other such costs and imposts.

1001
01:27:10.340 --> 01:27:21.340
The city councilman pocketed the money in return was supposed to stave off any cops, billing inspectors or other functionaries who had any lawful interest in the matter or try to horn in for private profit.

1002
01:27:21.340 --> 01:27:26.380
Being an honorable man according to his lights, he, at least the city councilman, kept his

1003
01:27:26.380 --> 01:27:29.740
bargain and the sign flapped and squeaked in the breeze for ten years.

1004
01:27:29.740 --> 01:27:36.340
In other words, from 1885 to 1895, Mencken and Co. was free of all government fees because

1005
01:27:36.340 --> 01:27:40.580
the city councilman pocketed twenty bucks and kept the government off his neck.

1006
01:27:40.580 --> 01:27:46.260
Then he says in 1895 a reform wave struck Baltimore and the reformers came in, the city

1007
01:27:46.260 --> 01:27:51.420
The city councilman was kicked out and quote, the idealist in the city hall sent word that

1008
01:27:51.420 --> 01:27:57.100
a license to maintain the sign would cost $62.75 a year, in other words, he had paid

1009
01:27:57.100 --> 01:28:03.220
20 bucks for a 10 year sentence, would now cost $62.75 a year.

1010
01:28:03.220 --> 01:28:07.460
This was proof to my, the sign came down the next day, this was proof to my father that

1011
01:28:07.460 --> 01:28:13.020
reform was mainly only a conspiracy of prehensile charlatanists and multi-tax payers.

1012
01:28:13.020 --> 01:28:18.280
and Mencken says that, and he believed that political corruption was inevitable under democracy

1013
01:28:18.280 --> 01:28:21.500
and was even argued out of his own experience that it had its uses.

1014
01:28:21.500 --> 01:28:25.900
So anyway, this is Mencken's view of the reform movement, I think he was right.

1015
01:28:25.900 --> 01:28:34.700
In the urban reform front, since in the cities wasps are on a minority after all, and liturgicals

1016
01:28:34.700 --> 01:28:41.380
and working class are majority, the way in which the reformers, which is almost always

1017
01:28:41.380 --> 01:28:47.860
Upper Class, WASP, the way they can win out from time to time is by using moral arguments,

1018
01:28:47.860 --> 01:28:53.460
by saying that the big city machines corrupt, they're boss-ridden, it's true they're corrupt

1019
01:28:53.460 --> 01:28:57.620
and boss-ridden, but the thing's worse than boss-ridden corruption, namely reformers,

1020
01:28:57.620 --> 01:29:03.940
and alleged efficiency, which really winds up with tremendous, tremendously increased

1021
01:29:03.940 --> 01:29:10.740
rates on the taxpayer, plus of course pietist elimination or wiping out of entrepreneurial

1022
01:29:10.740 --> 01:29:14.700
activities like gambling, prostitution, etc.

1023
01:29:14.700 --> 01:29:17.840
So one of the things which reformers use, one of their moral arguments is the attack

1024
01:29:17.840 --> 01:29:22.060
on organized, so-called organized crime, and it has been a very interesting article in

1025
01:29:22.060 --> 01:29:27.660
Journal of American History, I recommend, in December 1970, called Urban Crime and Criminal

1026
01:29:27.660 --> 01:29:34.060
Justice, a Chicago case, which really deals with how the whole class struggle around organized

1027
01:29:34.060 --> 01:29:38.820
Organized Crime with the reformers using the, of course, the argument of the ethnic

1028
01:29:38.820 --> 01:29:45.820
bosses and legal organized crime and using this as an argument to have state corporatists

1029
01:29:46.780 --> 01:29:52.860
control over the city. And this turns out, for example, in the legal profession, a corporate

1030
01:29:52.860 --> 01:29:59.860
lawyer is a big class struggle between the corporate lawyers and the criminal lawyers.

1031
01:30:00.140 --> 01:30:03.280
The corporate lawyers, of course, the elite in the law and legal profession, they make

1032
01:30:03.280 --> 01:30:15.160
The criminal lawyers tend to be less polished, they're raffish types, often in Brooklyn,

1033
01:30:15.160 --> 01:30:21.520
and they're less suave, etc., and they're attacked as being affiliated with organized

1034
01:30:21.520 --> 01:30:22.520
crime.

1035
01:30:22.520 --> 01:30:26.080
Of course, everybody's entitled to a lawyer, so if somebody is a criminal up for indictment,

1036
01:30:26.080 --> 01:30:31.840
he's going to turn to some lawyer or other, and criminal lawyers, therefore, often toward

1037
01:30:31.840 --> 01:30:35.680
are part of the brush of being quasi-criminals themselves, it seems to me unfair since everybody

1038
01:30:35.680 --> 01:30:42.160
is entitled to some lawyer, but as a matter of fact there is now a drive on by the legal

1039
01:30:42.160 --> 01:30:49.640
professional limit the fees the criminal lawyers get to put a cap, of course they're not putting

1040
01:30:49.640 --> 01:30:55.840
any cap on corporate lawyers, it's all part of this class struggle so to speak, business

1041
01:30:55.840 --> 01:31:00.040
These are just corporate types and more raffish ethnic types.

1042
01:31:00.040 --> 01:31:07.160
I remember one point about 20 years ago, Jacob Fuchsberg was an distinguished criminal lawyer

1043
01:31:07.160 --> 01:31:11.240
in New York, ran up to the State Court of Appeal, which was the highest New York State

1044
01:31:11.240 --> 01:31:15.360
judicial arm, and was bitterly attacked by the entire corporate law profession, and was

1045
01:31:15.360 --> 01:31:19.280
very upset that he's a criminal lawyer, he has no business in the, I mean, the Court

1046
01:31:19.280 --> 01:31:22.440
of Appeal people should always be corporate Wall Street lawyers, there's nothing, there's

1047
01:31:22.440 --> 01:31:26.840
There's no divine commandment, it has to be a corporate lawyer, but there's a big fight against them.

1048
01:31:26.840 --> 01:31:33.280
One of the ways in which the WASP reformers can use their moral outlaw is the media, of course.

1049
01:31:33.280 --> 01:31:40.760
The media is usually, of course, WASP-controlled, and so what you have then in the cities, New York, Chicago, etc., whatever,

1050
01:31:40.760 --> 01:31:48.200
the reformers are pushed by the New York Times, let's say, which is not WASP, but this is a reformer outfit.

1051
01:31:48.200 --> 01:31:54.600
and so you have then prestige or respectable newspaper behind the reformers.

1052
01:31:54.600 --> 01:32:02.240
In New York, for example, which is of course largely a democratic party city, was run by a reform fusion ticket for about all during the 1930s.

1053
01:32:02.240 --> 01:32:13.240
Mayor LaGuardia was elected by a Republican fusion government, fusion party, and coming in on the wave of so-called reform,

1054
01:32:13.240 --> 01:32:26.200
To get even more ethnic here, it's interesting that the Italian-Americans, for example, have

1055
01:32:26.200 --> 01:32:30.760
been very difficult to make it politically until very, very recently, of course, with

1056
01:32:30.760 --> 01:32:31.760
Cuomo.

1057
01:32:31.760 --> 01:32:37.800
Before that, in New York State, the only Italian-Americans who succeeded politically were Protestant-Atlanteans.

1058
01:32:37.800 --> 01:32:42.600
That's a very small percentage of the Italian-American population is Protestant, as you can imagine,

1059
01:32:42.600 --> 01:32:49.600
to be one percent, but somehow the Italian-Americans in politics who made it politically and so

1060
01:32:49.600 --> 01:32:57.440
very recently were Protestant, LaGuardia and Pecora, people like that who were really, Italian

1061
01:32:57.440 --> 01:33:00.440
Protestant therefore becoming a very small percentage of the Italian population, not really

1062
01:33:00.440 --> 01:33:08.520
in with basic Italian-Americans, so of course we're Catholic, so again this is all part

1063
01:33:08.520 --> 01:33:22.480
Part of the loss versus catholic and high Lutheran struggle.

1064
01:33:22.480 --> 01:33:28.600
And again an attack, big city machines were basically Irish, after 1900 or so, Protestant

1065
01:33:28.600 --> 01:33:34.560
loss were kicked out, so you had basically an old Calvinist loss, basically the city

1066
01:33:34.560 --> 01:33:43.560
The big city machines were Irish, and so an attack on the big city forces essentially was an anti-Irish or anti-Catholic assault in the name of so-called reform.

1067
01:33:50.560 --> 01:33:55.560
So what you had then is the reformers were able to capture the high moral ground.

1068
01:33:55.560 --> 01:33:59.560
There's very few people who can take a sophisticated argument in favor of corruption.

1069
01:33:59.560 --> 01:34:04.560
The argument basically is the Mencken argument. It's better to be corrupt and have an efficient high-tax government.

1070
01:34:04.560 --> 01:34:11.560
It's very difficult to make that argument, and basically so the reformers can use the media, the press, etc.,

1071
01:34:11.560 --> 01:34:17.560
taking a high moral tone and attacking everybody else as being immoral, which is basically their view.

1072
01:34:17.560 --> 01:34:26.560
Also along with this comes the upper-class WASP moral theorists, so to speak.

1073
01:34:26.560 --> 01:34:33.880
upper-class females who start running around 1900 the social work movement, social worker,

1074
01:34:33.880 --> 01:34:41.480
settlement house movement, Jane Addams, people like that who were a whole bunch of WASP reformers,

1075
01:34:41.480 --> 01:34:48.920
Jane Addams in Chicago, Seth Lowe in New York, Jacob Rees, Jacob Rees Housing, all these

1076
01:34:48.920 --> 01:34:54.840
people were upper-class WASP millionaires and Jane Addams was the daughter of an upper-class

1077
01:34:54.840 --> 01:35:01.840
Coming in to uplift the poor, in those days it was uplift. In other words, you are upper

1078
01:35:02.400 --> 01:35:07.400
class females, let's say, coming in and uplifting the lower east side. How do you uplift? Of

1079
01:35:07.400 --> 01:35:14.240
course, you hand out food and so forth. Basically, the uplift is also using compulsion, forcing,

1080
01:35:14.240 --> 01:35:19.200
kicking out, getting rid of sweatshop employers, which really meant getting rid of employers,

1081
01:35:19.200 --> 01:35:24.640
getting rid of conditions they didn't like, getting rid of prostitution saloons, you know,

1082
01:35:24.640 --> 01:35:28.300
Prohibition comes in beautifully, all these people were prohibitionists, and prohibition

1083
01:35:28.300 --> 01:35:32.860
was part of the idea of uplifting the poor, you uplift the poor by stamping out immoral

1084
01:35:32.860 --> 01:35:39.960
conditions, immoral conditions meant liquor, saloon, prostitution, pornography, whatever.

1085
01:35:39.960 --> 01:35:45.580
So all this was part of the moral reform movement, part of the progressive seizure of power on

1086
01:35:45.580 --> 01:35:50.460
a local level.

1087
01:35:50.460 --> 01:35:54.360
Another way to do this, this is known as urban imperialism, this is something which

1088
01:35:54.360 --> 01:35:59.240
which is very little known. I know of only one book that really mentions this in any length,

1089
01:35:59.240 --> 01:36:03.800
it's written by Kotler, a book called Neighborhood Government. One of the ways in which the cities

1090
01:36:03.800 --> 01:36:09.360
grew in this period is by seizing power over the other areas. In other words, much of the

1091
01:36:09.360 --> 01:36:16.640
urban political growth, urban population growth from 1900 to 1910 was not growth by people

1092
01:36:16.640 --> 01:36:21.740
being born or people migrating, it was growth in the sense of seizing control over by expanding

1093
01:36:21.740 --> 01:36:27.620
Originally a city geography, in other words, originally in 1900 New York City was Manhattan

1094
01:36:27.620 --> 01:36:32.140
and Brooklyn was its own city, actually Brooklyn was a combination of a whole bunch of different

1095
01:36:32.140 --> 01:36:36.940
cities, Black Bush, New York, all these were originally cities, Brooklyn was the fourth

1096
01:36:36.940 --> 01:36:42.580
largest city in the United States in 1900, it was seized by New York, Manhattan had conquered

1097
01:36:42.580 --> 01:36:47.340
the Bronx by that time, and seized in this sense compulsory seizure, Brooklyn did not

1098
01:36:47.340 --> 01:36:50.780
want to be amalgamated with New York, so New York went to the New York State Legislature,

1099
01:36:50.780 --> 01:36:53.780
New York State Legislature forced Brooklyn into it, in other words the state legislature

1100
01:36:53.780 --> 01:36:58.380
remember was all powerful and so this happened in Philadelphia, it happened in Pittsburgh

1101
01:36:58.380 --> 01:37:01.820
where the cities would just simply incorporate areas, other cities around it.

1102
01:37:01.820 --> 01:37:06.620
Philadelphia crushed Germantown, seized Germantown by using a Pennsylvania legislature.

1103
01:37:06.620 --> 01:37:10.820
In other words these cities, Brooklyn did not want to be incorporated into New York.

1104
01:37:10.820 --> 01:37:13.020
Germantown did not want to be incorporated into Philadelphia.

1105
01:37:13.020 --> 01:37:17.420
It's simply they used the state legislature to force these other cities into it.

1106
01:37:17.420 --> 01:37:22.780
It's been called urban imperialism over its neighbors, I think it's a pretty good term

1107
01:37:22.780 --> 01:37:23.780
here.

1108
01:37:23.780 --> 01:37:29.580
By urban, so what was the accomplishment here, what they did is you bring in more tax revenue,

1109
01:37:29.580 --> 01:37:35.180
in other words, many of these areas, for example in Pittsburgh, which grabbed a whole bunch

1110
01:37:35.180 --> 01:37:44.940
of neighboring cities, there was more, these cities, these downtowns, for example, let's

1111
01:37:44.940 --> 01:37:52.140
Pittsburgh was originally built around the railroad terminals. In other words, before

1112
01:37:52.140 --> 01:37:56.740
automobiles came in and trucks came in, the city had a railroad terminal and cities were

1113
01:37:56.740 --> 01:38:01.900
built around it. They had factories and people living there, etc. So the downtowns were heavily

1114
01:38:01.900 --> 01:38:06.900
indebted with railroad bonds and so forth, subsidized railroads. They're paying heavy

1115
01:38:06.900 --> 01:38:11.100
taxes on these bonds. If you grab a whole bunch of other cities around it and incorporate

1116
01:38:11.100 --> 01:38:15.260
into Pittsburgh, then you can tax these guys to pay for the railroad bonds. That's actually

1117
01:38:15.260 --> 01:38:20.100
what happened. In other words, to use this downtown interest, downtown businessmen are

1118
01:38:20.100 --> 01:38:25.540
heading up the inner city, seize power in the suburbs, bring them into the city and

1119
01:38:25.540 --> 01:38:30.900
then tax them. That's basically the point. Assess these billings at a higher rate, so

1120
01:38:30.900 --> 01:38:35.380
forth and so on. So, and especially New York is the same thing, the Brooklyn and the Bronx,

1121
01:38:35.380 --> 01:38:40.100
which was really part of Westchester.

1122
01:38:40.100 --> 01:38:47.100
So this happened a lot between 1900 and 1910, this growth of urban imperialism that annex

1123
01:38:47.580 --> 01:38:50.860
neighboring towns, neighboring cities, bring them into the tax base.

1124
01:38:50.860 --> 01:38:54.900
There has been for many years now a so-called metro movement.

1125
01:38:54.900 --> 01:38:58.660
The idea is to grab Westchester, I would say, and grab parts of Nassau, force them into

1126
01:38:58.660 --> 01:38:59.700
New York City and tax them.

1127
01:38:59.700 --> 01:39:05.100
In other words, it's really just a tax gimmick to bring these poor guys into a higher tax

1128
01:39:05.100 --> 01:39:12.100
and get downtown New York for the subsidies

1129
01:39:16.860 --> 01:39:23.860
This process happened during the 19th century but in this progressive period it reached its peak

1130
01:39:23.860 --> 01:39:34.680
So they deliberately, for example in Pittsburgh, they deliberately tax the other wards much

1131
01:39:34.680 --> 01:39:41.320
more heavily than the downtown wards, much higher assessment per dollar property on the

1132
01:39:41.320 --> 01:39:46.520
outlying wards that they were trying to take, they were taking over.

1133
01:39:46.520 --> 01:39:51.440
In Pittsburgh for example in 1912, after the compulsory seizure of Allegheny and other

1134
01:39:51.440 --> 01:40:00.000
In the other towns, incorporating to Pittsburgh, the old rate, well in one case, Boehm-Houven,

1135
01:40:00.000 --> 01:40:04.720
which was a new town, incorporating to Pittsburgh, was paying 90 times the property assessment,

1136
01:40:04.720 --> 01:40:07.640
property tax, than the old Third Ward, the old downtown Third Ward.

1137
01:40:07.640 --> 01:40:11.880
That's of course very unusual, usually not that big a range, but basically that's what

1138
01:40:11.880 --> 01:40:12.880
happens.

1139
01:40:12.880 --> 01:40:16.720
You take the new ward, you tax it more heavily than the old one and thereby subsidize the

1140
01:40:16.720 --> 01:40:33.440
Brooklyn was annexed in 1898 by the New York City Collaboration and New York State Legislature.

1141
01:40:33.440 --> 01:40:43.960
So for example, Pittsburgh grew from 1900-1910, grew from a population of 320,000 to 530,000

1142
01:40:43.960 --> 01:40:51.960
largely by incorporating other areas, not by real growth, doesn't mean it really grew, you know, in the sense of growth per mile, simply just by taking in, incorporating other

1143
01:40:51.960 --> 01:41:00.960
regions into Pittsburgh.

1144
01:41:00.960 --> 01:41:10.960
And as this happened, as the cities got larger and larger, it meant that the city, as the city councils got smaller, remember, because they were being voted on at large, and school boards got smaller at large,

1145
01:41:10.960 --> 01:41:13.180
it meant that the representatives per person

1146
01:41:13.180 --> 01:41:16.200
got less and less, in other words the cities got larger

1147
01:41:16.200 --> 01:41:19.840
the city council got smaller in number and larger

1148
01:41:19.840 --> 01:41:25.280
in representing more people, you wind up with less and less democratic voting, you have less and less fewer and fewer

1149
01:41:25.280 --> 01:41:27.020
government officials per person

1150
01:41:27.020 --> 01:41:30.360
and the city council, for example

1151
01:41:30.360 --> 01:41:34.120
in the

1152
01:41:34.120 --> 01:41:37.000
Columbus, Ohio, for example, had

1153
01:41:37.000 --> 01:41:41.440
In the 1830s, they had one city council member for every hundred people. They had two thousand

1154
01:41:41.440 --> 01:41:46.960
people and twenty city councilmen. And that's the situation. Everybody knew there, obviously

1155
01:41:46.960 --> 01:41:51.800
knew there were city councilmen. They could more or less ride herd over them. Jimmy is

1156
01:41:51.800 --> 01:41:57.560
goofing up, get him to change his vote, pay him a visit. By the current period, Columbus

1157
01:41:57.560 --> 01:42:10.560
Ohio has 500,000 people, instead of 2,000, and has 9 city councilmen, so you have one

1158
01:42:10.560 --> 01:42:18.560
city councilman for every 50,000 people instead of for every 20 people, except for every 100.

1159
01:42:18.560 --> 01:42:23.320
They obviously have much smaller representation per person than you have before

1160
01:42:30.920 --> 01:42:38.520
Anyway, to get back to the social work movement which becomes a professional uplift movement around 1900 with Jane Addams

1161
01:42:40.000 --> 01:42:42.760
the daughter of one of the richest men in Illinois

1162
01:42:43.880 --> 01:42:48.340
Mary Kingsley, same way, a whole bunch of them, Lillian Wall and the Henry Street settlement

1163
01:42:48.560 --> 01:42:55.560
and again bringing in professional social work, trying to stamp out alleged immorality

1164
01:42:58.800 --> 01:43:05.800
and making social work from a charitable thing into a profession, people living off of.

1165
01:43:06.560 --> 01:43:09.920
And most of the New Deal, many of the New Deal officials in the 1930s came out of this

1166
01:43:09.920 --> 01:43:14.720
original, of the social work movement. Most of the women, most of the women New Dealers

1167
01:43:14.720 --> 01:43:19.920
for example, originally upper class social workers in this whole house, settlement house

1168
01:43:19.920 --> 01:43:25.760
movement. Eleanor Roosevelt came out of that, and Francis Perkins, Secretary of Labor, and

1169
01:43:25.760 --> 01:43:39.960
a whole bunch of others. A part of the public school reform movement was to also run the

1170
01:43:39.960 --> 01:43:43.880
whole kit. In other words, the idea of school reform, not just to Christianize the Catholics

1171
01:43:43.880 --> 01:44:05.880
The Open Bureau doesn't have a lot of space, was there a growing subsidy for people or wasn't there a well-fitted space?

1172
01:44:13.880 --> 01:44:27.460
Well most of it was still, it really comes in in the 1930s, the welfare state.

1173
01:44:27.460 --> 01:44:31.480
Then it was mostly a lot of first workmen's compensation, there was public works, there

1174
01:44:31.480 --> 01:44:34.180
was a building of sewers and stuff like that.

1175
01:44:34.180 --> 01:44:39.880
Not too much, the welfare system, government welfare system really comes in in the 30s.

1176
01:44:39.880 --> 01:44:44.480
in the 30s, that's not really before, but the 30s were really an extension, the New

1177
01:44:44.480 --> 01:44:48.120
Deal was really an extension of the progressive period, really just a bigger progressive period

1178
01:44:48.120 --> 01:44:57.120
rather than the last two, it was a similar system except more of it than it was in the

1179
01:44:57.120 --> 01:44:58.120
last two.

1180
01:44:58.120 --> 01:45:04.480
Again with the schools, the cry was take the schools out of politics, you know, don't have

1181
01:45:04.480 --> 01:45:08.200
people voting from school boards, have it appointed by the mayor, have professional

1182
01:45:08.200 --> 01:45:38.200
as one historian says, the reformer's battle cry, take the school out of politics, not only meant take the schools out of the hands of Tammany Hall, but also out of the hands of the Roman Catholic Church, in other words, the idea was, you make it into a Protestantizing device and take it out of the hands of the ward boss and the hands of the technocratic educationists

1183
01:45:38.200 --> 01:45:42.840
And also the idea is you run the whole kit, in other words the educationists had the idea

1184
01:45:42.840 --> 01:45:49.160
the whole kit should be molded by the professional educators and molded into the system, molded

1185
01:45:49.160 --> 01:45:53.640
into how to conform and so forth and so on, which is essentially what they did.

1186
01:45:53.640 --> 01:45:59.160
Also from this came the idea of reducing content of the schools and making it into a sort of

1187
01:45:59.160 --> 01:46:05.760
a general socializing device.

1188
01:46:05.760 --> 01:46:11.400
Elwood Cumberley, who was the major historian of education, a big educationist, big progressive

1189
01:46:11.400 --> 01:46:18.400
educator, summed it all up in 1916, summed up the idea of school reform and he said one

1190
01:46:18.400 --> 01:46:22.000
of the important results of the change from ward representation to election from the city

1191
01:46:22.000 --> 01:46:28.040
at large is that the inevitable representatives from these poor wards is eliminated, representation

1192
01:46:28.040 --> 01:46:31.280
is eliminated, and the board comes to partake of the best characteristics of the city as

1193
01:46:31.280 --> 01:46:36.840
as a whole, I mean of course the upper class, upper class pietates, what do you call the

1194
01:46:36.840 --> 01:46:41.120
better elements? Who, he said, are the better elements who are now making up the school

1195
01:46:41.120 --> 01:46:45.840
board? Quote, men who are successful in their handling of large business undertakings, manufacturers,

1196
01:46:45.840 --> 01:46:50.960
merchants, bankers, contractors, and professional men of large practice, I mean of course doctors

1197
01:46:50.960 --> 01:46:56.200
would perhaps come first. There's an open recognition that the whole idea of the school

1198
01:46:56.200 --> 01:47:01.000
school reforms to take over, seize the control of the schools from the hands of the ethnic

1199
01:47:01.000 --> 01:47:08.000
people's representatives to the technocrats and big businessmen, and also to take these

1200
01:47:09.200 --> 01:47:14.680
new immigrants, mostly Catholic, and homogenize them into becoming good Protestants, as far

1201
01:47:14.680 --> 01:47:21.680
as possible of course. Prohibition was a great example, a marvelous example of the combination

1202
01:47:21.680 --> 01:47:29.120
and the combination of the moral uplift, pseudo-science, pseudo-value-free science, technocracy and

1203
01:47:29.120 --> 01:47:36.080
smashing the ethnic politics, liturgical politics, and all these guys combined on the drive for

1204
01:47:36.080 --> 01:47:41.280
prohibition which only of course gets here in World War I but is revved up during the

1205
01:47:41.280 --> 01:47:44.960
progressive period.

1206
01:47:44.960 --> 01:47:52.800
The businessmen, big business, lost big businessmen, attack the idea of liquor as quote a, an

1207
01:47:52.800 --> 01:47:53.800
enemy of efficiency.

1208
01:47:53.800 --> 01:47:58.320
In other words, the workers, the workers are allowed to drink, they get drunk and absenteeism

1209
01:47:58.320 --> 01:47:59.320
goes up.

1210
01:47:59.320 --> 01:48:04.040
I suppose at night, so therefore you, if we prevent the workers from getting drunk by eliminating

1211
01:48:04.040 --> 01:48:09.280
alcohol, outlawing alcohol, you notice for example in Disney World, the beautiful example

1212
01:48:09.280 --> 01:48:13.520
of the best and worst of lost capitalism, Disney World, if you've ever been to Disney

1213
01:48:13.520 --> 01:48:14.520
in the world.

1214
01:48:14.520 --> 01:48:16.640
It's a magnificently run, beautifully run outfit.

1215
01:48:16.640 --> 01:48:17.640
Everything is private, of course.

1216
01:48:17.640 --> 01:48:19.840
The sewers are private, the streets are private.

1217
01:48:19.840 --> 01:48:22.440
Everything works beautifully.

1218
01:48:22.440 --> 01:48:25.000
The bathrooms are spick and span, it's all great.

1219
01:48:25.000 --> 01:48:27.080
However, you can't get any liquor there.

1220
01:48:27.080 --> 01:48:33.240
Liquor, if you wander around Disney World forever, you get non-alcoholic punch.

1221
01:48:33.240 --> 01:48:36.720
Because liquor, of course, because all these people still have this pious view that somehow

1222
01:48:36.720 --> 01:48:37.720
liquor is...

1223
01:48:37.720 --> 01:48:42.160
If you have liquor at all, it should only be for the wealthy, the masses and shouldn't

1224
01:48:42.160 --> 01:48:47.960
and so you can drink liquor by checking in at Disney World Hotel and there you have a

1225
01:48:47.960 --> 01:48:52.080
cocktail lounge which does have liquor, but the masses, I mean the rest of us are wandering

1226
01:48:52.080 --> 01:48:54.600
around the streets there, can't get any liquor.

1227
01:48:54.600 --> 01:48:57.800
It's great except for that, of course it's a real blight.

1228
01:48:57.800 --> 01:49:04.400
George Pullman had his own private, he was the founder of Pullman Cars, was a progressive

1229
01:49:04.400 --> 01:49:12.800
If a businessman, he had his own city, Pullman, Illinois, now part of Chicago, for the workers,

1230
01:49:12.800 --> 01:49:16.960
the idea of the workers would live there, rent houses, his workers would live in Pullman,

1231
01:49:16.960 --> 01:49:19.960
Illinois, rent his houses.

1232
01:49:19.960 --> 01:49:24.720
And it was supposed to be a well-planned city, sort of a privately planned city for

1233
01:49:24.720 --> 01:49:25.720
his workers.

1234
01:49:25.720 --> 01:49:30.160
Unfortunately, what happened was that he engaged in pious moral domination of these people.

1235
01:49:30.160 --> 01:49:34.380
In other words, there'd be Gestapo-type checks raised on every home to make sure everybody

1236
01:49:34.380 --> 01:49:38.400
was walking around with jackets, the men were always supposed to wear jackets at all times,

1237
01:49:38.400 --> 01:49:39.400
not be in shirt sleeves.

1238
01:49:39.400 --> 01:49:45.200
To prevent shirt sleeves, they'd be raised on the porch, you know, busted on the home

1239
01:49:45.200 --> 01:49:46.880
to make sure everybody's got jackets on.

1240
01:49:46.880 --> 01:49:50.960
Of course, there was no liquor available, no pornography, of course, and no liquor was

1241
01:49:50.960 --> 01:49:52.560
available in all of Pullman, Illinois.

1242
01:49:52.560 --> 01:49:56.160
The masses began to get restless, edgy as a result.

1243
01:49:56.160 --> 01:50:01.480
and sneak across the border to free whatever the name is, Decatur, Illinois, to get liquor

1244
01:50:01.480 --> 01:50:07.200
and all the other sinful delights of big cities and the famous strike of the Pullman Railroad

1245
01:50:07.200 --> 01:50:11.640
workers in the 1890s was basically a result of this, living conditions getting more and

1246
01:50:11.640 --> 01:50:15.600
more edgy and restless and there was moral domination of this because it was creep, we

1247
01:50:15.600 --> 01:50:18.880
were trying to uplift them and shape them up.

1248
01:50:18.880 --> 01:50:24.660
So they had then the moral out, they had the efficiency argument that workers shouldn't

1249
01:50:24.660 --> 01:50:28.700
They shouldn't be allowed to drink because otherwise they have absenteeism.

1250
01:50:28.700 --> 01:50:37.700
The moral argument that liquor is sinful, and for example, Walter Rauschenbusch, the

1251
01:50:37.700 --> 01:50:42.180
famous social gospeler, the head of the social gospel movement, said, quote, the liquor industry

1252
01:50:42.180 --> 01:50:43.180
is 1912.

1253
01:50:43.180 --> 01:50:47.380
He wrote a book called Christianizing the Social Order, very interesting title, Christianizing

1254
01:50:47.380 --> 01:50:48.380
the Social Order.

1255
01:50:48.380 --> 01:50:53.780
He said, quote, the liquor industry is seeking to fasten on an angry people a relic of barbarism

1256
01:50:53.780 --> 01:50:59.500
in which the awakened conscience and the scientific intellect of the world are combining to condemn

1257
01:50:59.500 --> 01:51:03.740
the awakened moral conscience against liquor and the scientific intellect.

1258
01:51:03.740 --> 01:51:04.740
Why should the scientific intellect?

1259
01:51:04.740 --> 01:51:05.740
Because liquor is unscientific.

1260
01:51:05.740 --> 01:51:10.580
Liquor, at least absenteeism, at least a liver trouble, you know, there's lots of arguments

1261
01:51:10.580 --> 01:51:11.580
against liquor.

1262
01:51:11.580 --> 01:51:16.260
Nowadays, there's a return on prohibition sentiment.

1263
01:51:16.260 --> 01:51:22.620
You drink liquor, it tends to have rare car accidents, so therefore ban liquor seems to

1264
01:51:22.620 --> 01:51:30.280
So, as a result, you have this mighty prohibitionist movement on religious grounds and on so-called

1265
01:51:30.280 --> 01:51:31.280
scientific grounds.

1266
01:51:31.280 --> 01:51:34.920
Now, the scientists were usually also wasp-pietists.

1267
01:51:34.920 --> 01:51:38.360
One hat was wasp-pietists and the other hat, they were value-free scientists saying we should

1268
01:51:38.360 --> 01:51:42.260
outlaw liquor, but the liquor will lead to more accidents and liver trouble and God knows

1269
01:51:42.260 --> 01:51:43.260
what.

1270
01:51:43.260 --> 01:51:51.320
And particularly, this, of course, was an assault on German, Lutheran, and Catholic

1271
01:51:51.320 --> 01:52:04.320
Beer Drinking, and this is a fantastic clash over beer. The Germans love beer and beer was part of alcoholic beverages, a fantastic clash over that.

1272
01:52:04.320 --> 01:52:19.320
Reverend Josiah Strong, a prominent social gospel person, said in 1909 that high wages are bad because you buy drink with them and acquire the liquor habit

1273
01:52:19.320 --> 01:52:24.520
before the workers had developed a more refined pace of a higher civilization, in other words,

1274
01:52:24.520 --> 01:52:28.920
the workers aren't ready for high wages yet because of the drink, maybe you have more

1275
01:52:28.920 --> 01:52:34.360
refined pace eventually, I don't know what they'd be doing with refined pace, anyway.

1276
01:52:34.360 --> 01:52:38.760
Strong also attacked what he called personal liberty in 1914, he said, quote, this is a

1277
01:52:38.760 --> 01:52:45.080
fascinating quote, he said, personal liberty is at last, after many years of progressivism,

1278
01:52:45.080 --> 01:52:49.080
We are, among our own liberties, at last, an uncrowned, dethroned king with no one to do him reverence.

1279
01:52:49.080 --> 01:52:53.080
We are no longer frightened by that ancient bogey paternalism in government,

1280
01:52:53.080 --> 01:52:57.080
which, of course, the liturgicalism had been attacking for decades.

1281
01:52:57.080 --> 01:53:01.080
We affirm boldly it is the business of government to be just that, paternal.

1282
01:53:01.080 --> 01:53:05.080
Nothing human can be fraud to a true government."

1283
01:53:05.080 --> 01:53:09.080
It was a function of government to run everything, regulate everything, probe in everybody's life.

1284
01:53:09.080 --> 01:53:13.080
The scientific argument, which went along with the so-called scientific argument for liquor,

1285
01:53:13.080 --> 01:53:43.080
This is a so-called scientific argument for liquor, for prohibitionists, of course, the uplift, the poor are now being destroyed by liquor, which is therefore outlawed, has harmful effects if people drink too much, they, you know, have liver trouble, whatever, and since according to the new so-called scientists, people are determined by their environment, therefore you have to change the environment. How do you change the environment? You eliminate liquor, because part of people's equal environment is the ability to buy liquor.

1286
01:53:43.080 --> 01:53:49.680
So all these pseudo-scientific arguments are being called into being here, plus progressive

1287
01:53:49.680 --> 01:53:53.400
sociologists and social scientists like Edward A. Ross, one of my least favorite people,

1288
01:53:53.400 --> 01:54:00.400
he was a disciple of Commons and Ely, Edward Osworth Ross, professor of sociology in Ritchie,

1289
01:54:00.400 --> 01:54:06.400
Wisconsin, also a big racist, you have to realize that scientific, allegedly scientific

1290
01:54:06.400 --> 01:54:12.320
racism now comes in here as part of the progressive movement.

1291
01:54:12.320 --> 01:54:18.360
All these Wisconsin people have a belief that non-Anglo-Saxons are inferior races, of course

1292
01:54:18.360 --> 01:54:27.920
including Italians, Poles, Irish, etc., who are Catholics, all types of fit in, you see.

1293
01:54:27.920 --> 01:54:31.240
Other races are inferior, it should be kept out of and should be, of course, not allowed

1294
01:54:31.240 --> 01:54:32.240
to immigrate to the United States.

1295
01:54:32.240 --> 01:54:35.800
It's part of the immigration restriction movement, which is also an attack on liturgicals.

1296
01:54:35.800 --> 01:54:44.120
Now we get the scientific patina as being determined by biology, by social Darwinism biology.

1297
01:54:44.120 --> 01:54:49.160
The biology is now brought in as an allegedly scientific reason to eliminate immigration

1298
01:54:49.160 --> 01:54:54.040
of Catholic and Jews later and so forth countries.

1299
01:54:54.040 --> 01:55:01.000
Ross is one of the leading figures in this, as well as advocating state control of almost

1300
01:55:01.000 --> 01:55:02.000
everything.

1301
01:55:02.000 --> 01:55:05.640
The economic argument that says this is necessary for workers to be sober if you allow them

1302
01:55:05.640 --> 01:55:12.640
Another thing is that the drive for prohibition came about because the railroads were getting

1303
01:55:15.280 --> 01:55:21.160
to be liable, liability laws were coming in, the railroads were liable for accidents caused

1304
01:55:21.160 --> 01:55:26.160
by their engineers or firemen or whatever, so if you have a long switch you have an accident.

1305
01:55:26.160 --> 01:55:31.760
The railroads became liable. The railroads now wanted to start a pass making rules that

1306
01:55:31.760 --> 01:55:34.760
so that their engineers or whatever can't drink even off-duty

1307
01:55:34.760 --> 01:55:39.760
it's like pilots now can't drink I think 12 hours before they fly or something, that sort of thing

1308
01:55:39.760 --> 01:55:44.760
they start, so the railroads began to enforce temperance on their own employees

1309
01:55:44.760 --> 01:55:47.760
and then of course they said well look, if we have temperance voluntarily

1310
01:55:47.760 --> 01:55:51.760
let's get the government to pass compulsory temperance for our competitors

1311
01:55:51.760 --> 01:55:57.760
so therefore they start agitating for prohibition

1312
01:55:57.760 --> 01:56:00.760
another group in favor of prohibition, I kid you not

1313
01:56:00.760 --> 01:56:07.760
was the Coca-Cola, Coca-Cola in those days had a big competitor alcohol, had some cocaine

1314
01:56:13.520 --> 01:56:19.240
in it, that by the way was the origin of the word coca, coca leaf, had a little bit of

1315
01:56:19.240 --> 01:56:25.240
cocaine in it, which apparently gave you a certain kick, it's now, it's disappeared

1316
01:56:25.240 --> 01:56:30.680
long since in the formula, so Coca-Cola was a big competitor to liquor, Coca-Cola was

1317
01:56:30.680 --> 01:56:38.680
was one of the main agitators for prohibition. You outlaw your competitor, and you have to turn the coke for getting the missing kick.

1318
01:56:38.680 --> 01:56:47.680
Another big lobbyist for prohibition was Walsh's grape juice, which of course came in a communion when wine was outlawed.

1319
01:56:47.680 --> 01:56:56.680
By the way, grape juice, most Protestant churches already had Walsh's grape juice as a communion drink.

1320
01:56:56.680 --> 01:57:02.960
So most of the big competitors of the wine, they were lobbying for prohibition, two prominent

1321
01:57:02.960 --> 01:57:09.640
business lobbyists for prohibition, eliminate their competition.

1322
01:57:09.640 --> 01:57:15.120
The Catholics of course and Lutherans were heavily against prohibition, the Catholic

1323
01:57:15.120 --> 01:57:22.840
businessmen like Dupont were leading the fight against prohibition and were during the 1930s.

1324
01:57:22.840 --> 01:57:24.760
The unions were sort of split, they didn't know what to do.

1325
01:57:24.760 --> 01:57:27.800
Socialist unions or WASP unions were a favor of prohibition.

1326
01:57:27.800 --> 01:57:33.400
Socialist unions, Knights of Labor originally, the Railroad Brotherhoods were a favor of prohibition.

1327
01:57:33.400 --> 01:57:37.640
The other hand, of course, the brewery workers were also unionized and they were, of course,

1328
01:57:37.640 --> 01:57:38.640
against prohibition.

1329
01:57:38.640 --> 01:57:42.340
It means their livelihood would be taken away from them, the spillery and brewery workers.

1330
01:57:42.340 --> 01:57:43.600
So the AFL was sort of split.

1331
01:57:43.600 --> 01:57:47.600
They didn't take an official position on it because they had brewery workers.

1332
01:57:47.600 --> 01:57:52.600
But mostly most of the socialists and labor union people were in favor of prohibition.

1333
01:57:52.600 --> 01:57:59.080
They attacked the liquor industry, they took the usual leftist line of somehow businessmen

1334
01:57:59.080 --> 01:58:04.360
were creating demand so if people wanted liquor it wasn't there for them because the evil

1335
01:58:04.360 --> 01:58:09.520
businessmen were supplying them with alcohol and so therefore the liquor, you have to attack

1336
01:58:09.520 --> 01:58:15.920
the liquor lobby.

1337
01:58:15.920 --> 01:58:19.600
Social workers, of course, were all in favor of abolishing the saloon, here's a great quote

1338
01:58:19.600 --> 01:58:23.880
from a prominent social worker, Paul Benjamin, who wrote in the Survey magazine, which is

1339
01:58:23.880 --> 01:58:30.480
one of the big progressive publications, in 1915, he said, abolish the saloon quote, and

1340
01:58:30.480 --> 01:58:35.160
the task of Americanizing the conglomerate foreign population will be lightened by 50%

1341
01:58:35.160 --> 01:58:36.160
unquote.

1342
01:58:36.160 --> 01:58:40.720
In other words, Americanizing, meaning making good Protestants out of them, is what it really

1343
01:58:40.720 --> 01:58:49.520
So, again, it's all part of the same sort of schtick, and as the war begins, as World

1344
01:58:49.520 --> 01:58:54.280
War I begins to loom, and America begins to join the war effort, anti-German hysteria

1345
01:58:54.280 --> 01:59:02.960
becomes part of the argument for prohibition, as we'll see later.

1346
01:59:02.960 --> 01:59:07.480
One of the great quotes was that the biggest German agents in this country, the most important

1347
01:59:07.480 --> 01:59:22.480
German agents are not spies, but their names are Schlitz, Busch, Budweiser, whatever, Paps, Miller, in other words, the German brewers, or subverting American boys by subverting their moral fiber by spying them with beer.

1348
01:59:22.480 --> 01:59:32.480
The Anti-Saloon League said, quote, the German brewers in this country have rendered thousands of men inefficient, thus crippling the republic in its war against Prussian militarism.

1349
01:59:32.480 --> 01:59:37.400
So, in other words, the war, the entry into World War I supplied the final push over the

1350
01:59:37.400 --> 01:59:38.400
top.

1351
01:59:38.400 --> 01:59:42.160
The anti-German hysteria, and therefore the anti-Beer hysteria along with it, provided

1352
01:59:42.160 --> 01:59:46.080
the opportunity to get to, for the Democratic Party to impose prohibition notice.

1353
01:59:46.080 --> 01:59:53.880
As we'll see, Wilkson, by this time, of course, was a progressive, and oddly enough, prohibition

1354
01:59:53.880 --> 01:59:59.400
comes to the United States as a democratic maneuver during World War I.

1355
01:59:59.400 --> 02:00:05.000
becomes, excuse me, as American boys, American soldiers have to be protected from liquor,

1356
02:00:05.000 --> 02:00:10.680
and so by, first they sort of made all bars off limits and so forth, then they thought

1357
02:00:10.680 --> 02:00:13.920
well the best way to do it is to eliminate liquor altogether by outlawing it, and making

1358
02:00:13.920 --> 02:00:19.840
it unconstitutional, so as a result of World War I, liquor becomes an insane thing, a constitutional

1359
02:00:19.840 --> 02:00:24.560
amendment saying all liquor is outlawed, both the possession and the sale and production

1360
02:00:24.560 --> 02:00:28.400
of liquor becomes unconstitutional, and it's incredible it could even be a constitutional

1361
02:00:28.400 --> 02:00:32.720
Amendment, that's the way it was, as a result of World War I.

1362
02:00:32.720 --> 02:00:38.920
One prohibitionist said, yeah, this is a quote, we have German enemies in this country too.

1363
02:00:38.920 --> 02:00:44.040
The worst of all German enemies, the most treacherous, the most menacing are Paps, Schlitz,

1364
02:00:44.040 --> 02:00:45.040
Blatt and Miller.

1365
02:00:45.040 --> 02:00:48.280
These are the big beer manufacturers.

1366
02:00:48.280 --> 02:00:52.840
This is, we'll start next time by talking about the way the medical profession was screwed

1367
02:00:52.840 --> 02:00:55.560
up by progressivism.