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NOTE What are the roots of monopoly in America?

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The United States was born in an anti-monopoly tradition.

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It was literally.

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The Boston Tea Company, which we all know and hope to revere,

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was a revolutionary act which not only was a protest against taxes,

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by the way, a protest against taxes which are so low compared to what we have now

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that we wouldn't even think twice about it.

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I mean, they were very tax-sensitive in the colonial period.

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You impose a teeny tax on them, they might have your head chopped off.

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Nowadays, of course, we suffer almost anything in silence. It was not only a revolt against

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taxes, it was also a revolt against monopoly. In other words, this was considered to be

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the first step by which the British would impose the East India Company, which was a

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monopoly company. In other words, only the East India Company could trade with the Far

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East. Anybody else who traded with the Far East, any other Englishmen who traded with

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the Far East got shot, metaphorically speaking. Government clamped down on it, outlawed it.

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And so the Americans were afraid that the East Indian Company would be established in

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America also as a monopoly tea importer.

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And so the dumping of tea into Boston Harbor was one at the same time an anti-tax movement

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and an anti-monopoly movement.

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By monopoly I don't mean big business, I don't mean IBM, I mean any business or several businesses

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where the government says only thou can produce or sell a certain item, everybody else is

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restricted yet shot and so forth and so on.

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That's what monopolies always meant until 20th century economics came in and messed everything up.

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So the big businessmen, especially Morgans, were by the turn of the century, by the early 20th century,

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wanted to have cartels, compulsory cartels and monopolies in every field.

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The Federal Trade Commission was designed to do that in industry.

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As a matter of fact, the big businessmen who wrote the Federal Trade Commission Act and lobbied for it said,

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We want to do for general business what the ICC has already done for the railroads,

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and what the Department of Agriculture has done for farmers and so forth and so on.

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We want to get in on the general boodle.

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But they had a problem, they had an ideological problem.

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How do you put this over in a country committed and a public committed to anti-monopoly,

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and also a public suspicious of Wall Street and monopoly and stuff, or for good reason?

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In order to do that, you have to have an alliance with the intellectuals.

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The intellectuals are the opinion-molding class, so to speak.

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And so, you've got to have a lot of intellectuals, court intellectuals, as it has been called.

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To tell the public is all really great, and it's all really an anti-monopoly movement.

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The key thing is to sell monopoly under the guise of anti-monopoly. It's a beautiful shell game.

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In order to do it, you have to have glib intellectuals to do it.

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You can't have a king himself or the president himself who's not going to be able to get away with this.

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Well, it just so happens, by the way, this has been the age-old alliance of despotism throughout history.

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The way that the spotting, most governments have been, those countries have been the spotting and tyrannical.

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And the way they've done it is, the king or his nobles or whatever are in alliance with the intellectuals.

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In the old days intellectuals were almost all priests. There were no lay intellectuals.

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And so you have an alliance of church and state, in other words, both of them performing an important function for each other.

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The church tells the people you have to obey the state, the state is divine, the king is correct, and so forth and so on.

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And the king then gives the church lots of tax revenue, lots of prestige and monuments and so forth and so on.

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So you have a mighty coalition of throne and altar of church and state to moque the public.

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The public, of course, everybody benefits except the public who gets slaughtered here.

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They get robbed, moque-ed and whatever.

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So what they were doing now, what the Morgan types were doing, is to bring back the old church-state alliance.