Lecture 9 of 13 · The American Economy and the End of Laissez-Faire 1870 to World War II
The Progressive Era?
The Progressive Era? by Murray N. Rothbard is a free audio lecture (1:27:47) at freecapitalists.org, part of the 13-lecture series The American Economy and the End of Laissez-Faire 1870 to World War II.
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0:00This is supposed to make everything much more democratic, but it really doesn't, because it means that any schmoke can vote in a Democratic or Republican ticket. All you have to do is to sign up for the Democratic or Republican. You don't have to be an actual activist member. So this means anybody can get the nomination. It means that the nomination is decided by public relations, by TV ads, by money, whatever it is. It means the role of the party as such, the party as a mechanism for gathering, collecting ideas and principles, gets eliminated. The political party is now just a shell. Democrats and Republicans don't mean anything. It's all because of the culturally primary system. It's all up for grabs. And this is now admitted by most political scientists. They think it all came in in 1960. It really started coming in 1900 with the progressive whole primary concept.
0:48And this was deliberately done to destroy the role of the political party as an ideological and vote-gathering movement. In other words, as a group which means something. The idea is to make the party meaningless and leave a power vacuum for technocrats and progressive so-called non-partisan scientists. This was all accomplished and was all done very cleverly, and one of the things they try to do most is to eliminate the great war on the city. By this time, the cities are almost all ethnic. The cities are mostly liturgical, mostly Irish and Italian and Polish, etc., and the rural areas are mostly locked, getting them out of the point, which is more and more true. And so the big cities become the focus of attack by locked pietas, as being sinful per se, as being nests of evil and sin.
1:40The whole rural versus urban thing really comes in about this time as an attack on urban and Ethnics. And one of the things that's most important now, again, for Ross Pius, is to smash the saloon, to have prohibition, to eliminate the saloon as a political and political power of ethnic politics. Most ethnic, most Italian, Irish, etc., Catholic people, the neighborhood saloon still is the This is the focus of politics, and most of the socializing gets done in the saloon, and the saloon keeper becomes the major, the ward healer becomes the political power, the guy you ask who to vote for, and so if you outlaw that, you get out and you can smash, smash the political politics, so prohibition gets restored now as a big, you know, as a big objective.
2:36Another thing to do is to try to eliminate city voting altogether. Eliminate the mayor and put in the non-political, quote-unquote, city manager. This is the result of a kind of so-called city manager movement, a city commission movement. Very powerful, took over most of the small cities in the United States. It didn't went out in New York or Philadelphia or Boston, but in most of the small cities, Dayton, Ohio, and also in Galveston, Texas, they now have city managers. The city manager gets a high salary, the mayor gets almost no salary. The mayor gets 20 bucks a year or something. The mayor therefore has very little power. The city manager is in there full-time, gets his own bureaucracy in there, and runs everything mostly to his own liking. Again, this is political power by the bureaucrats, by the technocrat bureaucrats, taking over from the voters. Voters almost no say in this anymore. It's eliminated, very indirect.
3:28Another thing that happens is the nationalization of the public school system. The public schools until about 1900 were essentially, first of all, they were not compulsory outside New England and Yankee areas. In the South, there were no compulsory attendance laws. And second of all, the public school, remember the idea of the public school as a Protestantizing device. This comes in even much more now with progressives. If you can't get the Catholic adults, the Catholic adults are hopeless in sin, therefore get the kids. Christianize the Catholic, do they call, you get to force the kids into the public school system, then Protestantize them to the public schools. So, the big drive for public schools, expansion of the public school system in New York and the South and every part of South. Supposedly, public school attendance.
4:15There's an informal requirement in most jurisdictions in order to be a public school teacher, you had to be a Protestant church member. In San Francisco we had a constant fight for 50 years between the Catholics and the Protestants in San Francisco, control of the public school system, control of the city in general, public schools in particular. Behind the public school drive were the upper class and watch, upper class business people and what many places coincidental. So another thing about public schools is you, one, you force Catholics into it and Christianize them, quote unquote, and two, business people began to use the public schools as a device to socialize their costs.
5:04This is an important tool in subsidy we have to realize. One way in which the government subsidizes business is by socializing the cost of business. In other words, taking over some of the costs and loading it onto the taxpayer. For example, in the time of slavery in the South, slavery would not have been efficient, would not have been economic, I should say. Because one of the problems with slavery is that slaves tend to run away. You have a problem with slaves running away, you don't have capital equipment. I think machines don't decide to run away, slaves do. So in order to get the, in order to minimize the course of enforcement, the slave masters loaded onto the shoulders of the average white taxpayer in the South by having so-called slave patrols, The slave patrols rap. Every southerner is required to join a slave patrol for two weeks out of a year or something. The slave patrols patrol the highway, the roads at night, and catch slaves who have run away. The slave patrols like five people in the patrol. Every
6:00black person has to have an identity card, something like South Africa. You have to have an ID card, in this case from your master, telling you where to go, allowing you to go on this particular road. If you didn't have an ID card from your master, you're immediately If they didn't know who your slave master was, the slave patrol people were drafted, by the way. But the way they got their jollies was, every once in a while they'd find a slave who didn't have an ID card. They didn't know who the slave master was, and they would then own the slave. They'd assume homestead ownership of the slave and sell the slave at auction and get the proceeds. This is the way they got their little boodle, part of the loop. So the same way, in a sense the same way that the slave masters were able to load the slave patrol course onto the shoulders of the average white person in the South, the same way, the public school system socialized a lot of business courses.
6:48For example, businessmen began to want to send a lot of salesmen to South America. They said, why don't they get their businessmen to learn Spanish? Well, how do they get the kids and the guy to learn Spanish? They either have to train them themselves at their own course or else they get the public school system to teach them Spanish. What the hell? What the hell? Load the course onto the taxpayer. So the national NAM and other business groups began to agitate that public schools should teach Spanish, so that then they can take the guy who's already trained in Spanish. You're loading the course onto the taxpayers, as it's been announced too. So with all this, and in addition to this you have the education, professional educationists, who John Dewey and other so-called progressives, were talking about the new theory of progressive education. Every individual, instead of becoming an individual, The public school used to be decentralized. The school boards were voted on by each neighborhood.
8:00The parents of each neighborhood, they would vote for the school board in that neighborhood. This is the general way in which most schools were operated. This is considered inefficient, un- is too democratic, too much in control of the parents. The theory of progressive educators was only educationists know how to teach a kid. Parents know nothing. Educationists know everything. So they got a PhD in education. They teach in college. So you have a total graph of power on the part of the educationists. And part of the graph of power was that you minimize the voting procedure. First of all, you have a huge school board covering the whole city, and the school board hopefully appointed by the superintendent of the school, or appointed by the mayor. It eliminates the parents' role altogether. In other words, the whole idea was a huge district where the parents wouldn't know who the administrators are anyway, and have the mayor, you have to elect the mayor, no way you can get around that, but you have everything then appointed by the mayor.
8:55The mayor appoints a superintendent, a school board, and everything becomes a cozy technocratic thing with the parents having no say in the matter. This is of course what happened after the 1900s, the progressive situation. The 1960s is a slight move away from this, in the so-called New Left period where New York, for example, we now have regional school parent elections with a tremendous, after a tremendous blockage, This is a tremendous opposition by the French teachers who were fappling this to the hill. At any rate, this is an ideological drive, and the name is still called value-free science, value-free education, to grab control of the kids on the part of the professional educationists. We're in with upper class, lost type, those old things fitted in beautifully.
9:42Also another thing about urban reform is, in addition to city manager, you make, before that, Part of that, before 1900, you had the war districts, for example, legislature in New York City was a so-called board of aldermen, and you had a lot of, each small neighborhood would have its own aldermen, you had like 400 people in the board of aldermen. It means that everybody more or less knew their aldermen, so you have a certain amount of democratic check on a situation, you can put pressure on your aldermen, you knew who he was and you put pressure on him. In order to take power out of the hands of ethnic liturgical, Irish, Italian, et cetera, In the name of so-called efficiency, the progressives then change all that to make very big, very small city councils, instead of 400 people you have 20 people, you reduce that, you run them preferably at large for the whole city, so nobody knows, first of all, nobody knows any of your representatives, and second of all, it's very costly to run an at-large election,
10:39you need to run for the whole of New York, the whole of San Francisco, cost a lot of In this way, they deliberately got rid of most of the working class, poor or poor or working class, and ethnic supporters, ethnic administrators, and shifted the control of the city to a few upper-class wafts, upper-class wafts businessmen. This is all done deliberately. I'll quote a few things, but Weinstein has a lot of this and other sources if you're interested. There's all sorts of data on this thing. This is done in Pittsburgh and Des Moines, etc. There are data about how originally, say, Pittsburgh had a lot of working-class older men, and they shift this thing and wind up with a few upper-class businessmen and upper-class physicians. In the name, again, of efficiency. This is This is done, in Rochester, George Eastman does it, sets up a recent code act, sets up a Bureau of Municipal Research in the name of so-called good government, business-like efficiency.
11:44It's all done in order to shift the political power from liturgical, working class liturgicals and liturgical machines to upper class, lost businessmen. It all fits, the ethnic and the economic all fit in. Pittsburgh, for example, the drive for so-called reform was led by the Civic Club and the Voters League, which were both upper-class WASP groups, especially businessmen, bankers, corporate officials, and their wives and physicians. So in general, before the progressive reforms, cities were decentralized, there were confederations of local wards, they were quite democratic, there were local working-class representatives and middle-class representatives. In Pittsburgh, for example, in 1910, before the reform period, the city council consisted of about 300 members or so, of which two-thirds were small businessmen or workers. In other words, two-thirds were either employee clerks, laborers or roasters and things like that.
12:39After the reform movement took over, you have almost all were big businessmen, professional managers and lost types. There's all sorts of data on this to deal with. In the city In many of these cities, they didn't want to have a city manager or city manager reform. What they did is, in the United States, you have to realize that cities are a pure tool of the state. Constitutionally, the state has total power over every city within the state. So in Pennsylvania, for example, when Pittsburgh resisted the idea of progressive reform, the Pennsylvania legislature simply ordered Pittsburgh to do it. So for example, Pittsburgh got dominated by a new, the governor simply appointed, kicked out a city council, appointed a new city council based on at large voting, and of the nine people in it, they had six upper class businessmen and two upper class doctors, and one kept union official.
13:39And the school board they appointed, the state appointed in order to change this whole school Board thing. They again had ten big businessmen, one upper class doctor and one kept union official. So it's totally different from the way it had been elected before that. Now one of the one of the ways in which they did this, one of the areas of agitation was so-called corruption, the form versus corruption. So one thing we have to realize is the most this is really an ideological it was There's an ideological attack on the big-city machines, which are pro-corrupt, unquote. Actually, there are no more corrupt than others. It's just more visible. I mean, for example, if some small-time upstate New York is corrupt, it's very small. New York City is corrupt, as we've seen recently. It's huge. Hundreds of millions of dollars get siphoned off.
14:29So, big-city corruption is more visible, and it's also more visible in other sense. The guys who are doing it, if you have a reform group, you get a business contract above core, it's less visible than, say, something like Lindenauer, just taking money out of the tilt. It's more rapish in the case of Lindenauer. It's more visible, so to speak. It's less smooth, sort of that way. So we have, then, the use by the reformers of the corruption charge, much of which is, I think, ill, well, it's misfiring. For example, in the big business machines in the 1900s or so, instead of having a big welfare system, you had a lot of poor people, you had more poor people than you have now proportionally.
15:15You didn't have any welfare state. What you had was Tammany Hall, let's say, which is the New York, Manhattan Democratic Party known as Tammany Hall. The way they would take care of the poor is they had like a private welfare mechanism by a political party structure. In other words, they give away free turkeys at Christmas and Thanksgiving, they take turkey dinners for the poor, handled by the democratic party, the local democratic party, it's kind of lovable. So you have sort of a private welfare state organized by the democratic party, this way of course they buy the vote, in other words the people would be grateful to the local democratic party and vote democratic, in a sense there's nothing much wrong with that, sort of like the Pitford Tatt situation, where they fix traffic tickets. When I was growing up, for example, a local Democratic clubhouse person would fix traffic tickets and also fix jury servers. He didn't want a jury summons. He handed to your local Democratic leader
16:10and he would quote, take care, unquote, of the jury summons. This is, I suppose, corruption. It's also helpful corruption, helpful to the public. It's getting the public off their and also alleviating poverty out of essentially nongovernmental, at least it's not funded by a tax payer, it's funded in general, I guess, from government office. So it's kind of a ravished kind of corruption, which is not nearly as unfortunate, I think, as a non-corrupted government, so to speak. There were the worst things in the world of corruption, one of them was incorruptible government. In communist countries now, for example, the only way they can operate at all is by having huge amount of corruption, like bribery and so forth. They didn't have any bribery, hoped the whole country would fall apart, they wouldn't be able to produce anything. So it's a question of which you choose.
16:56Another thing they did was, as a result of the reformed government, they had a huge, much bigger government pool of taxes to have municipal garbage disposal and municipal construction, new sewers, new bridges, contracts for businessmen, and much more money to play around with. welfare departments, playgrounds, all these things now come in with so-called non-corrupt reform government. In other words, reform government turns out to be a much bigger government than non-reform. I'll just give you one quote before the break. H. L. Mencken, my favorite writer, he's a German-American growing up in Baltimore, a great story in his autobiography. His attitude toward reform, he said, was set by him when his father was a small cigar manufacturer 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. 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. In other words, the agreement was to pay the city councilman 20 bucks, in
18:07In time for which, he takes care of all easement fees, license requirements, all the rest of this crap, as Mencken said, this is in full settlement forevermore of all present and privileged fees, all permanent and privileged fees, easement taxes, and other such costs and imposts. The city councilman pocketed the money, in return was supposed to save off any cops, building inspectors, or other functionaries who had any lawful interest in the matter, or try to horn in for private profit. Being an honorable man according to his likes, he, at least the city councilman, kept his bargain and the science flap and squeak in the breeze for ten years. In other words, from 1885 to 1895, Mencken and Company was free of all government fees because the city councilman pocketed 20 bucks and kept the government off his neck. Then he says in 1895 a reform wave struck Baltimore and the reformers came in, the city councilman was kicked out and quote, the idealist in the city hall sent word that a licensed
19:03to maintain the sign would cost $62.75 a year. In other words, he had paid 20 bucks for 10 years, essentially. Now it costs $62.75 a year. This was proof to my, the sign came down the next day. This was proof to my father that reform was mainly only a conspiracy of prehensile charlatanists and multi-tax payers. And Megan says that, and he believed that political corruption was inevitable under democracy and even argued out of his own experience that it had its uses. So, anyway, this is Mencken's view of the reform movement. I think he was right. In the urban reform front, since in the cities, wafts are on a minority, after all, and liturgicals and working class are majority, the way in which the reformers, which is almost always upper class wafts, the way they can win out from time to time is by using moral arguments, by saying that the Dixity machines corrupt, they're boss-ridden, it's true that they're corrupt and boss-ridden, but the thing's worse than boss-ridden corruption, namely reformers, and alleged efficiency, which really winds up with a tremendous increase raised on the taxpayer, plus, of course, piousness, elimination or wiping out of entrepreneurial activities like gambling, prostitution, etc. So one of the things which reformers use, one of their moral arguments is to attack and organize
20:27So-called Organized Crime, has been a very interesting article in Journal of American History, I recommend, in December 1970, called Urban Crime and Criminal Justice, a Chicago case, which really deals with how the whole class struggle around organized crime, with reformers using, of course, the argument of the ethnic bosses and legal organized crime, and using this as an argument to have state corporates have control over the city. This turns out, for example, in the legal profession, the corporate lawyers, a big class struggle between the corporate lawyers and the criminal lawyers. The corporate lawyers are, of course, the elite in the law and legal profession. They make a lot more money than the Wall Street law firms.
21:13The criminal lawyers tend to be less polished. They're rapish types, often in Brooklyn. and they're less swab, etc. and they're attackers being affiliated with organized crime. Of course, everybody's entitled to a lawyer, so if somebody is a criminal up for indictment, he's going to turn to some lawyer or other, and criminal lawyers, therefore, often tarred with the brush of being quasi-criminal themselves, which seems to me unfair, since everybody's entitled to some lawyer. As a matter of fact, there's now a drive-on by the legal professional limit. These are the criminal lawyers we get to put a cap on. Of course, they're not putting any cap on corporate lawyers. It's all part of this class struggle, so to speak, between law, business, corporate types, and more raffish ethnic types.
22:05I remember one time, about 20 years ago, Jacob Pukesberg was an distinguished criminal lawyer in New York, ran for the State Court of Appeals, the highest New York State judicial arm, and was bitterly attacked by the entire corporate law profession. He's very upset with it. He's a criminal lawyer. He has no business in the court of appeal. He should always be corporate and more street lawyer. There's nothing, there's no divine commandment to have to be a corporate lawyer, but there's a big, big fight against him. One of the ways in which the watch performers have their, can use their moral outlaw is the media, of course. The media is usually, of course, watch controlled. And so if you have that in the cities, New York, Chicago, et cetera, whatever, the reformers are pushed by the New York Times, let's say, which is not law, but this is a civil reformer outfit.
22:52And so you have then prestige or respectable newspaper behind the reformers. In New York, for example, which is first largely a Democratic Party city, was run by a reformed fusion ticket for about all during the 1930s. Mayor LaGuardia was elected by a Republican fusion government, fusion party, and coming to begin on the wave of so-called reform, to get even more ethnic here, it's interesting that the Italian-Americans, for example, have been very difficult to make it politically, so very, very recently, with Cuomo. Before that, in New York State, the only Italian-Americans who succeeded politically were Protestant-Itanians. There's a very small percentage of the Italian-American population is Protestant, if you can imagine, maybe 1%.
23:43The Italian-Americans in politics who made it politically until very recently were LaGuardia and Procora, people like that who were really... Italian products therefore coming from a very small percentage of the Italian population, not really in with basic Italian-Americans. So, of course, we're Catholic. So again, this is all part of a lost The first is Catholic and high Lutheran struggle. And again, an attack, the big city machines were basically Irish. That says after 1900 or so, where the Protestant lost were kicked out, and so you had basically an old Calvinist loss. Basically, the city machines were Irish. And so an attack on the big city bosses actually was an anti-Irish or anti-Catholic assault in the name of so-called reform.
24:32What you had then is the reformers were able to capture the high moral ground. There's very few people who can take a sophisticated argument in favor of corruption. The argument basically is the Mencken argument. It's better to be corrupt and have an efficient high-tax government. It's very difficult to make that argument, and basically so the reformers can use the media, the press, et cetera, taking a high moral tone and attacking everybody else for being immoral, which is basically their view. Also along with this comes upper-class WASP moral theorists, so to speak, upper-class females who start running around 1900, the social work movement, social workers, settlement house movement, Jane Addams, people like that, a whole bunch of WASP performers, Jane Addams in Chicago, Seth Lowe in New York, and a whole bunch of... Jacob Rees, Jacob Rees Housing.
25:29All these people were upper-class lost millionaires, and Jane Asher was a daughter of an upper-class lost millionaire, coming in to help uplift the poor. It was known in those days as uplift. In other words, you are an upper-class female, let's say, coming in and uplifting the Lower East Side. How do you uplift? Well, of course, you hand out food and so forth, but basically The uplift is also using compulsion, forcing, kicking out, getting rid of sweatshop employers, which really meant getting rid of employers, getting rid of conditions they didn't like, getting rid of prostitution, saloons, you know, and prohibition comes in beautifully. All these people were prohibitionists, and prohibition was part of the idea of uplifting employees. Uplift the poor by stamping out immoral conditions, immoral conditions meant liquor, saloon, prostitution, pornography, whatever.
26:19So all of this is part of the moral reform movement, part of the progressive seizure of power on a local level. Another way to do this, this is known as urban imperialism. This is something which is very little known. I know of only one book that really mentions this in any length, Milton Kotler's book called Neighborhood Government. One of the ways in which the cities grew in this period is by seizing power over the other areas. In other words, much of the urban political growth, urban population growth from 1900 to 1910 was not growth by people being born or by people migrating, it was growth in the sense of seizing control over expanding the city geographically. In other words, originally a 1900 New York City was Manhattan and Brooklyn was its own city. Actually Brooklyn was a combination of a whole bunch of different cities.
27:09Bush, New Dwarf, all these were originally cities. Brooklyn was the fourth largest city in the United States in 1900. It was seized by New York, Manhattan had conquered the Bronx by that time, and seized in a sense, compulsory seizure. Brooklyn did not want to be amalgamated in New York, much of New York state legislature forced Brooklyn into it. In other words, the state legislature, remember, was all powerful. And so this happened in Philadelphia, it happened in Pittsburgh, where the cities would simply They incorporate areas, other cities around it. Philadelphia and Cork crushed German town, seized German town by using the Pennsylvania legislature. In other words, these cities, Brooklyn did not want to be incorporated into New York. German town did not want to be incorporated into Philadelphia. It's simply they use the state legislature to force these other cities into it. It's urban imperialism over its neighbors. I think it's a pretty good term here.
27:59By urban, so what was the accomplishment here? What they did is you bring in more tax revenue. In other words, many of these areas, for example in Pittsburgh, which grabbed a whole bunch of neighboring cities, there was more, these cities, these downtowns, for example, let's take Pittsburgh, was built around, originally built around the railroad terminals. In other In other words, before automobiles came in and trucks came in, the city had a railroad terminal and cities were built around it, factories and people living there, etc. So the downtowns were heavily indebted with railroad bonds and so forth, subsidized railroads. They're paying heavy taxes on these bonds. If you grab a whole bunch of other cities around it, incorporate it into Pittsburgh, then you can tax these guys to pay for the railroad bonds.
28:50That's essentially what happened. In other words, to use this, downtown interest, downtown businessmen are heading out to the inner city, seize power in the suburbs, bring them into the city and then tax them. That's basically the point. Assess these buildings at a higher rate, so on and so on. So, and especially New York is the same thing, the Brooklyn and the Bronx, which was really part of Westchester. This happened a lot between 1900 and 1910. of Urban Imperialism, and next, neighboring towns, neighboring cities, bring them into the tax base. There has been, for many years now, a so-called metro movement. The idea is to grab Westchester, let's say, and grab parts of Nassau, force them into New York City, and tax them. In other words, it's really just a tax gimmick to bring these poor guys into a higher tax bracket and get downtown New York for the subsidies.
29:39So anyway, this process happened during the 19th century, but in this progressive period at least, it's at its peak. So they deliberately, for example in Pittsburgh, they deliberately taxed the other wards much more heavily than the downtown wards, much higher assessment per dollar property on the outlying wards that they were trying to take, they were taking over. In Pittsburgh, for example, in 1912, after the compulsory seizure of Allegheny and other towns, incorporated into Pittsburgh, the old rate, well in one case, Boehm-Hooven, which which is a new town incorporated into Pittsburgh, was paying 90 times the property assessment, property tax, than the old Third Ward, the old downtown Third Ward. That's the part that's very unusual, usually not that big a range. But basically that's what happens, you're taking the new ward, you tax it more heavily than the old one and thereby subsidize the downtown, heavily debt-ridden downtown area.
30:33Brooklyn was annexed in 1898 by the New York City Collaboration and New York State Legislature. So for example, Pittsburgh grew from 1900 to 1910, grew from a population of 320,000 to 530,000, 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 and incorporating other regions into Pittsburgh. 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 The school boards got smaller and at large. It meant that the representatives per person got less and less. In other words, the cities got larger, the city council got smaller in number and larger in representing more people.
31:20You wind up with less and less democratic voting. Less and less, fewer and fewer government officials per person in the city council. For example, in Columbus, Ohio, for example, in the 1830s, 1830s had one city council member for every hundred people. They had 2,000 people in 20 city councilmen. So, and that's the situation. Everybody knew there, obviously knew there, city councilmen. More or less ride herd over them. Jimmy is goofing up, get him to change his vote, pay him a visit. By the current period, Columbus, Ohio has 500,000 people, instead of 2,000, and has nine city councilmen. So you have one city councilman for every 50,000 people instead of for every 20,000 people.
32:17You obviously have much smaller representation per person than you had before. Anyway, to get back to the social work movement, which becomes a professional uplift movement around 1900, Jane Addams, the daughter of one of the richest men in Illinois, Mary Kingsley, the same way, a whole bunch of them, Lillian Wall and the 100th Street Settlement. And again, bringing in professional social work, trying to stamp out alleged immorality, and making social work from a charitable thing into a profession, people living off of. And most of the New Deal, many of the New Deal officials in the 1930s came out of this social work movement. Most of the women New Dealers, for example, were originally upper class social workers in this whole house, settlement house movement. Eleanor Roosevelt came out of that, and Francis Perkins, Secretary of Labor, and a whole bunch of others. A part One of the, the public school reform movement was to also run the whole kit.
33:26The cry was, take the schools out of politics, you know, make it, don't have people voting for school boards, have a point about a mayor, have professional educationists do it. As one historian says, the reformers 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, take it out of the hands of the ward boss and in the hands of the technocratic educationists. And also the idea is you run the whole kit. In other words, the educationists had the idea the whole kit should be molded by the professional educators and molded into the system, molded into how to conform and so forth and so on, which is essentially what they did. Also from this came the idea of reducing content of the schools and making it into a sort of a general socializing device.
34:19Elwood Cumberley, he was a major historian of education, a big educationist, big progressive educator, summed it all up in 1916, summed up the idea of school reform and he said, one of the important results of the change from ward representation to election from in the city at large, is that the inevitable representatives from these poor wars are eliminated, representation is eliminated, and the board comes to partake of the best characteristics of the city as a whole. I mean, of course, the upper class, upper class biases, what he called the better elements. Who, he said, are the better elements who are now making up the school board? Quote, men who are successful in their handling of large business undertakings, manufacturers, merchants, bankers, contractors, and professional men of large practice, I mean, of course, The Prohibition was a great example, a marvelous example, of the combination of the moral
35:34uplifts, pseudo-science, pseudo-value-free science, technocracy and smashing the ethnic politics, liturgical politics, and all these guys combined on a drive for prohibition, which only of course gets here in World War I, but is revved up during the progressive period, the businessmen, big businessmen, lost big businessmen, attacked the idea of liquor as, quote, an enemy of efficiency. In other words, the workers are allowed to drink, they get drunk and absenteeism goes up, I suppose at night. So therefore, if we prevent the workers from getting drunk by eliminating alcohol, outlawing alcohol. You notice, for example, in Disney World, the beautiful example of the best and worst of lost capitalism. If you've ever been to Disney World, they've magnificently run, beautifully run out of it. Everything is private, of course. The sewers are private, the seats are private.
36:29Disney works beautifully. The bathrooms are spick and span. It's all great. However, you can't get any liquor there. Liquor, if you wander around Disney World forever, you get non-alcoholic punch. Because liquor, of course, is in focus. The only people who still have a pious view of somehow liquor is, if you have liquor at all, it should only be for the wealthy, the masters are not going to be allowed to drink. And so you can drink liquor by checking in at Disney World Hotel, and there you have a cocktail lounge. It does George Pullman had his own private, he was the founder of Pullman Cars, he was a progressive businessman, he had his own city, Pullman, Illinois, now part of Chicago, for the workers, the idea of the workers who lived there, rent houses, his workers would live in Pullman and the way I rent houses, rent his houses.
37:28And it was supposed to be a well-planned city, sort of a privately planned city for his workers. Unfortunately, what happened was, he engaged in pliant moral domination of these people. In other words, there'd be Gestapo-type checks raised on every home, make sure everybody was walking around with jackets. The men were always supposed to wear jackets at all times, not be in shirt sleeves. To prevent shirt sleeves, they'd be raised on the porch,
38:23So, he had then the moral, he had the efficiency argument that workers shouldn't be allowed to drink because otherwise they have absenteeism, the moral argument that the liquor is sinful, and for example, Walter Rauschenbusch, the famous social gospeler, the head of the social The liquor industry is seeking to fasten on an angry people a relic of barbarism which the awakened conscience and the scientific intellect of the world are combining to condemn.
39:08The awakened moral conscience against liquor and scientific intellect, why should the scientific Like liquor is unscientific. Liquor, at least absenteeism, at least liver trouble. There's lots of arguments against liquor. Nowadays, there's a return on prohibition sentiment. You drink liquor, it tends to have a car accident. Therefore, ban liquor seems to be the conclusion. As a result, you have this mighty prohibitionist movement on religious grounds and on so-called scientific grounds. The scientists were usually also wasp-iatists. One hat was wasp-iatists, the other hat they were value-free scientists saying we should outlaw liquor, but the liquor will lead to more accidents and liver trouble and God knows what.
39:54And particularly, this of course was an assault on German Lutheran and Catholic beer drinking. And this is a fantastic clash over beer. The Germans loved beer, and beer was part of alcoholic beverages. It's a fantastic clash over that. 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 before the workers have developed a more refined taste of a higher civilization. in other words, the workers aren't ready for high wages yet because of the drink, they have more refined taste, I don't know what they'd be doing with refined taste, anyway.
40:39Strong also attacked what he called personal liberty in 1914, he said, quote, this is a fascinating quote, he said, personal liberty is at last, after many years of progressivism, personal liberty is at last an uncrowned dethroned king with no one to do him reverence. We are no longer frightened by that ancient bogey paternalism in government, we affirm boldly it is a business of government to be just that, paternal. Nothing human can be far into a true government. It was a function of government to run everything, regulate everything, probe in everybody's life. The scientific argument, which went along with the so-called scientific argument for liquor, the prohibition is, of course, the uplift, the poor are now being destroyed by liquor, which is therefore outlawed, it has harmful effects if people drink too much, they have liver trouble, whatever.
41:32And 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. So all these pseudo-scientific arguments are being called into being here, plus progressive sociologists and social scientists like Edward A. Ross, one of my least favorite people, he was a disciple of Commons and Ely, Edward Osworth Ross, professor of sociology in Ritz, Wisconsin, Also a big racist. You have to realize that allegedly scientific racism now comes in here as part of the progressive movement. Only Wisconsin people had it. I believe that non-Anglo-Saxons were inferior races, of course, including Italians, Poles, Irish, etc., who were Catholics.
42:29There were all sorts of fit-ins. Other races are inferior. It should be kept out of and should be, of course, not allowed to immigrate to the United States. It's part of the immigration restriction movement, which is also an attack on strategicals. It now becomes, gets a scientific patina as being determined by biology, by social dollars and biology. The biology is now brought in as an allegedly scientific reason to eliminate immigration of Catholic and Jews later and so forth to the country. Roth is one of the leading figures in this, as well as advocating state control of almost everything. The economic argument that says it's necessary for workers to be sober, if you allow them to drink, they'll be absent more. Another thing is that the drive for prohibition came about because the railroads were getting to be liable, liability laws were coming in, The railroads were liable for accidents caused by their engineers or firemen or whatever.
43:28So if you switch and have the wrong switch and you have an accident, the railroads became liable. The railroads now wanted to start making rules that their engineers or whatever can't drink even off duty. It's like pilots now can't drink, I think, 12 hours before they fly or something, that sort of thing. So the railroads began to enforce temperance on their own employees, and then of course They said, well look, we have temperance voluntarily, let's get the government to pass compulsory temperance for our competitors. So therefore, they start agitating for prohibition. Another group that favored prohibition, and I kid you not, was the Coca-Cola. Coca-Cola in those days had, it was a big competitor of alcohol, had some cocaine in it.
44:14That, by the way, was the origin of the word coca, coca leaf. had a little bit of cocaine in it, which apparently gave you a certain kick. It disappeared long since from the formula. Coca-Cola was one of the big competitors to liquor. Coca-Cola was one of the main agitators for prohibition. You outlaw your competitor if you want to turn the coke for getting the missing kick. Another big lobbyist for prohibition was Volkshyn grape juice, which of course came into communion when wine was outlawed. and by the way, rape Jews, most Protestant churches already had rape Jews as the communion drink so most rape Jews were the big competitors in the wine, they were lobbying for prohibition two prominent business lobbyists for prohibition, to eliminate their competition Catholics, of course, and Lutherans were heavily against prohibition and businessmen like DuPonts were leading the fight against prohibition during the 1930s the unions were sort of split, they didn't know what to do, most unions or WASP unions
45:26were in favor of prohibition, socialist unions, Knights of Labor originally, the railroad brotherhoods were in favor of prohibition, the other hand of course the brewery workers were also unionized and they were of course against prohibition, meaning their livelihood would be taken away from them, the spillery and brewery workers, so the AFL was sort of split, they didn't They didn't take an official position on it, because they had brewery workers, but mostly most of the socialists and labor union people were in favor of prohibition. They attacked the liquor industry. They took the usual leftist line that somehow businessmen were creating demand. So if people wanted liquor, it wasn't their fault because the evil businessmen were supplying them with alcohol. And so therefore the liquor, you have to attack the liquor lobby. and Social Workers, of course, were all in favor of abolishing the saloon.
46:13Here's a great quote from a prominent social worker, Paul Benjamin, who wrote in a survey magazine, which was one of the big progressive publications, in 1915. He said, abolish the saloon quote, and the task of Americanizing the conglomerate fallen population will be lightened by 50 percent. In other words, Americanizing, meaning making good Protestants out of them, is what it really amounts to. So again, it's all part of the same sort of schtick. And as the war begins to come, as World War I begins to loom, and America begins to join the war effort, anti-German hysteria becomes part of the argument for prohibition, as we'll see later. One of the great quotes was that the biggest German agents in this country, The most important 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.
47:17The 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, unquote. So, in other words, the war, the entry into World War I supplied the final push over the top. The anti-German hysteria, and therefore the anti-Beer hysteria along with it, provided the opportunity for the Democratic Party to impose prohibition notice. As we'll see, Wilkinson, by this time, of course, was a progressive, and oddly enough, prohibition comes to the United States as a democratic maneuver during World War I. Actually, it comes, excuse me, with American boys, American soldiers have to be protected from liquor, and so by, first they sort of made all bars off limits and so forth, then they decided, well, the best way to do it is to eliminate liquor altogether by outlawing it, and making it unconstitutional, so as a result of World War I, liquor becomes an insane thing, a constitutional amendment saying all liquor is outlawed, both the possession and the sale and production of liquor becomes unconstitutional, and it's incredible, it could even be a constitutional amendment,
48:24That's the way it was, as a result of World War I. One prohibitionist said, yeah, this is a quote, we have German enemies in this country too. The worst of all German enemies, the most treacherous, the most menacing are Paps, Schlitz, Blass, and Miller. These were the big beer manufacturers. Generally the medical profession was free until the late 19th century and 1900. In the Jacksonian period, which is a real free market period now, 1830s, 1840s, 1850s, all licensing was limited in almost every profession, including medicine. The American Medical Association, which is and always has been the guild or the union of physicians, put through a medical licensing law in 1847, excuse me, they founded AMA in 1847, and they put through a medical licensing law around 1860, but it didn't really take.
49:26It was too easy to avoid it, and there was no real enforcement, so you could just get a license for 10 bucks or something. So the American Medical Association had as its goal, founded in 1847, to cartelize the medical profession, in other words, to kick out licensed medical schools and hospitals Restrict the supply of doctors so as to increase their income, it's very simple. You shift the supply to the left, reduce the number of doctors and thereby increasing their prices they can charge. They realized the medical school was the key. If you can license medical schools and kick medical schools out of business, cut the supply in half in medical schools, you can then of course restrict them as future doctors, younger doctors coming up.
50:17Most of these licenses are true in medicine too. One of the criteria you can tell about whether a license is pushed in order to help the public as it's supposed to be, the argument is always that general welfare of the common good requires worthy professionals, engineers, doctors, photographers, barbers, whatever license the occupation happens to be. But the key thing here is, in every situation where a restriction is put on an entry in in the profession, the existing people in the profession are exempt. It's the so-called grandfather clause, or grandfathering. In other words, the existing people are grandfathered in. In the barbering occupation, for example, every 10 or 20 years they put more restrictions on the supply of barbers. They say, in order to be a barber, you have to have four years of barber school. You have to pass a course in the history of barbering, in the ethics of Barbering, you have to be a citizen, you have to be 19, 21 years old, keep raising
51:15the age, you have to be a citizen, raising educational requirements for barbering, all this exempts the existing people, in other words, what they'll say is every new person coming in has to have four years of barber education, existing people can get along with the usual two years, in that way, the existing people are grandfathered into the outside profession and new people are kicked out, kept out, so the universal fact of grandfathering demonstrates The purpose of licensing is for cartel purposes, to restrict the entry in the profession rather than increase the income of the existing people rather than helping the public. So from 1847 to 1910, the American Medical Association was lobbying for this sort of restriction. In fact, for a long time, they wanted to license psychologists.
52:01There's a constant feud between doctors and psychologists. and doctors are trying to get psychologists, all psychologists who are not, don't have MDs kicked out and want to play it illegal and they haven't been able to do it because they're competing lobbies of the psychologists, but there's always been an attempt to do that. William James, the famous philosopher and psychologist, almost kicked out of the profession, was almost drummed out of medicine, excuse me, for being in favor of non-medical, legalizing, or to exist, to permit, legally permit non-licensed, non-doctor-psychologist, even though he himself was a physician, he was almost kicked out of medicine for this heresy. Well finally what happens is the American AMA sets up a Council on Medical Education in 1904, and gets in with the Carnegie Foundation, and the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching also allied with it with the Rockefeller Foundation and one of the things that happens in the early twentieth century is that people like Carnegie and Rockefeller begin to set up foundations
53:09allegedly for impartial scientific research actually these foundations first place are a tax dodge, in other words you don't have to pay, they're tax exempt so you don't have to pay inheritance taxes if you give your money to a foundation and also you control it, so the Rockefeller Foundation funds for example, the Carnegie Foundation funds can be invested in, standard oil or whatever the company is and vote the right way. So that's one purpose of foundations, to be able to keep your capital and vote the correct way so to speak. Another one is to pursue certain purposes which lead down to So the benefit of the profits, the profitability of the corporation, of the tycoon promoting the foundation.
53:54So that's one thing. Another thing is they actually use the funds for purposes which read down to the profit of the donor. I don't know if I mentioned the Milk Bank, New York City Health Department, CAPRE, anyway the key there is to sum it up very quickly, in the 1930s, most of the milk in New York in New York City was sold by farmers, independent farmers, and big cans, and then there were grocery stores in those days, not supermarkets, so you go to the grocery store with your bottle, and they take the, they dip the milk from the can into your bottle. There was packaged milk, bottled milk in those days, not cartons, sold by Borden and Sheffield, those were two major milk companies, all the rest was loose milk, sold at about half the price.
54:40After the depression, people turned more and more to loose milk. They couldn't afford the bottle of milk. So, the Borden and Sheffield were two major milk companies turning to the New York City Health Department and they get the health department to outlaw milk, loose milk on the basis of safety with no evidence. And the New York City Health Department sets up a commission, allegedly impartial scientific commission, to study the question of whether or not loose milk is unsafe. and the impartial science consists of a couple of guys from the health department, the rest of them are all from the mill bank fund, a couple of guys from Sheffield, like the vice president of Sheffield and the vice president of Borden, and four or five guys from the mill bank fund. The impartial committee after three months of investigation concludes that loose milk is unsafe and that's it, and the farmers are saying there's no evidence and besides the only possible problem might be that the dipper, the dip in milk is not sterile and we're working
55:36We're going to have to put down a sterile dipper, so there'll be no problem whatsoever. The dipper, you dip the milk from the can of the bottle, it'll be sterile. In two months, we'll have a sterile dipper, and the health department says, sorry, too late, you're now illegal. From then on, loose milk was declared illegal, supply of milk was cut in half, the price doubled, and people starved and all that, and Sheffield and Borden benefited. Every state has a milk cartel, which restricts production and raises prices. Farmers complained from the mid-1930s, about 3 or 4 years after this, the New York State government passed a milk act, which got the farmers into the monopoly. In other words, each farm now has what it still loves, a maximum quota of milk they can produce, and they sell it to a milk board, and the New York State milk board which parcels it around and sells it at a high price.
56:22In other words, basically what happened was the Sheffield and Borden shared the monopoly profits with the farmers, which shut the farmers up, of course the consumers are still suffering. Consumers will have to pay a lot more for less milk. Also, it's very difficult, you can't buy New Jersey milk in New York, even though it's right across the river, because of milk protectionism, so to speak. And so the result is a fantastic compulsory cartelization of the milk market. And by the way, what just happened recently is a million dairy cows, the dairy industry still thinks that the prices are too low. The Federal Government is compelling the slaughter of a million dairy cows just like that to cut the production of milk and raise the price.
57:08And the cattlemen are belly-aching, but the cattle farmers now find out that the killing dairy cows are selling it for meat, which means that there's more competition in the meat industry, so the meat prices are falling, and they're trying to get the Federal Government to stop killing the dairy cows on their own hook, but of course nobody cares about the consumer. The outrageous, the million dairy cows are being slaughtered to drive up the price of milk, and nobody's complaining, it's a so-called free market government. All right, so anyways, so what happened, the punchline here is that the Milbank Fund, who is the Milbank Fund? Also, the Milbank Fund, every New York City Health Commissioner and Assistant Commissioner are Milbank Fund people. In other words, the pattern was, you become Vice President of the Milbank Fund, you then become Chairman of the New York City Health Commissioner for a year or three years, I gave this lecture on health and medicine and the market to Mount Sinai medical school
58:06people about 10 years ago. I didn't get to this example of the MoBank fund and I told the kids who invited me, I said, yeah, that's a great example. I told them the story and you haven't heard the punch line yet. I told them the story and I said, gee, Professor, I'm glad you didn't mention it. I said, why not? Every member of the community health department in Australia is on the payroll of the Moe Bank Fund, every one of them, right now, it's like 10 years ago. So presumably this still exists, the Moe Bank Fund is a very powerful influence on New York City health. Who is the Moe Bank Fund? Jeremiah Moe Bank, the founder, is the owner of the Borden Company. And all of the Moe Bank Fund's investments, of course, are in the Borden Company. So you have, in other words, a beautiful tie-in between Borden Milk Company and the Moe Bank Fund, and running New York City Health in an impartial, scientific, value-free manner, such as the
58:53racket under which we're suffering here. So in the medical report, what happens is the Carnegie, go back to 1910, the Carnegie and Rockefeller Foundation set up a committee along with the AMA, the AMA really running it, to investigate medical education in the United States. Abraham Flexner was the point of the head of the, let's make the study, and his report issued in 1910 was called the Flexner Report. It was really written by his guy from the AMA named Colwell who was at his elbow telling him what to do. Flexner, he visited every medical school in the United States, he spent like three days in each medical school. He He was not a physician, he was not an educator, outside of that he was a very well qualified post, didn't know anything about medicine, didn't know much about education, I think he was a high school, prep school teacher in social science or something.
59:53The question is why was he appointed, Abraham Flexner, what was his qualification for this high post? And by the way, the recommendation was that there are too many medical schools in the United States and half of them should be put out of business, they should be licensed by by each state, which would then appoint a board, which would give the power of the American Medical Association to appoint the board of examiners, which would examine every, not only doctor, but every medical school and every hospital and decide whether they should stay in business. This was done, and within a year or two, every state in the union had this model bill, reorganized the medical profession to do this, gave the medical association the power to put hospitals and medical schools out of business, and they promptly put half There were 160 medical schools in 1906. There were 82 left by 1912 and they were all put out of business by the state government regulations engineered by the Flexner Report. Flexner
1:00:54said there's an oversupply of doctors. What does that mean, oversupply? It means there's too many doctors for the income they like to get. Too many doctors per person. Every Doctors are not well-off enough, therefore we should cut the supply, have higher quality, quote-unquote, medical education, and raise their income, and that's compulsory cartelization. Of course it raises costs, it's something he didn't talk about. So Flexner, what was Flexner's qualification? The only qualification I could see was he was a brother of Dr. Simon Flexner, who was the head physician or whatever, at the Rockefeller Institute for Medical Research, So here's the guy who's responsible for putting half the medical schools in the country out of business. He's neither a physician nor an educator. His only consultation was he was in with the AMA and his brother was head of the Rockefeller Institute.
1:01:45So in response to this, there were, as I say, 162 medical schools in 1906, and they kept progressively putting schools out of business until 1944, there were only 69 medical schools. And each medical school would get tighter and tighter, the number of medical students would push to the left, their income, those who make it, go up. The way he put it was, Flexner, one of his great statements from Flexner, The law that protects the public against the unfit doctor should in fairness protect the student against the unfit school. He put protecting the student by not allowing any school. The result now, whenever you have monopolists or cartelists, they will use their power to crush their competition.
1:02:30Competition means people they don't like. For example, if you have price control, if you have rent control, you'll have the landlord takes over housing. He's got a hundred applicants for every apartment. He will then choose, since he can't raise the rents, he'll choose on some other basis the people he likes. His brother-in-law will get his favorite race. If he doesn't like a certain race, he'll keep them out. In other words, the producer then takes over from the consumer. and racial discrimination, religious discrimination, and it takes over. Same thing happened in medicine. As the medical cartelists took over and used the government to cartelize the medical profession, they used the power systematically to put out of business every medical school. There were several black medical schools that were put out of business as being allegedly below par. There were many women medical students, they were put out of business. In other words, women doctors and Jewish doctors were kicked out.
1:03:17In other words, if you had, the medical schools would systematically then excluded women, blacks and Jews from the medical profession. You had many cases of bright young students who couldn't get into medical school, not because they weren't qualified, because there weren't any places left and there were quotas against their religion or race. They had to go to Switzerland or somewhere and get the degree there and try to come in as a foreign doctor. So it's still going on. It's not as bad as it used to be because things have loosened up in the last ten years or so. in years or so, more competition in the medical profession, but that was the, that was the situation and they put out a business, systematically black medical schools, and also medical schools of competing therapies, therapies which didn't fit into the orthodox mold. For example, in those days, the dominant medical therapy was called allopathy, allopath, which was the Well, the basic theory for allopathy is that diseases should be combated by massive doses
1:04:21of synthetic drugs to kill the germs, and this, of course, is very expensive, the synthetic drugs are expensive. Also, allopathy, before that, the allopath, the basic therapy insisted of purging, which means massive poisons, you take a guy and purge him with massive doses of arsenic and and Mercury, things like that, which would usually kill the patient. It was worth your life to go to a doctor and tell them that. The interesting thing on medical historians is when does the break-even point come? Was it at what point that the doctors cure more people than they kill? And even orthodox medicine agrees that, well, before, they say before the 1920s, what the hell of an admission? Here's the medical profession, which is the same sort of people are dominant, it's now agreed they kill more people than they cure.
1:05:09They did it, they purged them with massive, they bled them with leeches, they purged them with arsenic, and things like that, and the rest of it was surgery, and so this, they killed many people. So, and then came massive doses to say drugs, and according to Dr. McCown, I think is by far the top medical historian, he claims the break-even point came in the late 1930s with sulfur drugs and penicillin, Homeopathy is still very prominent in Western Europe. It's now essentially illegal in the United States, because all the homeopathic schools, every one of them will put out a business affliction report, and as soon as the AMF comes out, they'll put out a business affliction report.
1:06:06A.M.A., which hated homeopathy, took over, A.M.A. being allopaths, right now allopathy is medicine. Basically, when you talk about medicine, it's allopathy. The homeopaths have been put out of business. The only homeopaths now are either European or old ones, old guys over 80 who still went to medical school before 1916 and 1910. So a friend of mine went to an elderly homeopath and was cured of diabetes, he was taking insulin And the homeopath said, well, I said, if you take this little herb, and this is, take very minute doses of natural herbs, that's the homeopathic doctrine. And he said, you take a teeny dose, and this is a five-year supply, plus about three bucks, a five-year supply of his natural herb, and I just throw away the insulin. He did, and he's in great shape ever since. I'm not endorsing this therapy, I'm simply saying the consumers have the right to choose.
1:06:54So homeopathy is now basically illegal. Also, other cures, other suggested cures are illegal, cancer, alleged cancer cures. Cancer Cures. There's this elderly Romanian doctor, a lovable character, his license is being removed, which means he can't practice medicine anymore. The New York State government, they claim his cancer cures are not quote, not effective unquote. They don't say he's harming them, they just say they're not effective. Well, the patients think they're effective. The patients on television crying, they say, this guy's keeping them alive, he can't practice anymore because the New York State medicine, medical authorities, the New York State government claim that it's not effective. How do they know it's not effective? Who the hell are they? Not God. But anyway, that's the way they're preventing, so they're outlawing alleged cancer. You have to go to Mexico to get Leotrol.
1:07:40And most people only go to so-called crackpot medicine, when orthodox medicine says you can't help you anymore. Usually they're half dead when they get to these things. And they often help quite a bit. So, as I say, I'm not endorsing any of these things. I'm simply saying that consumers have the right to choose. These things should not be illegal. So, there are many things which are illegal in Western Europe and illegal here, although some things are illegal in Western Europe and illegal here. For example, emperin. You can't get emperin in Western Europe without a prescription. Emperin is supposed to be dangerous. Here, it's sold over the counter. By the way, the prescription business is another racket because it means you can't, in order to buy a drug, you have to get a prescription. You have to go to a licensed pharmacist and you have to go to a licensed doctor to get the prescription filled out, one of my physicians I go to is essentially what he really is is a paid
1:08:32prescription writer, in other words, what prescriptions do you want? He fills them out, so he performs an important service, on the other hand, it's pretty expensive to have to go through this kind of So the interesting thing here about this orthodox medicine is that the tie-up, just like the tie-up of the Milbank Fund, the Rockefeller Foundation, climate reflection and Rockefeller Institute of Medical Research, do the research for synthetic drugs. In other words, first the Rockefeller people get homeopathy outlawed, so allopathy becomes the only legal medicine. In order to have allopathy, you have to have a synthetic drug, very expensive.
1:09:18Rockefeller Institute pushes synthetic drug research. And the Rockefeller family, here's the punchline, Rockefeller family is heavily invested in drug companies. In other words, here's the situation you have in Sterling's other drug company. In other words, you have a situation where one wing of the Rockefeller empire, the Rockefeller The Rockwell Foundation, in the name of quote science unquote, gets all competitors to allopathy outlawed, runs the hospitals, medical schools that will get the competitors outlawed, and then that only synthetic drugs become viable or become legal, and then they make profits out of synthetic drugs through the Rockefeller's investment in synthetic drug companies. That's the racket, that's the basic systemic racket here. That's the way the Rockefeller forces operate. So it's a beautiful alliance between so-called value-free science, value-free medicine, and the Rockefeller economic interests, and it's still going on.
1:10:11Basically, this is the whole, every time, and the thing is, the thing which really annoys me almost more than anything else is the argument they give against people like Rovichy and people like, things like Lagerfeld is, they don't say it's harmful, these so-called crackpot therapies. They say, it wastes the click of the patient's, the consumer's dollar, spends their money unnecessarily. Well, I mean, first of all, there's a lot of gold for these goddamn doctors who are charging on arm and a leg to worry about the consumer's pocketbook after they're pillaging it. What they're really worrying about is other therapies are cheaper, regardless of whether they're effective or ineffective. Crackpot therapies are always much cheaper than orthodox medical therapies. Consumers have a right to be able to choose it. Anyway, that's my sermon for today. So, another thing you have is, with the medical, one of the things that the reflection report did, interestingly enough, is to outlaw proprietary hospitals, which were more or less illegal until quite recently, in other words, a proprietary hospital cannot be a medical school, and of course medical schools become the key hospitals, they have unpaid, exploited labor through interns and things like that, so, in other words, the only legitimate hospital
1:11:21Why should a hospital become, not a proprietary one, but especially a producer's co-op? A proprietary hospital is a profit-making hospital. Why should doctors who are conservative and everything else, why are they against proprietary hospitals? Why should they claim it's somehow evil to have a hospital that makes money? Remember what they're saying, a doctor's hospital makes money. Most of the big hospitals are non-profit-making, in other words, they're owned by the trustees. They get their money from donations by wealthy philanthropists, and they're run by the doctors themselves. It's like colleges. Colleges are run by trustees, and not the faculty, but essentially they're not owned by anybody. They're run by trustees, and therefore there's no responsibility of ownership. You don't have to make a profit. As long as you don't go bankrupt, you're picking it on forever.
1:12:07They're not nearly as efficient as profit-making outfits. Well, the result of this, where hospitals are basically not profit-making, but run by by trustees and by the doctors themselves. The doctors themselves take over. They seize power. The result of this is, if the hospital isn't exactly bankrupt, what happens is the doctors take over and the doctors push their own interests. What are their own interests? Well, high salaries and also sexy equipment. In other words, if you're a doctor and you want to make a name for yourself, how do you make a name for yourself? They don't go around treating colds. Every schmuck has a cold. Nothing sexy about a cold. Sexy is a rare disease only found in northern New Guinea and you're trying to get your hospital to have the only machine in the world, a $10 billion machine, the only machine that can cure this disease, one person gets it every 100 years, this is an exaggeration, but basically what it is, in other words, hospitals then compete, they overload in very expensive equipment for rare diseases, they forget about it, they try to play down important common diseases, so in other words, they get, so the interest then,
1:13:11It's not the interest of the consumer of the accounts or the owners, it's the interest of the doctors themselves, promoting their own glory. And so there's too much equipment, overuse of equipment, sophisticated equipment, and equipment for its own sake, for high tech for its own sake, so to speak. And forgetting about the patient becomes last in this whole machine. They don't get their income so much from the patient, they get their income from donations from multi-philanthropists. And, of course, now with medical insurance, since the 60s, 50s and 60s with Medicare and Blue Cross and everything, you get almost nothing from the patients. The patients are guaranteed by the insurance company, so they charge almost as much as they want, within limits. So the demand curve goes up way up, in other words, the supplies are restricted by law, and the demand curve goes way up because it's pushed by government insurance proposals, and you wind up with almost unlimited funds for the doctors. I mean, hospital costs are enormous compared to what they used to be like.
1:14:09has increased by a hundred and four in the last ten years or so. It's not because of the inflation, it's because of the artificial increase in demand by the third party insurance, especially government, and the restriction of supply by government. Now the restriction of supply has been loosening up. What's happened is, it got so bad that people began to, so-called paramedics began to come in. People who are slightly illegal paramedics because doctors become so scarce that they turn to nurses or paratypes. And people begin to realize, for example, to get an injection, to get a blood test or something. If you go to an orthodox doctor, you have to pay $80 or something for one lousy injection. Doctors aren't good injectors because they only give one injection a day or something. Nurses usually do it a lot. Nurses are much better at injections or taking blood tests than doctors are.
1:14:59Why should you have to pay a high-priced doctor? Why can't you go to a low-priced nurse? And so more and more of this is happening now where people with paramedics come in who are much more specialists in a certain area and are much cheaper and are able to out-compete. And a lot of this has brought a lot of, also in the last 20 years or so, there's been a healthy re-evaluation of the medical profession. People are going to realize they're not divine, they're not God, they're not God's imprimatur, that people like everybody else in fact slightly worse because they've got a government monopoly behind them. and therefore it should be looked at with a cold and sober eye and the whole idea people really should run their own bodies and not the doctors and also it's coming to the fore, all of this is very healthy, it's a good reaction against the usual authoritarian submission of your life to the doctor anyway so the punchline here is the Rockefeller Institute, Rockefeller
1:15:50family benefits in this aesthetic drug investments for pushing allopathy and and Outlaw and Competing Therapies, and similar. In addition to this we have, I talked about prohibition, we have the purity movement. The idea of purity, remember I talked about Dr. Wiley and his obsession with purity. Purity comes in now as a combination, just like prohibition, a combination of alleged value-free science and pietist values. life should be purified, prostitution should be outlawed generally before about 1900, before the progressive era prostitutes were there all the time anyway, never been eliminated if anything they were sort of put into a red light district, so they were sort of an invisible area and regulated and so forth and what happens in a market situation is it's important to have brand names of prostitutes since the individual prostitute is sort of a shifting high turnover and so if you have brand names like Madam's, they supply a brand name for the customers.
1:16:54Well, the progressive era had a hysterical attack on prostitution through purity, through piousness, purity and through progressive upper-class wasp-alleged science, and they were considered to be the center of the disease and so forth. The prostitution was then an illegal purity drive against prostitutes in every city. As a result, the brothels were eliminated or outlawed and the girls were driven onto the streets. and quality control whatsoever. The disease, of course, increases because there's no madam saying I guarantee the purity or health of these girls. So as a result, the problem became worse, but they didn't, the progressives don't care about that. So what you have in the anti-prostitution movement, you have the quietest doctors, progressive doctors, plus social hygienists, and vice commissions, reformers, urban reformers, the whole gang, all these people I've been talking about, Unite and things like this. In 1911, one of the progressive guys of the Federal Government passed the Mann Act, which outlaws transporting women across state lines for immoral purposes.
1:18:00It's really enforced, tough to enforce it, but every once in a while these things are enforced. And according to Mencken's view, it might be true that this was passed by the envious farmers who didn't have any cars. They were stuck to the hayrocks, because in other words, farmers transport girls only within the state line, they only have hay wagons, so they didn't have automobiles. It was an attack by crummy farmers against envious of their urban competitors, urban types that can drive across the state. So they wanted to crush, it wasn't really an attack on immorality, it was an attack on immorality across state lines. So, who knows, it might be right. But it hasn't been studied enough. The whole Man Act agitation should be studied from this revisionist point of view. There's a social hygiene movement, which is part of this whole thing, which combines all the people we love here. The pietists, value-free physicians, value-free scientists. There's a whole stew of these characters, also the idea that if you stamp out prostitution, as well as if you stamp out liquor, you will improve the morals of the masses and work harder and become more cleaner and all the rest of it, vote WASP
1:19:15and of course the theory was that you were attacking ethnic, the theory was that there were no WASP prostitutes, of course that's incorrect, it was part of the whole struggle between these groups And the same guys pop up, by the way. For example, when I was growing up, Dr. Raymond Fosdick was beloved. There were certain people who were beloved. By beloved, I mean people who were beloved in the media. New York Times, Washington Post, CBS, Time Magazine. One of them was Dr. Raymond Fosdick, who pops up everywhere. I think he was a Rockefeller Foundation physician, head of the American Social Hygiene Association, He's also, I think, the brother of Dr. Harry Emerson's Phosdek Piatist minister at Riverside Church.
1:20:06He's also president of the Rockefeller Foundation. These people are everywhere. They're sort of this whole network. He's the official biographer of John D. Rockefeller Jr. John D. Rockefeller Jr., by the way, did the following thing. He was the only son of John D. Sr. He set up the Bureau of Social Hygiene in 1911 to stamp out sin, stamp out prostitution and everything else, pornography, et cetera, put in five million dollars for so-called scientific social reform, he wanted to stamp out liquor, and so he put out a prohibition movement, he sponsored Flexner in his report, also sent Flexner to Europe to try to stamp out sin in Europe, in Europe. He also set up, he got Fosdick, who is sort of Mr. Rockefeller in those days, Mr. Rockefeller in the social field, he got Fosdick to investigate, have a scientific police system helping set up the FBI, getting files on everybody. This is part of course of the art of pious reform, in other words, part of the things you do is you have fingerprints
1:21:19of everybody, files of everybody to make sure you can regulate people. Also he helped set The Federal Drug Policy, the whole multi-billion dollar war on drugs is going on, really starts around World War I, before it, it starts with John D. Rockefeller Jr. and the idea of stamping out drugs. By the way, one interesting thing is that the appliances are so anti-licker that they were promoting the idea of taking cocaine in order to stop liquor. All of these guys are in favor of stamping out pornography and having censorship and making sure that everything is all press and all publications are moral, etc. etc.
1:22:06Can you imagine who decides what's moral or not, another can of worms? So all this really comes in the progressive period. In an improgressive period, during World War I, we'll get to a little later, World War I was the culmination of all that stuff. They outlaw, in order to save American boys from liquor, they outlawed liquor, in other words, prostitution. Prohibition comes in in World War I to save American soldiers from liquor. The same way they started stamping out the brothels in order to save American soldiers from sin, Starting with the famous federal government seizure and eradication of Storyville, the famous New Orleans red light district, and the closing down of Storyville by the federal troops in World War I. All of this, as I say, was backed by scientific value-free doctors and pietists and this whole alliance, which culminates in the progressive parties we'll see in 1912.
1:23:03What happened after two terms of Theodore Roosevelt, 1908, his successor, William Howard Taft, who had been a judge, Supreme Court judge and secretary of war, was an old pal of Roosevelt's. And one of these things, if you pass on something to your successors, it often happens in life, by the way, in business and in unions. For example, David Dubinsky was a beloved head of the American International Ladies Goverment Workers Union for about 60 years. The union movement, once a union president, always a union president, same as the motto and Labor Union Movement. At any rate, so Dubinsky finally retired at the age of 70. He passed on the chairmanship to his old buddy and right-hand man, Louis Stilberg. And he expected Stilberg would be his shadow. In other words, he would issue orders from his retirement home. Stilberg would follow. After all, Stilberg wanted to do something on his own, and immediately a bitter clash between him and Dubinsky.
1:23:54In a couple of years they wouldn't speak to each other, battling and so forth and so on. So when Taft gets in as president in 1908, I guess they forgot that he was an Ohio Republican. As an Ohio Republican, he was essentially in a Rockefeller camp, and he starts a savage, bitter attack on the Morgans. In other words, essentially as a Rockefeller retaliation for the Morgan savage attack by Teddy Roosevelt. And so we have, next time I'll go into the TAF cabinet, etc., but we have then TAF rolling out the antitrust arm, filing antitrust suits like mad against the Morgans, against international harvester and U.S. Steel. They didn't succeed, but it was a bitter fight.
1:24:39In other words, here's Teddy Roosevelt, a Morgan person trying to smash Standard Oil, attacking Standard Oil, and here's TAF as a response, as retaliation for this, going and the money after the Morgan Trusts and it was on that basis, because Taft being anti-Morgan and Teddy Roosevelt broke with him, Teddy Roosevelt was an African safari or something and he says, he's writing letters back, hysterical letters saying Taft is evil, he's monstrous, he's crushing poor Morgan and on that basis Teddy Roosevelt breaks with Morgan and the Morgans then decide to punish Taft forever, in other words destroy the Republican Party temporarily in order to crush Taft and prevent him from re-electing in 1912. So for the election of 1912 the Morgans created We made a new party, a new third party, a very powerful third party, at least for a short period of time, the Progressive Party.
1:25:29And in the Progressive Party, we culminate all the progressive aspects. The Progressive Party was filled with almost all the upper-class wasps, there were all Morgan people, there were social workers, there were Jane Addams, all these people I've been talking about, my least favorite people in the world, collected in the Progressive Party. Party, pietists, hymn singers, so-called value-free scientists, physicians, shrinks, social workers, they're all in the Progressive Party. Also, by the way, women's suffrage, remember I said that women's suffrage was essentially a pietist maneuver to beat out the ethnics. Women delegates, the women delegates of the Progressive Party convention in 1912 for the first time in the history of American politics, and women, this was before women's suffrage, comes in only 1920, on a federal level, a lot of women delegates and the New York Times, which was a democratic newspaper in those days, the Progressive Party met in 1912 in New York City and they said they couldn't believe what the guy reported on it, they
1:26:27said this is not like a political convention, it's like a religious revival meeting, indeed it was. Teddy Roosevelt is giving an address to the inaugural address or whatever, keynote He's using religious, pious, praxeology. He talks about his famous climactic. In the end he says we stand at Armageddon and we battle for the Lord. In other words, this is Armageddon. The election in 1912 was Armageddon. And all throughout his speech was punctuated with amens from the floor and hymns singing, constantly breaking into hymns. They sang a hymn, we will follow, follow, follow Roosevelt, substituting the word Roosevelt for Jesus in the famous Protestant hymn. So the whole thing was a hymn singing revivalist, revival meaning, rather than an orthodox political invention.
1:27:14Progressive Party arrived, Progressive Party was created by the Morgan interests. The head of the Progressive Party, the secretary treasurer, the guy who really ran it, was none other than our old pal George W. Perkins, Morgan's partner, who brings Teddy Roosevelt retirement, uses all these crackpot technocrats and scientists to smash Taft, bring back Roosevelt and run against Taft and destroy Taft's re-election, which he did. In other words, re-election. Taft was nominated for the Republican Party. Teddy Roosevelt was nominated for the Progressive Party. Teddy Roosevelt got more votes than Taft did.
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Speakers: Murray N. Rothbard.
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- Murray N. Rothbard delivered it, in the series The American Economy and the End of Laissez-Faire 1870 to World War II.
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