What are the roots of monopoly in America?

0:00The United States was born in an anti-monopoly tradition. It was literally. The Boston Tea Company, which we all know and hope to revere, was a revolutionary act which not only was a protest against taxes, by the way, a protest against taxes which are so low compared to what we have now that we wouldn't even think twice about it. I mean, they were very tax-sensitive in the colonial period. You impose a teeny tax on them, they might have your head chopped off. Nowadays, of course, we suffer almost anything in silence. It was not only a revolt against taxes, it was also a revolt against monopoly. In other words, this was considered to be the first step by which the British would impose the East India Company, which was a monopoly company. In other words, only the East India Company could trade with the Far East. Anybody else who traded with the Far East, any other Englishmen who traded with the Far East got shot, metaphorically speaking. Government clamped down on it, outlawed it.

0:55And so the Americans were afraid that the East Indian Company would be established in America also as a monopoly tea importer. And so the dumping of tea into Boston Harbor was one at the same time an anti-tax movement and an anti-monopoly movement. By monopoly I don't mean big business, I don't mean IBM, I mean any business or several businesses where the government says only thou can produce or sell a certain item, everybody else is restricted yet shot and so forth and so on. That's what monopolies always meant until 20th century economics came in and messed everything up. So the big businessmen, especially Morgans, were by the turn of the century, by the early 20th century, wanted to have cartels, compulsory cartels and monopolies in every field. The Federal Trade Commission was designed to do that in industry.

1:41As a matter of fact, the big businessmen who wrote the Federal Trade Commission Act and lobbied for it said, We want to do for general business what the ICC has already done for the railroads, and what the Department of Agriculture has done for farmers and so forth and so on. We want to get in on the general boodle. But they had a problem, they had an ideological problem. How do you put this over in a country committed and a public committed to anti-monopoly, and also a public suspicious of Wall Street and monopoly and stuff, or for good reason? In order to do that, you have to have an alliance with the intellectuals. The intellectuals are the opinion-molding class, so to speak. And so, you've got to have a lot of intellectuals, court intellectuals, as it has been called. To tell the public is all really great, and it's all really an anti-monopoly movement.

2:27The key thing is to sell monopoly under the guise of anti-monopoly. It's a beautiful shell game. In order to do it, you have to have glib intellectuals to do it. You can't have a king himself or the president himself who's not going to be able to get away with this. Well, it just so happens, by the way, this has been the age-old alliance of despotism throughout history. The way that the spotting, most governments have been, those countries have been the spotting and tyrannical. And the way they've done it is, the king or his nobles or whatever are in alliance with the intellectuals. In the old days intellectuals were almost all priests. There were no lay intellectuals. And so you have an alliance of church and state, in other words, both of them performing an important function for each other. 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. And the king then gives the church lots of tax revenue, lots of prestige and monuments and so forth and so on.

3:17So you have a mighty coalition of throne and altar of church and state to moque the public. The public, of course, everybody benefits except the public who gets slaughtered here. They get robbed, moque-ed and whatever. So what they were doing now, what the Morgan types were doing, is to bring back the old church-state alliance.