Counter-Currents
1,369 words
Slovak translation here
Most productive Americans hate the idea of socialized medicine since they think that they will pay more into it than they will get out of it, and they are right. Americans who take care of their health—i.e., exercise and avoid smoking, junk food, excessive drink, and recreational drugs—should also hate the idea of socialized medicine, since they will be paying for the cancer treatments of chain-smokers, the triple bypasses of lard-asses, the venereal diseases of the oversexed and impulsive, and the diabetes, cirrhosis, dialysis, obesity, etc. of the overfed and overindulgent.
Is it any wonder, then, that productive, health-conscious people prefer the present semi-private system to socialized healthcare? They would need mental healthcare if they thought otherwise.
But, crazy though it may sound, I want to argue that healthy, productive Americans should prefer a socialized healthcare system to what we have now.
First, they are already paying for socialized medicine without reaping any of the benefits, because we have a sneaky, hypocritical form of socialized medicine anyway.
Second, a socialized healthcare system need not exploit the health-conscious to coddle the sickly and self-destructive. One could also award health-conscious people certain benefits and penalize people who do not take care of their health appropriately, so perhaps they would take better care of themselves.
Before we go into the details, however, we have to confront honestly why we do not have a completely capitalist, free-market healthcare system. Such a system would mean that the only health care one could get would be what one can pay for by oneself (or persuade others to pay for).
Yes, there would be charity hospitals for the indigent in such a society, as long as some people did not completely embrace the libertarian ethic of selfishness. But there would be no “safety net”: no government guarantee that everyone who needs healthcare gets some care, no matter what.
In a completely capitalist system, there would be people who suffer and die of easily preventable diseases simply because they lack money (or the ability to persuade others to foot their bills). Not enough people want that sort of society, whether from religious conviction, altruistic sentiments, or simple rational self-interest (since anyone can have a run of bad luck). So we already have a form of socialized healthcare.
If you have private health insurance, you still pay taxes for Medicare and Medicaid and emergency room care for the indigent. And private health insurance is also a form of redistribution. The healthier you are, the less medical care you use. The people who really benefit from private insurance are those who have serious medical problems.
In the past, healthy people with private insurance could at least count on a modicum of protection from this because their insurers could turn away people with serious health problems or at least refuse to cover pre-existing conditions. But today, thanks to our government, they can’t. So the healthy are forced to contribute to the health care of smokers, fatties, drunks, druggies, AIDS patients, and others who can join your “private” health plans.
But it gets worse. Many health-conscious and responsible people pay such high premiums with high deductibles that they postpone visits to the doctor and important checkups and tests, while hypochondriacs clog the waiting rooms. This often leads to serious medical problems that could have been easily prevented if decent people were a little more inclined to be crybabies and mooches. Where is the justice in this?
In our current system of semi-socialized medicine by stealth, disproportionate benefits go to the improvident, undisciplined, and irresponsible—paid for by the productive, disciplined, and responsible. Given that, productive and health-conscious people might actually be better off with outright socialized healthcare.
Socialized healthcare is merely the logical extension of the commitment that our society has already made not to allow anybody to go without necessary care. I believe that commitment is fundamentally right.
But a socialized healthcare system need not be run by malevolent egalitarians out to penalize the healthy and responsible and coddle the sickly and irresponsible. Instead, one could have a set of incentives that reward healthy lifestyles and penalize unhealthy ones.
First of all, let’s divert all the monies raised from cigarette and liquor taxes to the healthcare system, so that people who smoke and drink subsidize their own care.
Second, let’s tax junk food for the same purpose. Let’s make corn syrup more expensive than caviar. Let’s return to a society where obesity is a rare sign of great wealth rather than a common sign of poverty, as it tends to be today.
Throw in hefty taxes on TV, golf carts, ride-on lawn mowers, leaf-blowers, drive-throughs, and everything else that promotes laziness and unhealthy living.
Conversely, give tax breaks for healthy lifestyle choices: joining gyms, taking yoga classes, quitting smoking and drinking, etc. Change zoning laws to mandate mixed-used development and walkable communities.
These are just a few suggestions, but they suffice to illustrate the basic idea. We need to create incentives to encourage healthy living and personal responsibility rather than penalize them.
But what about freedom? It’s overrated, but still a value to be preserved. Under my plan, nobody would be forced to do jumping jacks. Nobody would be prevented from eating Twinkies. (Well, maybe Twinkies.) I do not propose turning society into a vast boot camp or making fat farms mandatory.
But people who abuse their health will have to pay the full cost of it, since their little indulgences will be taxed to pay for treating the illnesses that follow from their lifestyle choices. (I do, however, think that individuals whose drug and alcohol problems prevent them from carrying out their personal and social responsibilities should be forcibly dried out.)
Should people have the freedom to opt out of a socialized healthcare system altogether? Yes and no.
No, people should not be able to opt out of paying for a basic healthcare system, even if they say that they are willing to suffer the consequences. First of all, most of them would come running to the emergency room anyway. But beyond that, some individual choices are foolish and should not be honored. A certain amount of paternalism is necessary in a decent society.
But although people should not be free to opt out of the standard healthcare package available to all citizens, they should be free to pursue additional healthcare if they can pay for it. The rich, after all, will always be with us, and as long as they can travel abroad, they will seek out whatever healthcare they can afford. So there is no reason to eliminate a private healthcare sector in addition to a socialized sector. Furthermore, it would probably be more efficient if most healthcare providers were private enterprises. The government would merely be the biggest customer.
Of course, the biggest barrier to socialized healthcare in America is not that people think it is immoral, impractical, or undesirable. The problem is a deep division and distrust within American society. Most white Americans correctly believe (1) that the left would end up administering any system of socialized medicine, and (2) that the American left is deeply hostile to the interests of white Americans.
There is also a racial dimension of this anxiety. Whites instinctively know that blacks and browns would take more from the system than they contribute, with whites paying the bills. Moreover, the old are disproportionately white, the young disproportionately non-white. Thus it makes political sense for the Democrats, as the party of non-whites, to want to bump off old white people to divert their healthcare dollars to the Democrats’ younger, non-white constituency.
As Harvard professor Robert Putnam’s studies have shown, racial and ethnic diversity are profoundly destructive of social solidarity and civic mindedness. Thus America will never have a Scandinavian-style welfare state unless and until we have the racial and ethnic homogeneity Scandinavia used to have. (Specifically, we would need a homogeneous society of intelligent, industrious, conscientious people.)
We’re never going to have a fully private healthcare system. The present semi-socialist system is immensely costly and inherently unjust. Maybe somewhere down the line, when the White Republic is established, we should consider replacing the socialism of the sick with the fascism of the healthy.
26 comments
Could you please give me one example of a bureaucracy that works well? Should all lawyers become government employees, too? After all, lawyers make more money off of healthcare than doctors. Tort reform could solve a whole swathe of problems, but then, you were saying, when something is not working, no problem, just create another government bureaucracy.
Check out the new piece “Japan, Refutation of Neoliberalism”:
https://counter-currents.com/2011/10/japan-refutation-of-neoliberalism/
History is replete with examples of bureaucracies that attracted the services of highly accomplished, public-spirited people. Also see Frank Martel on the Prussian General Staff, which was but one part of a remarkable bureaucracy:
https://counter-currents.com/2010/09/the-vanguard-system/
https://counter-currents.com/2010/09/training-for-power/
Beyond that, there is a conceptual problem here. There are common or public goods that cannot be supplied and secured by private enterprise. Only the state can provide them.
Why is it that Americans will gladly pile into some Groupon offer — hey, if we all sign up, we can get 10% off on nail care! — but call the idea of everyone getting together to negotiate lower health care costs “socialism”?
Because, in the first instance, the participants are motivated by a common self-interest, collaborate voluntarily, have 100 percent consensus, and are under no duress… while, in the second instance, not all the participants have their self-interests met, the “every- one- getting- together” part is coerced, consensus can be as low as 51% assuming some semblance of democracy, participants pay under duress, and how much they pay is decided by bureaucrats and politicians. Big, big difference.
Good observations. Theoretically, the bar can be as low as 50% + 1, which is an even lower bar for establishing a “consensus” than 51%. And with an ever increasing non-White population throughout the White world, we can be reasonably assured that non-Whites won’t hesitate to vote themselves health benefits for which Whites will be compelled to pick up the tab. Moreover, the whole system will be administered by virulent anti-Whites. The anti-Whites enforce racial quotas and preferences in every sphere of life that government touches; there is no reason to believe that healthcare delivery would be any different. If you or a family member needs a critical procedure, you will be shunted to the back of the line.
I will take my chances with what we have.
A real fascist would note that:
A. insurance is a racket.
B. The Practice of Medicine has been cartelized by criminal syndicates.
A real fascist would act accordingly.
Destroy existing medical associations and create new ones.
Increase the number of students in medical schools.
Build new hospitals, and encourage the construction of new hospitals by non-governmental organizations, even to the point of out-right forcing churches like the Roman Catholic one to spend their vast resources on the construction of new and improved facilities, as well forcing them to put their nuns and priests to work actually caring for the flock. Same for Protestants.
Increase dispensaries and clinics in blighted areas, for the purpose of treating non-whites, and also sterilizing them and providing abortions on demand.
Develop special programs to channel ex-military medical personale into new-medical technology programs, as these are the best practicioners available.
Destroy the insurance system, by increasing the number of clinics and medical personale to such an extent, that prices drop significantly.
This will force the naturally conservative medical world to keep pace with the rest of society’s advancements.
You can buy a laptop for $250 dollars. There is not reason why anyone should be billed thousands of dollars for a cat scan.
And, oh, increase the number of white male medical students, obviously by offering the neccessary incentives.
Why not have a look at how medical problems were handled a long time ago? The fact is, if you got a serious illness, you died of that illness and not the barbaric treatment. Now, the sickly have a billion dollars’ worth of medical infrastructure keeping them alive and vital enough to at least produce some even sicker children.
It’s not just an issue of socialist vs fascist vs free enterprise. Those are just methods of delivery. You touched on “lifestyle” and that was good, but it is not enough. It barely skirts the issue of why Amerika is so sick.
Good suggestions, Greg, although as I suspect you already know, too intelligent to ever actually be implemented under the auspices of our current system. As for your suggestion that people with drug or alcohol problems that impede their ability to live a productive life be forced to dry out, it’s a good one, although my youthful experience with addicts when I travelled in neo-hippie circles taught me that 99% of them will go out and start using again as soon as they are able. Perhaps the best solution would be to dry them out, along with a warning that if they end up in the same situation again, they will be executed for being a parasitical burden on society. But again, that idea would never fly in the U.S. as currently constituted.
Rather like drug addicts, however, I really think Rightist Americans will have to hit rock bottom before they will give up their love affair with capitalism. I really found it chilling when members of the audience at the Republican debates were cheering executions and the (theoretical) deaths of people who don’t have health care. (Not that I have anything against the death penalty per se, but certainly the state governments’ application of it tends to be highly arbitrary.) These people really believe that Jesus and capitalism are one and the same, and that both are leading them to the Promised Land. It’s this sort of delusion that keeps the ranks of White nationalism thin while the majority waste their time and energy worrying about tax hikes and whether or not a few Muslim cab drivers in Kansas City be allowed to have foot baths. Meanwhile, their end is being openly prepared by those whom they support. Madness.
Some Christian conservatives seem to think that Mammon is part of the Holy Trinity. They can worship God and Mammon at the same time with a clear conscience and an empty mind.
On a more serious note, Robert H. Nelson’s Reaching for Heaven on Earth: The Theological Meaning of Economics (Savage, MD: Rowman and Littlefield, 1991) might be worth looking at concerning economics as a secularization of theological thought, a topic addressed by the Nouvelle Droite. Nelson appears to be sympathetic to separatism, judging from the following quotations from his work:
“The right of free secession might . . . supersede economic principles of free trade, and other past freedoms in providing a founding principle for a postmodern economic order.”
“Political disagreements among groups in a diverse nation erode the moral capital and sense of community needed to make government work well. . . . A world of free secession would provide the alternative of dividing into smaller and more homogeneous sovereign entities where there is much greater internal agreement on social goals.”
In the UK we have socialised medicine through the NHS, which results in high taxes, waiting lists and dirty hospitals where patients die from superbugs.
Still its certainly preferable to the American model which seems entirely regulated for the benefit of corporate healthcare cartels and the improvident.
In healthcare as in most things demography is destiny, long term care for the eldery is expensive and requires manpower yet our birth rate is so low our people are not even replacing ourselves which means crippling taxation for the young.
I would love to understand the Anglo-Saxon cultural disease that makes socialized medicine in the UK and Canada, and bureaucracy in the US, so inefficient–whereas in racially similar Scandinavian countries, things seem to be much better.
@ Greg
“Yes, there would be charity hospitals for the indigent in such a society, as long as some people did not completely embrace the libertarian ethic of selfishness.”
Selfishness, in the pejorative sense, could be an outcome for certain individuals in a libertarian society, as it can in any political system. But it is inaccurate to say that selfishness is an “ethic” of libertarianism.
It is true that libertarianism seeks to protect the individual from being forced or intimidated by other, more powerful individuals, or groups of individuals, to act against his own best interests. To me this seems sane and just. Equally important, however, is that libertarian ethics also forbid conduct that we could call ” selfish”: the use of force or fraud to impose upon others responsibility for the consequences of one’s own actions.
Libertarian thought does not hold itself forth as a spiritual philosophy, and correctly endeavors not to interject itself in matters of altruism, other than to protect freedom of choice. As such it remains silent on the question of charity, defined as love freely and voluntarily expressed through generosity. But so does fascism, which concerns itself instead with mandatory taking of private property and its redistribution in measure and to recipients chosen by those in power.
Since private property rights, along with racial and ethnic homogeneity, is one of the most critical preconditions to prosperity, and since prosperous people are usually the most generous, libertarian ethics, I would argue, enable, rather than hinder, charitable outcomes.
Take a look at Ayn Rand’s The Virtue of Selfishness.
This is an excellent article, my thoughts exactly! I will be referring people to this article from now on instead of repeating myself 100 different ways in less detail. After all, I would rarely write something of this length to explain my opinions on healthcare for one person.
Thanks Greg, that is why I wrote it!
You certainly have to be congratulated for tackling a difficult subject and an emotionally laden one at that. In the here and now I would certainly encourage people to use socialized medicine for we are paying for it anyway. Depending on the area in which one lives and the services available, one might then want to have private insurance as an alternative.
My head spins when I think of all the medical advances since WW2 and what will be up for discussion if there is ever a regime change. Where do we draw the line in resuscitating people, are transplants to be allowed to continue, blood transfusions, the endless resources thrown into saving otherwise doomed babies and at the other end the seemingly artificially prolonged life of our elders. It is certainly a brave new world. I only wish that healthy people and high IQ people would have more children to counterbalance the other end. Perhaps society is going to be grateful for all these new “superbugs” and the fact that pneumonia will again soon be the old man’s friend. As I said, a difficult subject.
Your comment raises an issue addressed by Garrett Hardin and William Ophuls, namely that of “heroic medicine.” In Requiem for Modern Politics (Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 1997), Ophuls writes (pp. 165-166):
“[M]edical resources are increasingly devoted to ends that bring little real gains to society and that are sometimes disdvantageous to the patients themselves. For example, more than half of our medical budget is dedicated to postponing the inevitable by a few months for the moribund old — which in too many cases means extending their agony, not their enjoyment of life. (To be specific, according to public health researcher Patrizia DiLucchio, ‘two-thirds of all Medicare expenditures . . . occur in the last year of life, and half of that amount occurs in the last month of life.’) We also spend heavily to save the lives of a few premature or diseased infants who are likely to constitute a continuing financial and social burden, both to their families and to the general public. (DiLucchio again: ‘It is not unusual to end up spending $500,000 to “save” a child who will turn out to be completely dysfunctional and end up surviving only a few years.’)
“So medical resources are largely consumed by heroic interventions at the two extremes of the life span, interventions that often do more harm than good. At the same time, the cost of treating the medical aftermath of social failure — crime, drugs, sexual promiscuity, and so on — is also high and growing rapidly. This is not to deny or denigrate the blessings that many individuals in all the above categories have received from modern scientific medicine; but these vast expenditures do little to improve the overall health of the population. What is worse, no money is left over to pay for programs that bring great social and individual benefit at relatively low cost — for example, prenatal care and early childhood immunization. . . .
“Medicine therefore illustrates with stark clarity the nature of the developmental life cycle: exuberant growth and big gains at the beginning, diminishing returns and an inexorable rise in costs at the end. Hence, as medical science continues to make further strides, finding ever more high-tech and expensive ways of staving off death at both ends of the life span, the escalation of costs threatens us with bankruptcy.
“Better management alone will not control medical costs. Because it is technology that drives costs higher, it will take a social decision to forgo some of the miracles of medical science. But no one wants to bell the medical cat, for that would require us to make excruciating trade-offs between the end of saving individual human lives and the available social and financial means. . . .
“In any event, the futility of seeking to conquer natural limits with technology is pitilessly revealed. Not only have we no prospect whatsoever of completely eliminating both heart disease and cancer, but if we were to do so (at what price?) it would lengthen our days by no more than a few years (at what quality of life?).”
The figures for Medicare expenditures mentioned by Ophuls are shocking. I would like to check them, as the article cited — DiLucchio’s “The Trouble with Health Care,” Whole Earth Review, Fall 1993 — is dated and it was not published in a scholarly journal. If they are true, it seems surprising that they could effectively be secret, but taboos can be very powerful. It may be regarded as improper and imprudent to discuss such things. One risks being accused of wanting to callously bump off old people or arrogantly play God by exercising control over life and death. But there are real problems here that should be faced with intelligence rather than sentimentality.
Extending life is one thing, postponing death is another thing. I would suggest that who try to postpone natural and inevitable deaths through heroic medicine are the ones trying to play God.
Hardin’s Promethean Ethics might merit an article at Counter-Currents. It’s a short collection of lectures on triage, competition, and population control. Hardin was an acute critic of the sloppy thinking, superstitions, and taboos that govern contemporary thinking on many issues.
It’s a tragedy that Georges Vacher de Lapouge never wrote the book on biological ethics that he proposed to write after L’Aryen, son rôle social (Paris: Albert Fointemoing, 1899). That could have been a truly revolutionary work. His proposal to replace the French republican motto of “Liberty, Equality, Fraternity” with “Determinism, Inequality, Selection” was certainly a provocative one.
Ophuls: “What is worse, no money is left over to pay for programs that bring great social and individual benefit at relatively low cost — for example, prenatal care and early childhood immunization. . . .”
Vaccination is not immunization. The endless vaccinations (poisons) injected into tiny bodies is one cause of the serious weakening of our species. I would urge everyone reading this to look into the matter.
Fascism started in Mussolini’s Italy, then became Corporatism. All the industrial countries are variations of Corporatism. Socialism + Markets + Statism = Fascism. We have it now.
The common claim that we have “capitalism” now is marxist, as they blame everything on capitalism. Capitalism means State out of economy, which means special interests out of the economy. Business utterly hates capitalism, as it gets its way through legislation. Yes, you read that right- BUSINESS HATES CAPITALISM.
It might be worth looking at the proposals of Kevin A. Carson and John C. Médaille concerning health care reform. Carson addresses these things briefly in his book Organization Theory: A Libertarian Perspective and at length in his paper “The Healthcare Crisis: A Crisis of Artificial Scarcity.” Médaille addresses these things in his book Toward a Truly Free Market, which I have heard Médaille discuss in an interview, but have yet to read. As Carson notes:
“A central problem of all the healthcare reform proposals circulating in Congress is that they focus almost entirely on finance — giving the uninsured the wherewithal to buy insurance and otherwise increasing insurance coverage to pay for healthcare — without addressing the cost of healthcare itself. But if healthcare itself were cheap, much of the debate on finance and insurance would be moot.”
Carson addresses why healthcare in the U.S. is so expensive. One reason is the cartelization of medicine:
“Professional licensing regimes, in practical effect, are cartels, outlawing competition between multiple tiers of service based on the consumer’s preference and resources. The licensing cartels outlaw one of the most potent weapons against monopoly: product substitution. Much of what an MD does doesn’t actually require an MD’s level of training. But to get any kind of treatment, no matter how simple and straightforward, you cannot simply pay a price that reflects the amortization cost of the level of training it actually requires to perform the service you need. You must pay the amortization cost of an entire medical school curriculum and residency.”
Another reason is that premium medicine has supplanted empirical treatment:
“Arnold Kling observes that medical conditions which, thirty years ago, would have been treated ’empirically’ at low cost, now routinely rely on expensive CAT scans and MRIs. He mentions the case of a patient with an eye inflammation. Thirty years ago the low-cost empirical treatment would have been to send her home, in the absence of a firm diagnosis, with antibiotics and prednisone and see if that took care of it. Thanks to modern technology, she was put through a battery of inconclusive tests, then given a series of CAT scans (also inconclusive) — and finally sent home, in the absence of a firm diagnosis, with antibiotics and prednisone. . . .
“What Kling calls ‘premium medicine’ has completely crowded out empirical treatment, and become the routine practice for everyone — even though it benefits only a very tiny minority of patients who would not have responded to empirical treatment. For example, everyone with a severe cough is likely to be subjected to a chest X-ray, despite the fact that 998 out of a thousand likely have a bronchial infection that will respond to simple treatment with antibiotics.”
Cartelization and premium medicine has nothing to do with protecting consumers and everything to do with increasing profits.
As Carson notes: “It’s quite likely that the tens of millions of uninsured would love to have access to a policy that covered the low-cost, empirical options, provided at cost; but to return to our ‘food insurance’ analogy, the system skews delivery of service so that only T-bones are available, even for those who can afford only hamburger.” Consumers are thus overcharged or driven out of the market for basic medical care.
I think there is merit in Carson’s proposal that there should be “competition between multiple tiers of service based on the consumer’s preference and resources.”
Every member of the nation should have access to basic medical care.
Some people might think it strange and inconsistent that I can praise fascism in a previous comment, then favourably cite the work of an anarchist such as Carson in this comment. I have precedents for this and I see no inconsistency in doing this.
By way of precedent, I will note that Benito Mussolini at one time translated writings by the anarchist Peter Kropotkin, and that some fascists were interested in distributism, which is quasi-anarchist in that it envisages a society of self-governing producers. Indeed, I believe that Hilaire Belloc’s An Essay on the Restoration of Property was first published serially in the American Review, whose editor had fascist sympathies.
Like Guillaume Faye, I advocate a strong but limited state. The contemporary state often usurps functions that properly belong to other bodies and neglects the functions that properly belong to it. It is a bureaucratic rather than a sovereign entity. It meddles in everything but does not do its own work.
I could say that I’m authoritarian in some respects and libertarian in other respects. Authority and liberty should not be regarded as absolutes, as mutually exclusive, as homogeneous, as monolithic. Authority and liberty should be understood in pluralistic and particularist terms. Different bodies should have different authorities and liberties. To each its own.
There is no reason why a fascist government cannot use market forces to serve socially beneficial ends.
These are very helpful comments.
I agree that an essentially fascist society can and should use the market when and where it is efficient.
When it comes to economics, there are no absolutes: we are not absolutely for or against private property, markets, etc. We are for these things on the condition that they serve the public good. We oppose them when they fail to serve the public good.
It should be noted however that the way free market works creates those cartels: big pharmaceutical companies often offer seminars to doctors on how to cure a specific disease in order to promote their own treatment. Some doctors are even “bribed” so that they’ll advice their patients to go for an expensive treatment whereas natural medicine could cure the disease they suffer from. I’m pretty sure that traditional medicine can cure most of the “classic” diseases. As for “modern” diseases (AIDS, cancers, etc.), our modern lifestyle should be questioned: air pollution (everyone knows that you don’t breath the same air in big cities as in the countryside), chemically-purified water, “sexual wandering”, etc. were unimaginable to the Ancient. This is also true for mental illnesses: isolation individuals suffer from in cities may play a role in paranoia, schizophrenia, etc.
The comments I made above were meant to be more suggestive than definitive. Healthcare is a very large, complex, and controversial area.
Kevin Carson plausibly argues that it is state capitalism rather than the free market that creates such cartels. If the tendency of state capitalism is to favor monopoly or oligopoly, the tendency of the free market is to oppose such things. Big businesses are often subject to diseconomies of scale that make them less efficient and adaptable than smaller businesses, and they often owe their success to anti-competitive measures enacted with the aid of the state. Carson addresses these things in Organization Theory: A Libertarian Perspective.
Cartels are created by government regulation. The American economy was cartelized during the New Deal, by the jew CEO of GE, Gerard Swope. The FDA was created by the drug companies.
One may read about the “Swope Plan” here:
Appendix A The Swope Plan
1. All industrial and commercial companies (including subsidiaries) with 50 or more employees, and doing an interstate business, may form a trade association which shall be under the supervision of a federal body referred to later.
2. These trade associations may outline trade practices, business ethics, methods of standard accounting and cost practice, standard forms of balance sheet and earnings statement, etc., and may collect and distribute information on volume of business transacted, inventories of merchandise on hand, simplification and standardization of products, stabilization of prices, and all matters which may arise from time to time relating to the growth and development of industry and commerce in order to promote stabilization of employment and give the best service to the public. Much of this sort of exchange of information and data is already being carried on by trade associations now in existence. A great deal more valuable work of this character is possible.
3. The public interest [jewish/corporate interest] shall be protected by the supervision of companies and trade associations by the Federal Trade Commission or by a bureau of the Department of Commerce or by some federal supervisory body specially constituted.
http://www.reformation.org/wall-st-fdr-app-a.html
Cartels fall apart without Soprano or government to twist some arms. They need force to work.
The Swope plan led to the “big three” auto makers cartel.
Apparently Preston Tucker was not covered by the Swope plan.
Great post Greg.
I’m UK based so it’s always fascinating to see how the worlds largest super power deals with such a critical part of society. I believe the UK will slowly move to a more US like model in time. I love the NHS and I truly believe it is a national treasure but without more funding its just going to force people to lose faith in it and go private.
Amazing read. Please keep the good work.
Best regards,
Alex
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