by Ralph Nader
One other problem is that the deep and reckless pushing further of the frontiers of immunities for the corporate power structure does not occur within any recognized legal or ethical frameworks around which public dialogue and electoral contests can engage. This is in marked contrast to what was available at the time of the decentralists, whose moral vision of the good life and startling ability to go beyond economics and doctrinaire ideologies put such corporate skullduggery in perspective. This fully justifies our giving their views a closer look in the historical contexts of their and our time. Certainly their view of localism, small business, and cooperative-style ownership is still resonant and is being put into practice by the current spread of community economies, as noted earlier, facilitating wide new possibilities by harnessing locally many recalled and modern technologies. These modes of life reject the “servility, and regimentation, [and] degradation of human values,” in the words of Professor Shapiro’s foreword to Who Owns America?.27 But they need the expanded public consciousness that would give them greater diffusion.
To those who would say that it’s always been that way, corporate criminals have always gotten away with it, the historical reply is “not quite.” Many high Wall Street operators went to jail after the October 1929 stock market crash. The president of the New York Stock Exchange, patrician Richard Whitney, went up the Hudson to Sing Sing Prison; photographs of him in handcuffs were printed on page 1 of the country’s newspapers. President Franklin D. Roosevelt denounced these reckless bankers and speculators as the “enemies of peace,” and he named strong regulators to the new federal law enforcement agencies.
Yet now the latest gang of Wall Street miscreants walk free. I have seen neither studies nor any explanation that would suggest how to reverse the frustrated public acceptance of this fact, other than putting pressure on Congress and the White House. Notwithstanding C-SPAN, twenty-four-hour cable news, finger-tip Internet, and access to the blogs and websites of dissidents and rebels, the anomie of the populace taken together just deepens. From somewhere we need a spark to action leading to a surge of civic determination to activate our constitutional authorities and assert our sovereignty. The people’s sense of injustice is widespread enough to warrant some optimism.
The Forward Legacy of Who Owns America?
Not surprisingly, when Who Owns America? came out on April 28, 1936—a presidential election year—it did not have much influence on contemporary politics. All over, schools of thought, political practices, and public earnestness were concentrating on relief, not basic reform. But concrete, principled ideas matter, and they can lie fallow for years before the times afford the proper soil for their seeds to sprout.
There were reviews of Who Owns America? in major newspapers and magazines that pointed to the decentralists and agrarians as impractical utopians, out of touch with the inevitability of Big Business, big industry, and these entities’ own possible discipliner—the federal government. After all, at the time the people had a president whose fireside radio speeches satisfied many Americans who needed a perceived champion against concentrated power. An FDR sample: “I should like to have it said of my Administration that in it the forces of selfishness and of lust for power met their match. I should like to have it said of my second Administration that in it these forces met their master.”28 But Professor Shapiro does quote one notable commentary by the publisher of the American Review, Seward Collins, who called Who Owns America? “the most significant book produced by the depression. It contains more sanity and penetration, more sense of American realities and American history, more grasp of economic fundamentals, more enlightened moral passion, more insight into what is happening and . . . into what will happen than the whole monstrous spate of depression books put together.”29
Today we live in a polity possessed of shrunken perspectives, where elective offices are political sinecures, with the occupants serving corporate bosses. Almost all the politicians are for sale—with few enough successful exceptions to point to as the preferable, contrasting alternative of politicians actually concerned with the good of the people. The 24/7 distractions of Internet and video inundations have given birth to a new generation of aliterates with alarmingly shortened attention spans.30 Worse by the year, historically deprived youngsters are split off from their own communities and neighborhoods, with which they scarcely interact, preferring to be glued to, even addicted to, watching screens hour after hour, sitting entranced while clutching their iPhones in their hands. Yet, even in this state, some young people are still reading. Let’s hope they get their hands on books such as the one I have scrutinized in this chapter.
Who Owns America? is the question for our times, immersed in expanding urgencies that cry out, “Take heed, take heed, or pay the price!”
8
Common Ground for Common and Uncommon Causes, Found in the Thoughts of Much-Cited but Little-Read Conservative Icons
The previous chapter, as well as my earlier remarks on the unorthodox thoughts of various much-cited but seldom-read icons of conservatism, has shown us that by shattering images and avoiding cherry-picking, progressive readers of conservative/libertarian literature will come to the conclusion that, program by program, there is plenty of room for LCs to converge and work together on system-altering actions.
One by one, the titans of the Right demonstrate that their principles are not frozen against the tides of realities and their own human values. A few more remarks on the flexibility of these icons might be apropos here. Friedrich Hayek wrote that the state should assure a base income to all the poor under its jurisdiction. The Austrian economist also declared the need for “a legal system designed both to preserve competition and to make it operate as beneficially as possible.”1 Carl T. Bogus, a biographer of William F. Buckley Jr., wrote that Hayek “advocated regulatory mechanisms to prevent fraud, deception, and monopolies, and said there was a strong case for government providing ‘some minimum of food, shelter, and clothing, sufficient to preserve health and capacity to work,’ and organizing a comprehensive system of social insurance for sickness and accidents. Nevertheless, the principal theme of his work tied together freedom, democracy, and capitalism.”2 All were tied together to oppose socialism. Adam Smith noted “the interest of the producer ought to be attended to only so far as it may be necessary for promoting that of the consumer.”3
That is a lot of common ground shared with progressives, visible once the selective references to Hayek’s work by today’s Paul Ryans are cast aside. As economist Peter Boettke of George Mason University and editor of the Review of Austrian Economics has said: “What Hayek has become, to a lot of people, is an iconic figure representing something that he didn’t believe at all.”4 What Hayek intensely opposed was government planning of the economy and its inherent complexity, corporate subsidies, chronic deficit spending, government housing programs, and any state initiative that is not applicable to all the citizenry. Illustratively, he opposed Medicare and Medicaid unless they were applicable to all citizens.
Neither Russell Kirk, who referred to the grasping super-rich as “a host of squalid oligarchs,”5 nor Henry Calvert Simons, one of the founders of the conservative Chicago School of Economics, and a major mentor of Milton Friedman, had any illusions about who was running the economy.
Here are Simons’s prescriptions, written in the Depression (1934) as an essay, “A Positive Program for Laissez Faire,” to bring private enterprise to its potential:
Eliminate all forms of monopolistic market power, to include the breakup of large oligopolistic corporations and application of anti-trust laws to labor unions. A Federal incorporation law could be used to limit corporation size and where technology required giant firms for reasons of low cost production, the Federal government should own and operate them. . . . Promote economic stability by reform of the monetary system and establishment of stable rules for monetary policy. . . . Reform the tax system and promote equity through income tax. . . . Abolish all tariffs. . . . L
imit waste by restricting advertising and other wasteful merchandising practices.6
Compare the economic stands of Simons with those of his cruel corporatist successors at the Chicago school, who would not consider moving against even the financial conglomerates that brought down the economy in 2008–2009 and that now, in 2014, are even more concentrated and “too big to fail.”
Milton Friedman and Richard Nixon both supported a “negative income tax” that led to an earned income tax credit for poor people with children. In a debate I had with Milton Friedman, he reluctantly admitted that government regulation—and was he ever against just about every government regulation from tariffs to licensing of doctors to car safety—had to be applied to pollution. Even the biggest conservative icon of them all, Adam Smith, was big on public works. Smith also “maintained that a chief goal of taxation should be ‘to remedy inequality of riches as much as possible by relieving the poor and burdening the rich.’”7
But let’s move from thinkers to doers and examine some of the flexibility found in conservative politicians of the past. Senator Robert Taft was the towering Mr. Conservative in Washington after World War II. His father was William Howard Taft, president of the United States and later chief justice of the Supreme Court. As president, William Howard Taft supported the Sixteenth Amendment authorizing the income tax, went after big monopolies with many antitrust prosecutions, and backed regulation of railroad rates. His conservative standard-bearer son was even more surprising. While Senator Taft had been a supporter of Herbert Hoover and opposed Roosevelt’s New Deal’s “socialistic experiments without paying for them,” he was anything but a clenched-jaw ideologue.8 Remarkably, the Senator favored taxing investment income before taxing income on labor. As Bogus relates: “In the early days of the New Deal, he favored price controls for oil and coal, some forms of debtor relief, and spending $3 billion (‘but no more’ for public works programs). He supported old-age pensions, increasing payments for the health of mothers and children, and some unemployment insurance under Social Security, but he did not want to extend coverage too far.”9 Believing that the free enterprise system “has certain definite limits,” he accorded the state a role in reducing poverty. In Taft’s words, the federal government should “put a floor under essential things to give all a minimum standard of living, and all children an opportunity to get a start in life.”10
Raising the eyebrows, if not ire, of some of his fellow conservatives, Senator Taft voted for FHA loans to home purchasers and for constructing public housing for the poor. After a visit in 1943 to Puerto Rico, where he witnessed grievous poverty, he became a strong champion of federal aid to education. Accused of being socialistic by his hidebound, right-wing peers, Taft showed his pragmatism by retorting: “Education is socialistic anyhow, and has been for 150 years.”11
Here are some other statements and stances adopted by Taft in a time when they were not conventional positions.
As to racist attitudes, he stated, “I see no reason to think that inequality of intellect or ability is based on racial origin,”12 and he opposed poll taxes and discrimination against African Americans. In 1942, going against such liberals as FDR and California governor Earl Warren, he was the only lawmaker in Congress to question the internment of Japanese Americans after Pearl Harbor.
The notorious anti-union Taft-Hartley law of 1947 bore his name and active advocacy, though he believed in the workers’ right to collective bargaining and to strike. He even blocked President Truman’s outrageous but then-popular demand that Congress enact legislation allowing him to draft strikers who he believed jeopardized the national welfare. Taft believed the 1947 law would create a better balance between labor and management. Two years later, he saw the opposite had happened—that the law heavily favored management—and he wanted to amend it accordingly to achieve the hoped-for balance. The unions wanted total repeal, and they ended up with nothing. Sixty-seven years later, Taft-Hartley has stayed unchanged.
On foreign and military policy, he presciently warned against our nation becoming “a garrison state,” being imperialistic, and spending too much on military budgets and non–disaster-related foreign aid. He did not believe that the Soviet Union wanted war with the United States or with Western Europe. For this he was labeled an “isolationist.”
Compared to his relatively nonbelligerent views against Western European defense involvement, Taft was a hawk in Asia, opposing Communist China, calling for an escalation of the war in Korea, and supporting Chiang Kai-shek and Formosa. Generally, however, he was an exponent of using reason and reality to guide political philosophy, in strong contrast to today’s Republican “nattering nabobs of negativism” (using Spiro Agnew’s words in a new context), who blockade the Senate and House of Representatives.
It was President Richard Nixon who recognized Communist China, made arms control agreements with the Soviet Union, proposed a national health insurance scheme that was better than Clinton’s, wanted a drug policy emphasizing rehabilitation over incarceration, got rid of the gold standard, and, apostasy itself, instituted wage and price controls to restrain inflation. All these and other signed enactments by Nixon of new regulatory agencies outraged William F. Buckley and William A. Rusher of the National Review.
This accounting, which has detailed some of the eminently sensible and progressive attitudes of many famed conservatives, both thinkers and politicians, could be extended, but enough has been said to indicate that any progressive who seriously delves into conservative thought will find much common ground, on which can be built LC convergences.
9
What of the Liberals? And Populist Conservatives?
Liberals’ Shibboleths and Weaknesses
What of the liberal/progressive intellectual tradition over the past century or so? That is, after the period when “classical liberalism” became so accepted, even thinkers viewed as conservatives would adhere to its stance on individual and religious freedoms, private property protection, civil rights, curbs on arbitrary government, and the rule of law.
If we go beyond the eighteenth- and nineteenth-century “classical liberalism,” in which conservatives also find their roots, we see the Left does not possess the kind of revered champions, delineating norms and guarding its frameworks of thought, as found among conservatives and libertarians. Political economist Jeff Faux, founder of the Economic Policy Institute in Washington, DC, believes that Henry George, Harold Laski, Eugene Debs, and the institutionalists like John R. Commons and Thorstein Veblen, filled the role of liberal sages in their day. But starting with the age of FDR, much of the Left became very practical, eschewing the grand philosophies that could be equated with the persecuted adherents of domestic socialism or communism—a fear of being equated with these “isms” whose characterizations were defined by the prominent accusatory career of Senator Joseph McCarthy. For himself, FDR was content with telling American workers to join unions.
Consumer and later environmental advocates were stiffly empirical, evidence- and exposé-oriented, avoiding more sweeping ideologies. The New Left in the sixties, Faux says, had very little connection with the past, sometimes even ridiculing its elders and the intellectual output from the Great Depression. The New Left was going for a cultural revolution, expanding individual rights and behaviors, eschewing wars with the cry “Hell no, we won’t go” or “Make love, not war,” while showing little interest in establishing institutions to carry forward. There was, Faux, says “a lack of seriousness in ideas.”1
Liberals have been mostly programmatic—a mode of operation that connects with reality. Ask them what they espouse, and you’ll see. But the energy behind this pragmatic attitude begins to dry up without the nourishment of a larger philosophic or general vision. So it has come to pass that liberals and, to a lesser extent, progressives must own up to their own shibboleths and weaknesses if convergence is to widen beyond the easy areas of agreement.
Over the years, many outspoken liberals/progressives were not a
s attuned to communist despotism—its end purposes were said to be fairer—as they were to fascist despotism. This began to change with the Soviet invasion of Hungary in 1956 to put down popular resistance to the domestic communist government. Moreover, they turned away from facing up to union leaders’ corruption even as they excoriated corporate corruption. They overlooked serious and violent corruption at the top of the United Mine Workers in the last years of the sixties and later in the Teamsters, which joined with trucking companies to force drivers to run unsafe rigs. Some of us criticized repression of the rank-and-file workers by union officials when it came to union governance and worker rights. None of these criticisms, which would have strengthened unions, were received with much enthusiasm by liberal politicians and writers, who, allied with unions on other important issues, felt constrained to look the other way.
Liberals/progressives have also feared that any criticisms of social welfare programs would jeopardize their existence or their needed budgets. So they would overlook the waste and unintended consequences of bureaucratized dispensing agencies. Coming late to this problem set up the Clinton-era mischief called “workfare,” administered by the likes of Lockheed Martin and intended to get aid recipients to take jobs for unlivable wages, assuming the cut-loose welfare mothers could get them in the first place. All this emphasis on welfare abuse also distracted politicians from addressing the burgeoning corporate welfare extravaganzas draining far more of the taxpayers’ dollars than do poverty welfare payments. Not confronting the hard edges of these poverty programs also allowed the avowed terminators of such programs to daunt or co-opt more reasonable conservatives in the tradition of Senator Robert Taft, conservatives who could have pushed reform efforts that shed the negatives and strengthened the positives of these compassionate programs for the sick, maimed, impoverished, or unlucky people of all ages in our country.
