250 years of America's socialism

Ralph Nader - On September 18, the U.S. Chamber of Commerce announced it is launching a six-week, 20-state “Free Enterprise Express Bus” tour to back Republican candidates and “fight for free enterprise.” This big business lobby ignores the fact that, just like “capitalism,” American “democratic socialism” (supported by the voters for generations) is everywhere in our mixed-economy country.

 Here is an incomplete list of public goods, services, benefits, and institutions that Democratic candidates can invoke in asking their GOP opponents: “Which one of the following will you tell voters you want to get rid of?”

•  Public Lands – Parks and National Forests
• Public Schools and Universities
• Public Transit
• U.S. Postal Service
• Public Drinking Water Departments
• Public Electric Utilities
• Public Fire Departments
• Public Libraries
• Public Roads and Highways
• VA hospitals
• Mandatory Minimum Wages
• SNAP Food Stamps
• Unemployment Compensation Payments
• Social Security
• Medicare
• Medicaid
• Head Start
• Peace Corps and AmeriCorps
• Meals on Wheels
• Tennessee Valley Authority (TVA)

The list can go on. During the Vietnam War, the Pentagon begged the big drug companies to work on anti-malaria medicines. Malaria was the second leading cause of hospitalization for U.S. soldiers in that undeclared war. Big Pharma refused, saying there was too little profit in one-time anti-malarial shots, compared with medicines soldiers were taking every day. So, the Pentagon chose socialism, setting up its own drug development entity in its two military hospitals. Pentagon scientists and doctors developed three of the four anti-malaria drugs in use and offered them to any country for use, without imposing patent monopolies.

Probably one of the nation’s earliest and foremost mixed-economy-minded civic founders was Ben Franklin. A successful businessman, he also knew the meaning of the phrase later coined by Amory Lovins: “Markets make a good servant, a bad master, and a worse religion.” Societies have many necessities that markets—meaning private companies—don’t supply when immediate profits are insufficient. Franklin helped create institutions to meet some of those needs: Philadelphia’s subscription Library Company, the volunteer Union Fire Company, and the Academy and College of Philadelphia, a precursor to the University of Pennsylvania. He also played an important role in colonial postal administration. These were not all government-operated public agencies, but they were civic institutions intended to serve broad public purposes.

Public works were crucial in enabling private business enterprises to flourish. Consider the Erie Canal, which opened in 1825 and linked the Hudson River at Albany to Lake Erie at Buffalo. It created a navigable commercial route between the Atlantic economy and the Great Lakes interior, reducing transportation costs and accelerating settlement and trade. The growth of the nation-building national post office is an example of a spectacular universal “democratic socialistic” public institution. 

When these and other socialistic enterprises generated consumer or worker demand, private corporate usurpers moved to undermine them, seize a piece of this governmental success and their publicly created value, rip them off as vendors, or persistently disparage these services to get the public to lose confidence in them. This corporate propaganda never stops. MORE