Freedom Versus Monopoly

Benjamin C. Marsh

[Reprinted from Land and Freedom, September-October 1940]

At the time of this writing, Benjamin C. Marsh served as Executive Secretary of the People's Lobby, Washington, D. C. Reprinted from Land and Freedom, September-October 1940 A time of stress always brings the failures of an economic system to the fore. A decade ago America entered such a period of stress the culmination of three-quarters of a century of looting and special privilege.

During the past decade America has been treated to the interesting, but withal disgusting, spectacle of so-called intelligent governments beating the tom-toms, and of braintrust indulging in economic hair-pulling, to revive prosperity without ending the conditions which make prosperity for all the people impossible. It should have been an education.

Hitler has been accused of creating world chaos. He is an absolute dictator, but not powerful enough to do that. He capitalized on the world chaos due to the dictatorship of special privileges and monopolies. He seized the opportunity presented by the general corruption due to this monopoly control.

Pre-Hitler Germany put through a land increment tax, and controlled the use of land, particularly through her city planning, as no other nation had done. But she failed to face the necessity for ending land monopoly and other monopolies. And then post-Versailles rancor and rivalry with Britain's imperialism, enabled Hitler's genius to harness the tremendous mechanical and administrative capacities of the German people into a drive to equal or surpass British control in the world.

The invasion of Poland by Germany last September started at another time of stress in America. We are not prepared to meet it, for the simple reason that neither peace stress nor war stress can be met by the United States, with private monopoly of land, and other private monopolies [unreadable]

A recent issue of the United States News outlines the respective four great economic Empires: the American, taking in all the Western Hemisphere, out to Hawaii and including Greenland; the Russian, including her present territory and Turkey; the German, including the Scandinavian countries and the rest of Europe, and all of Africa to the Union of South Africa; and the Japanese, taking in part of China, the Philippines, French Indo-China, and the Dutch East Indies. Britain and Australia with the Union of South Africa, and a few Islands, seem to be destined for a smaller geographical control, but Threadneedle Street and British finance would doubtlessly play a large part in determining world affairs and internal policies of the four great economic Empires of the world of tomorrow. Approximately this distribution is made by Mr. Lawrence Dennis in his recent book, The Dynamics of War and Revolution.

Over a year and a half ago, the present writer wrote an article entitled, "Americans Must Win War on Poverty Or Be Kidded Into Foreign Wars" which was read into the Congressional Record by Senator Frazier, and some quarter of a million reprints sent into every State of the Union. That forecast threatens today.

With an intelligent economic system, with an economy of freedom, the United States would not need an economic Empire. But under our present system, with two per cent of our people owning about three-fifths of the national wealth, and two and one-half per cent of our families getting about $5 billions of property income, plus nearly $4 billions of earned income in all over an eighth of the national income and with 18,000,000 of our population a "surplus" (as far as the present economic system is concerned), America most desperately needs an imperialistic policy for two reasons : to pay part of the overhead of our top-heavy system, and to help keep the people's minds off what has happened to them.

The writer did not need to prove the charge he made nearly two years ago, that Roosevelt needed a Franco victory, so he could wave the bogey of Hitler and Mussolini over Central and South America before the American people and make them forget what was happening to them. If Willkie is elected, this bogey will be just as helpful to him.

An army of 9,000,000 employables unemployed, and an army of one and a half million surplus farm families (under our economic system) opens the door to conscription of men and may keep a large standing army busy subduing domestic commotions. Of course, if two or three million of these unemployed are conscripted into the army, they will reduce the pressure for jobs.

The President's suggestion that it is the patriotic duty of students to attend to their studies, and not volunteer for the army, shows his knowledge that there is little danger that they will be taught anything opposed to the economic status quo.

America probably has less than three years, and almost certainly less than five years in which to make the essential changes in America peacefully. Failure to do that will probably result in America's having a hard-boiled dictator with a heart for the special privileges.

For seven and a half years, America has gone on the theory of raising the standard of living by curtailing the production of the essentials to raise that standard of living, through subsidy out of the Federal Treasury. We have spent over $62 billions, about half of it borrowed, to buy off a revolution, and to prime the pump for private ownership. Some 20,000 people get approximately one third of all dividends paid, amounting to about twelve and a quarter billion dollars for the three years '37, '38, and '39.

We are heading into a World War with the same semi-criminal privilege classes in control as were in control under Presidents Harding, Coolidge and Hoover, though none of those three had President Roosevelt's gift of bamboozling the American people. Apparently, only a British defeat, or scare over South America created in the hearts of millions of Americans, can re-elect the present occupant of the White House, who has done infinitely more for monopolists and the special privilege classes than any predecessor, though he has handed out more slops and sops to the disinherited than any other of his less astute predecessors in Washington.

Every reactionary interest in America, clerical, financial, pseudo-educational and landed, favors the conscription of men for an army, including an industrial army. They first tried to get them at $5.00 a month, throwing in religious services, though they have raised the ante, under severe pressure, to $30.00.

The Congress of the United States favors more consumption taxes to pay for the billions of dollars allegedly for defense and, as the writer told the House Committee on Ways and Means, the defense tax bill should be called a bill to "give free plants to profiteers, and protect them from taxes".

The big financial and industrial interests of America, whose products are needed for defense, are on a sit-down strike. This is so serious that the President of the American Farm Bureau Federation, a highly conservative organization largely dominated by Southern planters, told the House Ways and Means Committee: "The American people will not tolerate, at a time of such grave emergency, any group, in effect, pointing a pistol at the government and saying they will not produce guns or airplanes or other supplies needed for national defense in this hour of grave emergency unless they are given this guarantee or that guarantee and unless the restrictions are kept off their profits."

Readers may think I have painted a rather dark picture. I hope events may prove me wrong, but 1 doubt it.

No essential economic changes have been made yet in any major nation, except through totalitarian methods. America has gone a long way toward that goal in the efforts of the Old Deal and the New Deal, to maintain special privileges. America has a chance to do the essential things by democratic procedure, but they cannot be postponed for any term of years. It is not Hitler at our gates which menaces America; it is the big and little Hitlers of special privilege in America who constitute the real danger to our country. Running away from depression at home to disaster abroad, is not the American way.