Dit boek is een verzameling van allerlei artikelen en essay's geschreven door Murray Rothard over wat in de Verenigde Staten bekend staat als "the progressive era" (grosso modo de periode tussen 1900 en 1920), maar dat label lijkt de vlag nauwelijks te dekken. Of toch wel? Zoals lezers zullen merken zijn er parallellen te trekken met het huidige tijdsgewricht waar linkse intellectuelen en CEO's van grote kapitalistische ondernemingen en (vooral) banken elkaar opnieuw gevonden hebben, maar dan dit keer op globaal vlak. De gelijkenissen tussen de "progessive" era en "the great reset" van het WEF zal daarbij hopelijk duidelijk worden. Allebei zijn het in mijn ogen vormen van fascisme gebleken.

• Belangrijk economisch speerpunt was het bestaan van kartelvorming die volgens de overheid (met name president Teddy Roosevelt) en het publiek moest worden aangepakt. Rothbard maakt brandhout van dat argument: kartelvorming was immers niet in het voordeel van de ondernemingen:
  The general public conceives of price-raising and price-fixing agreements to be as easy as a whispered conversation over cocktails at the club. They are, however, extremely difficult to arrange and even harder to maintain. For prices have been driven low by the competition of supply and production; in order to raise prices successfully, the firms will also have to agree to cut production. And there is the sticking point: for no business firm, no entrepreneur, and no manager likes to cut production. What they prefer to do is expand. And, if the businessman is to agree, grudgingly, to cut production, he has to make sure that his competitors will do the same. And then there will be interminable quarrels about how much production each firm is supposed to cut.
• Ontgoocheling onder zakenlui over het uitblijven van enige succes bij "kartelvorming" ontstond datn ook al gauw:
  By the turn of the 20th century, in fact, businessmen had become disillusioned with trust combinations. In trust after trust, higher prices brought about by the combine simply attracted new and powerful competitors—and this after the trust had expended a great deal of resources in buying out previous competition. As the influential Iron Age lamented, trouble confronted the trust especially “where the combination is naming confessedly high prices for its goods and is at the same time under heavy expenses on account of buying out competitors or subsidizing them to keep out of the market.”
  There are other ways of revealing similar conclusions. Thus, of nearly 100 consolidations formed in 1899–1900, three-quarters were not paying dividends in 1900. Alfred L. Bernheim’s study of 109 corporations with a capitalization of $10 million and up in 1903, found that 16 failed before 1914, 24 paid no dividends during 1909–1914, and only 22 paid dividends of over 5% during this period. The average dividend for this period was a puny 4.3% for these companies. Or, put another way, of the 50 largest corporations in 1909, 27 had dropped out of the 100 by 1929, while 61 of the 100 in 1909 had dropped out of the ranks by the latter year.[15] Dewing concluded from this study that businesses who analogized from economies of scale to a quest for One Big Firm in their industry had committed a grave error.
• Waarom werkte kartelvorming niet? Omdat er ook nadelen zijn aan het continue vergroten van de schaal: bigger is niet altijd better:
  They overlooked that there were definite limits to the economic size of a firm. In particular, managerial ability, individual human judgment, and initiative are extremely scarce and cannot be automated and routinized into one giant firm. Mere large size, he pointed out, was often a handicap in competing with smaller, more mobile competitors—competitors who had lower overhead costs, who could leave the industry in bad years and return in good ones, and who could shop around quietly for raw materials without being so big as to significantly raise their own costs. Moreover, he might have added that smaller competitors were very often better innovators, less bureaucratic, and more open to new ideas and new methods; indeed, they were not struck with obsolescing fixed plants. Dewing concluded with these wise words: I have been impressed throughout by the powerlessness of mere aggregates of capital to hold monopoly; I have been impressed, too, by the tremendous importance of individual, innate ability, or its lack, in determining the success or failure of any enterprise.
• Waarom dan toch kartel- en monopolievorming? Deze werd gedreven door de investeringsbanken met name J.P. Morgan (naar analogie met Blackrock en anderen tegenwoordig):
  We have pointed out earlier in this chapter that industrial corporations and stock shares only appeared in the mid-1890s. It is no coincidence, therefore, that it was the investment bankers, who promoted and underwrote such corporations—led by J.P. Morgan—who took the lead in forming corporate mergers in the same period and attempting to achieve the alleged advantages of monopoly prices. U.S. Steel was but one example of such a failed monopoly.
• En om de nadelen van schaalvergroting (in een vrije markt) te voorkomen en van kartelvorming een succes te maken zocht men hulp vanwege de overheid. Die kwam er tijdens de "progressieve" periode (blijkbaar is elke vorm van overheidstussenkomst progressief, maar wanneer het is om grote ondernemingen te helpen is het in mijn ogen fascistisch):
  In manufacturing as well as railroads, then, mergers as well as cartels had systematically failed to achieve the fruits of monopoly on the free market.[17] It was time, then, for those industrial and financial groups who had sought monopoly to emulate the example of the railroads: to turn to government to impose the cartels on their behalf. Except that even more than in the railroads, the regulation would have to be ostensibly in opposition to a business “monopoly” on the market, and even more would it have to be put through in conjunction with the opinion-molding groups in the society. The stage was set, at the turn of the 20th century, for the giant leap into statism to become known as the Progressive Period.
• Immigratie dan. Tot 1882 waren de V.S. een land van vrijwel onbelemmerde immigratie. Ook daar kwam een einde aan:
  The first break in the American tradition of free and unrestricted immigration came in the act of 1882, when the federal government assumed at least formal control over immigration (previously regulated by the states, principally New York).[17] The United States, instead of the several states, was to tax each entrant a modest fifty cents to accumulate an immigrant welfare fund, and ex-convicts or other people likely to become a public charge were to be denied admission. In the late 1880s, working class activists, concerned with restricting the supply of incoming labor, obtained legislation in several states barring aliens from various types of employment. In particular, aliens were prohibited from employment on public works. The U.S. House of Representatives passed a bill in 1886 banning “nondeclarant” aliens (those who had not yet declared their intentions of becoming U.S. citizens) from employment on public works. When the Senate failed to pass the bill, Illinois, Wyoming, and Idaho proceeded to bar such aliens from state or municipal works projects.
• Het politieke landschap verschuift verder weg van een vrije markteconomie naar alsmaar meer statisme en overheidsinterventie. Deze verandering vindt plaats bij zowel Democraten als Republikeinen:
  What happened to the Democracy? Why didn’t rural America respond to the agrarian economic appeals of the Bryanites? Simply, because the Bryan Democrats were most aggressively not the Democratic party of the fathers; they were neither the party of the liturgicals nor of personal and economic liberty. On the contrary, the Bryanities were both extreme economic statists and extreme religious and cultural pietists. All too far from the “party of personal liberty,” the Bryanities were statists and pietists across the board, ever more moralistic than the old Republican enemy. And when we consider that the Republicans had been moving rapidly, and moved still further during the 1896 McKinley campaign, toward the moderate center and away from statist pietism, we can readily understand the massive defection of the liturgicals from the Bryan Democracy and toward the Republicans or toward dropping completely out of the political process. Democratic loyalists, whom even a depression could not budge, were driven out of their party home by the invasion and triumph.
  The election of 1896 left the United States with a new party system: a centrist and moderately statist Republican Party with a comfortably permanent majority of the country, and a minority Democratic Party roughly confined to the one party South and to Irish-controlled big cities of the Northeast and Midwest, which were nevertheless a minority in those regions. Gone was the sharp conflict of ideology or even of ethnic-religious values; both parties were now moderately statist in different degrees; both parties contained pietists and liturgicals within their ranks. The McKinley Republicans were happy to be known as the “party of prosperity” rather than the “party of great moral ideas.” The familiar lack of clear and genuine ideological choice between two dominant parties so characteristic of modern America was beginning to emerge. Above all, there was no longer a political party, nor a clear-cut constituency, devoted to the traditional American ideology of laissez-faire.
• En ook protectionisme werd ingevoerd, nota bene door de Republikeinse president McKinley en zijn vriend, partijbaas Marc Hanna, nauw gelieerd met Rockefeller:
  McKinley’s long-time friend, political boss, and mentor in the new pragmatic approach was the Cleveland industrialist Marcus Alonzo Hanna. As a coal and iron magnate, Hanna also championed the protective tariff. Hanna was a long-time friend and business associate of John D. Rockefeller and provided the channel by which the Cleveland oil refiner was able to influence the powerful Ohio Republican Party, a party which gave no less than five presidential nominees to the national party between 1876 and 1920.[16] Hanna had been a high-school chum of Rockefeller’s at Central High, Cleveland, and his coal and iron business was economically closely allied with Standard Oil. Relatives of Hanna were direct investors in the stock of the closely held Standard Oil Trust. Hanna repeatedly loaned money to the ever hard-pressed McKinley while in office, and in 1893 Hanna organized a secret consortium of industrialists to salvage the Governor when he went bankrupt. It was Hanna who engineered the McKinley nomination, promptly became national chairman of the party, and was then, at McKinley’s instigation, elevated to the U.S. Senate the year after McKinley’s election to the presidency.
• Pragmatisme was aan de orde van de dag, culminerend in Teddy Roosevelt, die begon te strijden voor de zondagssluiting als manier om alcoholgebruik aan te pakken:
  In 1895, Roosevelt was made president of the Police Board of New York City. The blustering Roosevelt immediately began to make his mark in a way that was becoming standard for “reform” politicians: a pietistic crackdown on liquor and Sunday business. Specifically, T.R. began a ferocious enforcement of the Republican-sponsored Raines Law, which mandated Sunday closing for liquor stores and saloons. The crackdown was particularly effective against neighborhood saloons and beer gardens, the latter the habitual Sunday entertainment of German-Americans. As a not unintended consequence, the result was a crippling of the political power of the saloonkeepers, the major political influence in liturgical-ethnic neighborhoods, and also habitually the bulwark.
• Roosevelt werd echter natuurlijk vooral bekend voor zijn strijd tegen de "kartels" (een van zijn adviserus was Elihu Root, zelf aan advocaat voor Morgan, de drijvende kracht ACHTER de kartels:
  But Teddy Roosevelt and his financial allies were in the process of taking a very different line on the trusts. Roosevelt turned for advice to three distinguished economists, each of whom were taking in various ways a pro-government cartelist, rather than a laissez-faire position. One was the Columbia University professor, Edwin R.A. Seligman, of the distinguished investment banking family of J. & W. Seligman; another was President Arthur Twining Hadley of Yale. A third was Jeremiah W. Jenks, Cornell University professor and chief advisor to the U.S. Industrial Commission, a federal blue ribbon panel investigating the trusts. A key adviser was Secretary of War Elihu Root, once and future Ryan and Morgan lawyer.
  Roosevelt emerged from these consultations determined to move toward government regulation and cartelization of the trusts and of corporations generally. In a speech in late September, 1899, Roosevelt urged the regulation of trusts first through compulsory publicity, then, if necessary, through taxation, and finally through licensing. Trusts and the accumulation of wealth were perfectly legitimate, Roosevelt was soon to hold, but regulation was needed when fortunes were acquired in a predatory manner.[19] Jenks and Seligman had long been members of the “new school” of economics which, over a decade earlier, had frankly repudiated the idea of laissez-faire in favor of increasing state control of the economy.
• Dat Roosevelt streed tegen kartels, is uiteraard een mythe. Hij wilde hen reguleren en maakte een onderscheid tussen goede en slechte kartels, officieel waren slechte kartels roofzuchtig en goede niet. Dat was natuurlijk een nonsensicaal onderscheid, enkel bedoeld om de goede vrienden van Morgan een dienst te bewijzen (hun kartelisatieschema ging dus gezwind door, gesanctioneerd door de overheid). Een andere illustere figuur in dit verband was Louis D. Brandeis:
  But keeping up a hysterical drumfire of public criticism of the merger was the wealthy progressive Boston corporate lawyer, Louis D. Brandeis, who somehow managed to gain for himself, both in the press at the time and among historians afterward, the reputation of being a “people’s advocate” removed from the sordid economic interests of the day. In reality, as was fully known to his enemies at the time, Brandeis was an attorney for Morgan’s great investment banking rival, Kuhn-Loeb, which in turn was the investment bank for the Harriman interests. When T.R., under public pressure, finally filed an anti-trust suit against the New Haven-Boston & Maine merger in May 1908, Roosevelt’s old friend and major political mentor, Henry Cabot Lodge, long allied to the Morgan interests, wrote to T.R. informing him of the facts of life: namely, that Louis Brandeis was really a tool of Harriman and Kuhn-Loeb. In response, Roosevelt in effect dropped the suit.[49] But the outstanding example of a “bad” trust, from T.R.’s point of view, was Standard Oil. Roosevelt had never forgiven McKinley and Hanna—of the Rockefeller wing of the Republican Party—for stubbornly resisting his nomination for vice president in 1900. Then, the Rockefellers angered T.R., as we have seen, by lobbying against his Bureau of Corporations Bill. The Standard Oil people tried to induce Mark Hanna to run for the Republican nomination in 1904 against the upstart Roosevelt; but the Hanna boom, which much worried the president, was cut short by Hanna’s death in the early part of the year. There is evidence that the Rockefeller forces then swung their support to Judge Alton B. Parker, the colorless Democratic nominee, who got roundly clobbered by Roosevelt in the 1904 election.[50] In Roosevelt’s second term, his first full term elected on his own, he concentrated an assault on Standard Oil. From 1905 on, Roosevelt directed the Bureau of Corporations to focus its attentions upon, i.e., to persecute, Standard Oil. In explanation, Roosevelt vindictively admitted many years later: “It [Standard Oil] antagonized me before my election, when I was getting through the Bureau of Corporations bill, and I then promptly threw down the gauntlet to it.”[51] Another important consideration is that Morgan’s hated foe, Harriman, was financially allied with the Rockefellers.[52]
• De ganse kartellisatiedebat was dus gewoon een dekmantel voor een strijd om te macht tussen de Morgans en de Rockefellers. Dit had ook een internationale dimensie (en hier komen we de Rotschilds tegen, bondgenoten van Morgan):
  It should be noted that a fierce international oil war between the two giants began in 1902 and continued for many years thereafter, and that Shell had early formed an alliance with Mellon-run Gulf Oil in supplying it with Texas crude. Indeed, since the early 1890s, Mellon oil companies had competed with Standard Oil for petroleum markets in Europe.[63] And since the Morgans were long-time allies of the Rothschilds, could we not interpret T.R.’s ferocious assault on Standard Oil as an integral part of the world-wide oil war—a war assisted by former Morgan-and-Mellon lawyer, Attorney General Philander Knox?[64]
• De "progressive era" is natuurlijk vooral bekend omwille van de regulering van de vleesindustrie, zogenaamd als gevolg van mistoestanden in die industrie, aangeklaagd door bvb. Upton Sinclair in The Jungle (Sinclair, een socialist was overigens ook auteur van een roman over de olieindustrie, later verfilmd als There will be blood) maar in werkelijkheid bedoeld om ook in die industrie de kartellisatie en monopolievorming te bevorderen:
  Unfortunately for the myth, the drive for federal meat inspection actually began more than two decades earlier and was launched mainly by the big meat packers themselves. The spur was the urge to penetrate the European market for meat, something which the large meat packers thought could be done if the government would certify the quality of meat and thereby make American meat more highly rated abroad. Not coincidentally, as in all Colbertist mercantilist legislation over the centuries, a governmentally-coerced upgrading of quality would serve to cartelize—to lower production, restrict competition, and raise prices to the consumers. It, furthermore, socializes the cost of inspection to satisfy consumers, by placing the burden upon the taxpayers instead of on the producers themselves.[2] More specifically, the meat packers were concerned to with combating the restrictionist legislation of European countries, which, in the late 1870s and early 1880s, began to prohibit the import of American meat. The excuse was to safeguard the European consumer against purportedly diseased meat; the probable major reason was to act as a protectionist device for European meat production. Partly at the behest of the major meat packers, Chicago and other cities imposed and then strengthened a system of meat inspection, and the Secretary of the Treasury, on his own and without Congressional authorization, set up an inspection organization to certify exported cattle as free of pleuropneumonia in 1881. Finally, after Germany prohibited the importation of American pork, ostensibly because of the problem of disease, Congress, responding to the pressure of the large meatpackers, reacted in May 1884 by establishing a Bureau of Animal Industry within the Department of Agriculture “to prevent the exportation of diseased cattle” and to try to eliminate contagious diseases among domesticated animals.
  This government inspection thus becomes an important adjunct of the packer’s business from two viewpoints. It puts the stamp of legitimacy and honesty upon the packer’s product and so is to him a necessity. To the public it is insurance against the sale of diseased meats.[4] Government meat inspection which also lures the public into always thinking the food is safe and reduces competitive pressures to improve meat quality.
  Even Upton Sinclair himself was not fooled; he realized that the new law was designed to benefit the packers; the intention of his expose, in any case, was not to impose higher standards for meat as it was to improve the living conditions of the packinghouse workers, which he himself admitted was scarcely accomplished by the new law.
• Teddy Roosevelt (een J.P. Morgan man) was ook de drijvende kracht achter de beweging voor natuurbehoud, met steun van linkse intellectuelen en bedrijfstycoons (hier was hij een voorloper van mensen zoals John D. Rockefeller III en Laurence Rockefeller en ook hier weer parallellen met de huidige tijd):
  T.R., once again at the suggestion of Pinchot, whipped up a nationwide “Conservation Movement” as a supposedly grassroots crusade. The movement was proposed at the convention of the Deep Waterways Association in the fall of 1907 and officially launched at the Conference of Governors held at the White House in May 1908. Roosevelt managed to line up in support of the conservation crusade not only many members of his Cabinet and of the Supreme Court, but also 38 state governors, William Jennings Bryan, soon to be the Democratic presidential standard-bearer for the third time. intellectuals and magazine editors, and such industrialists as Andrew Carnegie and railroad magnate James J. Hill.
• Natuurconservatie had op een of andere manier zowat de steun van alle industrie-organisaties:
  The Public Lands Commission report quickly met with the hearty approval of the president of the National Board of Trade, the National Association of Manufacturers, the National Business League of America, and the National Irrigation Association.[33] George Maxwell mobilized his entire propaganda machine, including the transcontinental railroads and manufacturing organizations, behind the commission report. Despite this formidable pressure and the repeated pleas of the president, Congress, led by the citizens of the West themselves, blocked passage of the commission’s measures. In particular, they saw that repression of homesteading, especially through the reservation of lands and forests, would cripple development of the West. As E. Louise Peffer writes about the Roosevelt period: It appears ironical that, in a period of such heart-felt sympathy for the homesteader and concern over preserving for his benefit all the remaining good land, every effort seemed to be aimed at cutting down his opportunities.
• Ook m.b.t. tot de loonvorming keerden (sommige) werkgevers zich naar de overheid, en begonnen te pleiten voor loonregulering (ook dit bevorderde de kartellisatie):
  Progressive employers, in contrast, began moving in this period toward workmen’s compensation laws. From their point of view, these laws would confer several important benefits. First, they would forestall the threat of employer liability laws; the payments would be far less, and the costs would be spread among all the employers, not only those with the highest rates of accidents. Second, and more important, the taxpayers would be forced to pay a large proportion of the costs of compensation. In contrast, say, to voluntary insurance, the taxpaying public would be forced to pay for the bureaucracy of the regulatory commissions and to socialize the costs of accident insurance under state insurance plans. Third, the laws would impose high fixed costs for compliance and for accident prevention, which would fall with particular severity on smaller competitors. Hence, workmen’s compensation laws, in the name of humanitarianism and progress, would advance the cartelization of industry. Specifically in line with cartelization, such large firms, which had already instituted voluntary workmen’s compensation plans such as International Harvester and U.S. Steel, could now impose higher costs on their competitors by agitating for the government legislation. And fourth, for anti-union employers, workmen’s compensation would reduce benefits workers might expect from unions and lead them to look elsewhere.
• Immegratie nog eens (beperkingen kwamen er vooral om de pro-katholieke toestroom te beperken, voorafspiegeling van de beperkingen op moslimmigratie) & de link met de "eugenitica" die sterk onder progressieve kringen aan het opkomen was:
  One way of correcting the increasingly pro-Catholic demographics was to restrict immigration; another to promote women’s suffrage. A third way, often promoted in the name of “science,” was eugenics, an increasingly popular doctrine of the progressive movement. Broadly, eugenics may be defined as encouraging the breeding of the “fit” and discouraging the breeding of the “unfit,” the criteria of “fitness” often coinciding with the cleavage between native, white Protestants and the foreign born or Catholics—or the white-black cleavage. In extreme cases, the unfit were to be coercively sterilized.
  To Mrs. Sanger, “science” also meant stopping the breeding of the unfit. A devoted eugenicist and follower of C.B. Davenport, she in fact chided the eugenics movement for not sufficiently emphasizing this crucial point.
• "progressivisme" als een uiting van het piëtistisch Protestanisme, namelijk de wens om alles te reguleren tot de meest intieme aspecten van het familieleven toe ("wokeness" avant la lettre):
  Progressivism was, to a great extent, the culmination of the pietist Protestant political impulse, the urge to regulate every aspect of American life, economic and moral—even the most intimate and crucial aspects of family life. But it was also a curious alliance of a technocratic drive for government regulation, the supposed expression of “value-free science,” and the pietist religious impulse to save America—and the world—by state coercion. Often both pietistic and scientific arguments would be used, sometimes by the same people, to achieve the old pietist goals. Thus, prohibition would be argued for on religious as well as on alleged scientific or medicinal grounds. In many cases, leading progressive intellectuals at the turn of the 20th century were former pietists who went to college and then transferred to the political arena, their zeal for making over mankind, as a “salvation by science.” And then the Social Gospel movement managed to combine political collectivism and pietist Christianity in the same package. All of these were strongly interwoven elements in the progressive movement. All these trends reached their apogee in the Progressive Party and its national convention of 1912.
• Bovenstaande is misschien de meest cruciale quote uit het boek: overheid en "wetenschap" samen werkend in een soort technocratisch verbond met tevens een moreel verheven vingertje (stop met vlees eten, met vliegen, met autorijden...) om de domme mensen in het gareel te krijgen en te houden, zodat een select clubje alle macht in handen krijgt: dat is het "progressivisme" (waarvan het fascisme de meest extreme uiting is).
• De progressive era zag natuurlijk ook de start van de welvaartsstaat. Wat was de oorzaak daarvan?
  Armoede of de industrialisering en urbanisering? Of de vakbonden?
  One answer is that the development of poverty over the past century gave rise to welfare and redistribution. But this makes little sense, since it is evident that the average person’s standard of living has grown considerably over the past century-and-a-half, and poverty has greatly diminished.
  It should also be evident from one glance at the Third World that the disparity of income and wealth between the rich and the masses is far greater there than in Western capitalist countries. So what’s the problem? Another standard answer more plausibly asserts that industrialization and urbanization, by the late 19th century, deprived the masses, uprooted from the soil or the small town, of their sense of community, belonging, and mutual aid.[1] 
  One grave flaw in this urbanization theory is that it ignores the actual nature of the city, at least as it had been before it was effectively destroyed in the decades after World War II. The city was not a monolithic agglomeration but a series of local neighborhoods, each with its own distinctive character, network of clubs, fraternal associations, and street corner hangouts. 
  On deeper historical inquiry, moreover, this seemingly plausible industrialism explanation falls apart, and not only on the familiar problem of American exceptionalism, the fact that the United States, despite industrializing more rapidly, lagged behind European countries in developing the welfare state. Detailed investigations of a number of industrialized countries, for example, find no correlation whatsoever between the degree of industrialization and the adoption of social insurance programs between the 1880s and the 1920s.
  Another standard view, the left-liberal or “social democratic model,” as its practitioners call it, holds that the welfare state came about not through the semi-automatic functioning of industrialization, but rather through conscious mass movements from below, movements generated by the demands of the presumptive beneficiaries of the welfare state themselves: the poor, the masses, or the oppressed working class. This thesis has been summed up boldly by one of its adherents.
  Certainly, much of this thesis is overdrawn even for Europe, where much of the welfare state was brought about by conservative and liberal bureaucrats and political parties, rather than by unions or socialist parties. But setting that aside and concentrating on the United States, there has been, for one thing, no massively supported socialist party, let along one which has managed to achieve “hegemonic status.”
  We are left, then, with labor unions as the only possible support for the social-democratic model for the United States. But here, historians, almost uniformly starry-eyed supporters of labor unions, have wildly exaggerated the importance of unions in American history. When we get past romantic stories of strikes and industrial conflicts (in which the union role is inevitably whitewashed if not glorified), even the best economic historians don’t bother informing the reader of the meager quantitative role or importance of unions in the American economy. Indeed, until the New Deal, and with the exception of brief periods when unionization was coercively imposed by the federal government (during World War I, and in the railroads during the 1920s), the percentage of union members in the labor force typically ranged from a minuscule 1% to 2% during recessions, up to 5% or 6% during inflationary booms, and then down to the negligible figure in the next recession.[6] Furthermore, in boom or bust, labor unions, in the free-market environment, were only able to take hold in specific occupations and areas of the economy. Specifically, unions could only flourish as skilled-craft unions (a) which could control the supply of labor in the occupation because of the small number of workers involved, (b) where this limited number constituted a small fraction of the employer’s payroll, and (c) where, because of technological factors, the industry in question was not very actively competitive across geographical regions.
  One way to sum up these factors is to say, in economists’ jargon, that the employers’ demand schedule for this type of labor is inelastic—that is, that a small restriction in the supply of such labor could give rise to a large wage increase for the remaining workers. Labor unions could flourish, moreover, in such geographically uncompetitive industries as anthracite coal, which is found in only a small area of northeastern Pennsylvania; and the various building trades (carpenters, masons, electricians, joiners, etc.), since building construction in, say, New York City, is only remotely competitive with similar construction in Chicago or Duluth. In contrast, despite determined efforts, it was impossible for unions to prosper in such industries as bituminous coal, which is found in large areas of the United States, or clothing manufacture, where factories can move readily to another, non-unionized area.
• Natuurlijk zagen we ook de eerste tekenen van het feminisme:
  The Elys, Commonses, and Deweys might have might have been more notable, but the Yankee women progressives provided the shock troops of the progressive movement and hence the burgeoning welfare state. As in the case of the males, gradual but irresistible secularization set in over the decades. The abolitionist and slightly later cohort were fanatically postmillennial Christian, but the later progressive cohort, born, as we have seen, around 1860, were no less fanatical but more secular and less Christian-Kingdom oriented. The progression was virtually inevitable; after all, if your activism as a Christian evangelist had virtually nothing to do with Christian creed or liturgy or even personal reform, but was focused exclusively in using the force of government to shape up everyone, stamp out sin, and usher in a perfect society, if government is really God’s major instrument of salvation, then the role of Christianity in one’s practical activity began to fade into the background. Christianity became taken for granted, a background buzz; one’s practical activity was designed to use the government to stamp out liquor, poverty, or whatever is defined as sin, and to impose one’s own values and principles on the society.
  Florence Kelley differed from her colleagues on two counts: (1) she was the only one who was an outright Marxist, and (2) she was married and not a lesbian. However, in the long run, these differences did not matter very much. For Kelley’s open Marxism was not, in practice, very different, in policy conclusions, from the less-systematic Fabian socialism or progressivism of her sisterhood. As such, she was able to take her place at the end of a spectrum that was not really very far from the mainstream of non-Marxian ladies. On the second count, Florence Kelley managed to dispose of her husband in fairly short order, and to palm off the raising of her three children onto doting friends. Thus, home and hearth proved no obstacle to Florence Kelley’s militancy.
• Het hoogtepunt van de "progressive era" was natuurlijk de "new deal". Een sleutelfiguur in deze new deal was Harry Hopkins, die nauwe banden had met de zakenwereld: de Harriman familie, Lehman Brothers en de onvermijdelijke Rockefellers:
  How did Harry Hopkins rise from being a settlement-house worker to one of the most-powerful people in the New Deal? Part of the answer was his close friendship with W. Averill Harriman, scion of the Harriman family, his friendship with John Hertz, partner of the powerful investment-banking firm of Lehman Brothers; and his association with the rising political leader of the powerful Rockefeller family, Nelson Aldrich Rockefeller. Indeed, when Hopkins was made Secretary of Commerce in the New Deal, he offered the Assistant Secretary post to Nelson Rockefeller, who turned it down.
• De impact van de business community op de new deal was groter dan gedacht (met inbegrip van de Rockefellers):
  Altmeyer and Witte also prepared names for FDR to select an Advisory Council to the CES, consisting of employer, union, and “citizen” members. In addition to Swope, Folsom, and Teagle, the Advisory Council included two other powerful corporatist businessmen. The first, Morris Leeds, was president of Leeds & Northrup, and a member of the corporate, pro-union, pro-welfare-state American Association for Labor Legislation. The second, Sam Lewisohn, was vice president of Miami Copper Company, and former president of the AALL. Selected to head the Advisory Council was an academic front man, the much beloved Southern liberal, Frank Graham, president of the University of North Carolina.
  Altmeyer and Witte appointed as the members of the key Technical Board of the CES three distinguished experts, Murray Webb Latimer, J. Douglas Brown, and Barbara Nachtried Armstrong, who was the first female law professor at the University of California at Berkeley. All three were IRC affiliates, and Latimer and Brown were, indeed, eminent members of the Rockefeller-IRC network. Latimer, chairman of the Railroad Retirement Board, was a long-time employee of the IRC, and had compiled the IRC’s study of industrial pensions, as well as having hammered out the details of the Railroad Retirement Act. Latimer was a member of the AALL and helped administer insurance and pension plans for Standard Oil of New Jersey, Standard Oil of Ohio, and Standard Oil of California. J. Douglas Brown was head of Princeton’s...
• Rothard is de uitvinder van de term "war collectivism", en wijst op het enthousiasme van de bedrijfswereld voor deze vorm van collectivisme:
  The general enthusiasm of the business world, and especially big business, for the system of war collectivism can now be explained. The enthusiasm was a product of the resulting stabilization of prices, the ironing out of market fluctuations, and the fact that prices were almost always set by mutual consent of government and the representatives of each industry. It is no wonder that Harry A. Wheeler, president of the United States Chamber of Commerce, wrote in the summer of 1917 that war “is giving business the foundation for the kind of cooperative effort that alone can make the U.S. economically efficient.” Or that the head of American Telephone and Telegraph hailed the perfecting of a “coordination to ensure complete cooperation not only between the Government and the companies, but between the companies themselves.” The wartime cooperative planning was working so well, in fact, opined the chairman of the board of Republic Iron and Steel in early 1918, that it should be continued in peacetime as well.[27] 
  It is true that wartime relations between government and steel companies were sometimes strained, but the strain and the tough threat of government commandeering of resources was generally directed at smaller firms, such as Crucible Steel, which had stubbornly refused to accept government contracts.[29] In the steel industry, in fact, it was the big steelmakers—U.S. Steel, Bethlehem, Republic, etc.—who, early in the war, had first urged government price fixing, and they had to prod a sometimes confused government to adopt what eventually became the government’s program.
• Oorlog is goed voor big business, omdat de overheid hen beschermt en steunt terwijl kleinere ondernemingen worden geëlimineerd. Ook hier zien we een link met de huidige tijd: zie Blackrock en de oorlog in Oekraïne. De "progressive era" culmineerde dan ook in twee wereldoorlogen wat overduidelijk geen toeval is geweest. Intussen ging de kartellisatie door in alle sectoren:
  The excessively high prices of wheat and flour also meant artificially high costs to the bakers. They, in turn, were taken under the cozy cartel umbrella by being required, in the name of “conservation,” to mix inferior products with wheat flour at a fixed ratio. Each baker was of course delighted to comply with a requirement that he make inferior products, which he knew was also being enforced upon his competitors. Competition was also curtailed by the Food Administration’s compulsory standardization of the sizes of bread loaves, and by prohibiting price cutting through discounts or rebates to particular customers—the classic path toward the internal breakup of any cartel.[36] In the particular case of sugar, there was a much more sincere effort to keep down prices—due to the fact that the United States was largely an importer rather than a producer of sugar. Herbert Hoover and the Allied governments duly formed an International Sugar Committee, which undertook to buy all of their countries’ sugar, largely from Cuba, at an artificially low price, and then to allocate the raw sugar to the various refiners. Thus, the Allied governments functioned as a giant buying cartel to lower the price of their refiners’ raw material. Herbert Hoover instigated the plan for the International Sugar Committee, and the U.S. government appointed the majority of the five-man committee.
• De kartellisatie van de economie was dus niet het gevolg van autonome marktkrachten of automatische wetten van het kapitalisme, zoals de Marxisten beweerden (en beweren), maar was "by design". Het gevolg van "progressieve" krachten die elke vorm van competitie wilde elimineren. Het was ook over de partijen heen. Herbert Hoover was een Republikein, een andere spilfiguur Bernard Baruch een Democraat (en tevens financier - zoals gezegd waren de banken de grote aanstokers achter de kartellisatie. Zonder hen (en de overheid, door de banken gecontroleerd) zou dat nooit gelukt zijn:
  Baruch called for the continuance of such corporate associations, in “inaugurating rules” to eliminate “waste” (i.e., competition), to exchange trade information, to agree on the channeling of supply and demand among themselves, to avoid “extravagant” forms of competition and to allocate the location of production.
• En dan waren er ook nog de linkse intellectuelen, zoals John Dewey (hij vertolkte een rol vergelijkbaar met de linkse intellectuelen van nu die graag in Davos vertoeven in de buurt van Klaus Schwab van het WEF en van Bill Gates):
  During the 1890s, Dewey, as professor of philosophy at the University of Michigan, expounded his vision of postmillennial pietism in a series of lectures before the Students’ Christian Association. Dewey argued that the growth of modern science now makes it possible for man to establish the biblical idea of the Kingdom of God on earth. Once humans had broken free of the restraints of orthodox Christianity, a truly religious Kingdom of God could be realized in “the common incarnate Life, the purpose ... animating all men and binding them together into one harmonious whole of sympathy.”[45] Religion would thus work in tandem with science and democracy, all of which would break down the barriers between men and establish the Kingdom. After 1900 it was easy for John Dewey, along with most other postmillennial intellectuals of the period, to shift gradually but decisively from postmillennial progressive Christian statism to progressive secular statism. The path, the expansion of statism and “social control” and planning, remained the same. And even though the Christian creed dropped out of the picture, the intellectuals and activists continued to possess the same evangelical zeal for the salvation of the world that their parents and they themselves had once possessed. The world would and must still be saved through progress and statism.[46]
  A pacifist while in the midst of peace, John Dewey prepared himself to lead the parade for war as America drew nearer to armed intervention in the European struggle. First, in January 1916 in the New Republic, Dewey attacked the “professional pacifist’s” outright condemnation of war as a “sentimental phantasy,” a confusion of means and ends. Force, he declared, was simply “a means of getting results,” and therefore would neither be lauded nor condemned per se. Next, in April Dewey signed a pro-Allied manifesto, not only cheering for an Allied victory but also proclaiming that the Allies were “struggling to preserve the liberties of the world and the highest ideals of civilization.” And though Dewey supported U.S. entry into the war so that Germany could be defeated, “a hard job, but one which had to be done,” he was far more interested in the wonderful changes that the war would surely bring about in the domestic American polity. In particular, war offered a golden opportunity to bring about collectivist social control in the interest of social justice.
• Een andere illustere figuur was Walter Lippmann, de uitvinder van de term "manufacture of consent" en nauw betrokken bij het gebruik van propaganda en psychologische oorlogsvoering tijdens WO2:
  Let others fight and die in the trenches; Walter Lippmann had the satisfaction of knowing that his talents, at least, would be put to their best use by the newly emerging collectivist State.
• Een andere was de econoom David Croly, die uiteindelijk bewonderaar werd van Mussolini:
  At the end of the war, Lippmann was to go on to become America’s foremost journalistic pundit. Croly, having broken with the Wilson administration on the harshness of the Versailles Treaty, was bereft to find the New Republic no longer the spokesman for some great political leader. During the late 1920s he was to discover an exemplary national collectivist leader abroad—in Benito Mussolini.[56] That Croly ended his years as an admirer of Mussolini comes as no surprise when we realize that from early childhood he had been steeped by a doting father in the authoritarian socialist doctrines of Auguste Comte’s Positivism. These views were to mark Croly throughout his life. Thus, Herbert’s father, David, the founder of Positivism in the United States, advocated the establishment of vast powers of government over everyone’s life. David Croly favored the growth of trusts and monopolies as a means both to that end and also to eliminate the evils of individual competition and “selfishness.” Like his son, David Croly railed at the Jeffersonian “fear of government” in America and looked to Hamilton as an example to counter that trend.[57]
• Terug naar John Dewey, pacifist met een eigenaardige voorkeur voor oorlog:
  Into this complex situation John Dewey plunged, seeing no complexity and of course considering it unthinkable for either him or the United States to stay out of the entire fray. Dewey leaped into total support of the Chinese nationalist position, hailing the aggressive Young China movement and even endorsing the pro-missionary YMCA in China as “social workers.” Dewey thundered that while “I didn’t expect to be a jingo,” Japan must be called to account, and Japan is the great menace in Asia. Thus, scarcely had Dewey ceased being a champion of one terrible world war than he began to pave the way for an even greater one.[58]
• De progressive era zag ook de oprichting van economische denktanks zoals het Brookings Instituut (ontstaan met geld van Carnegie:
  IGR people soon expanded their role to include economics, establishing an Institute of Economics headed by Robert Brookings and Arthur T. Hadley of Yale, with economist Harold G. Moulton as director.[102] The institute, funded by the Carnegie Corporation, would be later merged, along with the IGR, into the Brookings Institution. Edwin Gay also moved into the foreign policy field by becoming secretary-treasurer and head of the Research Committee of the new and extremely influential organization, the Council on Foreign Relations (CFR).[103]
  In a similar vein, the assembled economists in 1918 were regaled with the visionary presidential address of Yale economist Irving Fisher. Fisher looked forward to an economic “world reconstruction” that would provide glorious opportunities for economists to satisfy their constructive impulses. A class struggle, Fisher noted, would surely be continuing over distribution of the nation’s wealth. But by devising a mechanism of “readjustment,” the nation’s economists could occupy an enviable role as the independent and impartial arbiters of the class struggle, these disinterested social scientists making the crucial decisions for the public good. In short, both Mitchell and Fisher were, subtly and perhaps half-consciously, advancing the case for a postwar world in which their own allegedly impartial and scientific professions could levitate above the narrow struggles of classes for the social product, and thus emerge as a commonly accepted, “objective” new ruling class, a 20th-century version of the philosopher-kings.
  The Recent Economic Changes study was originated and organized by Herbert Hoover, and it was Hoover who secured the financing from the Carnegie Corporation. The object was to celebrate the years of prosperity presumably produced by Secretary of Commerce Hoover’s corporatist planning and to find out how the possibly future President Hoover could maintain that prosperity by absorbing its lessons and making them a permanent part of the American political structure. The volume duly declared that to maintain the current prosperity, economists, statisticians, engineers, and enlightened managers would have to work out “a technique of balance” to be installed in the economy.
  In a major address before the United States Chamber of Commerce, on May 7, 1924, Hoover spelled out his corporatist views in some detail. He called for the self-regulation of industry by way of trade associations, farm groups, and unions. In a vein strongly reminiscent of English Guild Socialism, Hoover harked back to the Middle Ages for his model: the guilds, he asserted, obtained “more stability through collective action.” The job of the associations was to strengthen “ethical standards” in industry by eliminating “waste” and “destructive competition.” In short, Hoover was calling for the national cartelization of industry under the aegis of government.[15] Samuel Gompers hailed the address and considered this “new economic policy” to be the same as the newly forged position of the AF of L.[16]
• Linkse intellectuelen, economen die voor filosoof-koning spelen, big government, big business en big labour: de weg naar de new deal lag open. De man die voor dit alles verantwoordelijk was, is niet FDR, maar wel de Republikein Herbert Hoover:
  One of Mr. Hoover’s clearest harbingers of the New Deal was his creation in January, 1932, of the Reconstruction Finance Corporation. The RFC was clearly inspired by and modelled after the old wartime War Finance Corporation, which had extended emergency loans to business. One of the leading originators of the RFC was Eugene Meyer, Jr., Governor of the Federal Reserve Board and former Managing Director of the WFC; most of the old WFC staff were employed by the new organization.[47]
  Hoover also aided these laws by suspending all further oil leases on public lands and by pressuring oil operators near the public domain to agree to restrict oil production.
• Maar Hoover twijfeld. Pas met FDR gingen wel alle remmen los:
  Franklin Roosevelt was to have no such scruples. Hoover’s decision had vital political consequences: for Harriman told him bluntly at the start of the 1932 campaign that Franklin Roosevelt had accepted the Swope Plan—as he was to prove amply with the NRA and AAA. If Hoover persisted in being stubborn, Harriman warned, the business world, and especially big business, would back Roosevelt. Hoover’s brusque dismissal led to big business carrying out its threat. It was Herbert Hoover’s finest hour.[66] America’s legion of corporate liberals, who found their Holy Grail with the advent of Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal, never forgave or forgot Herbert Hoover’s hanging back from America’s entry into the Promised Land. To the angry liberals, Hoover’s caution looked very much like old-fashioned laissez-faire. Hence Herbert Hoover’s pervasive entry into the public mind as a doughty champion of laissez-faire individualism.[67]