“When it is said that free enterprise has failed, my answer is that we have not permitted it to work.”

Samuel Pettengill

„It was corporate welfare policies alone that precipitated the many panics and the alleged “need” for social welfare reform from the Progressive Era to the New Deal and beyond.

The Panic of 1873 illustrates the thesis….. The patriotic project designed to spur economic growth and bind the nation together proved an unmitigated disaster for the country. It was the source of the corruption, hardship, acrimony and strife that is constantly attributed to capitalism’s recurring booms and busts. Had there been no Railway Act of 1862, so much trouble would have been avoided. In the end, it was “capitalism” that was unjustly blamed for the calamity. As in all earlier and later crises of capitalism, it was not free market activities, but easy money and credit and corporate welfare policies that alone engineered the dastardly Panic of 1873 and eventually created the “need” for “reform” from the Progressive Era, to the Fed, to the New Deal, to today.

Jerome Huyler