In 1888, at the height of the Gilded Age, a rather prominent American said some startling things. First he observed, “Our cities are the abiding places of wealth and luxury; our manufactories yield fortunes never dreamed of by the fathers of the Republic; our business men are madly striving in the race for riches, and immense aggregations of capital outrun the imagination in the magnitude of their undertakings.”

But this did not mean all was well with America. The speaker went on: “We view with pride and satisfaction this bright picture of our country’s growth and prosperity, while only a closer scrutiny develops a somber shading. Upon more careful inspection we find the wealth and luxury of our cities mingled with poverty and wretchedness and unremunerative toil.”

Has this man forgotten, as many people do, that in market-based societies the growth of wealth, while inevitably uneven, is over time steady and general? That’s not relevant to what he had in mind. He wished to assign blame for the poverty he observed: “We discover that the fortunes realized by our manufacturers are no longer solely the reward of sturdy industry and enlightened foresight, but that they result from the discriminating favor of the Government and are largely built upon undue exactions from the masses of our people. The gulf between employers and the employed is constantly widening, and classes are rapidly forming, one comprising the very rich and powerful, while in another are found the toiling poor.” [Emphasis added.]

“As we view the achievements of aggregated capital, we discover the existence of trusts, combinations, and monopolies, while the citizen is struggling far in the rear or is trampled to death beneath an iron heel. Corporations, which should be the carefully restrained creatures of the law and the servants of the people, are fast becoming the people’s masters.”

Who was this man? Progressive politician William Jennings Bryan? Socialist Party presidential candidate and union leader Eugene V. Debs? Neither. It was Grover Cleveland, the 22nd and 24th president of the United States. The occasion: his December 1888 State of the Union address, delivered a month after losing his reelection bid in the electoral college (but not in the popular vote) to Benjamin Harrison.

The source of corporate privilege that raised Cleveland’s ire was the tariff. (Back in the day it was said, “The tariff is the mother of trusts.”) Big business’s successful opposition to reform, he said, is the reason government is seen as the dispenser of privilege. Then, astoundingly, he added:

“Communism is a hateful thing and a menace to peace and organized government; but the communism of combined wealth and capital, the outgrowth of overweening cupidity and selfishness, which insidiously undermines the justice and integrity of free institutions, is not less dangerous than the communism of oppressed poverty and toil, which, exasperated by injustice and discontent, attacks with wild disorder the citadel of rule.” (Emphasis added.)

Note what Cleveland said: The impetus for communism of the masses is not envy of wealth earned in the free market, but rather honest people’s frustration at being exploited through the collusion of capital and State.

Thus Cleveland acknowledged that America in the Gilded Age was no bastion of laissez faire. Rather, it was a neomercantilist corporate state, where government—as only government can—empowered privileged business interests to make fortunes at the expense of regular working and consuming Americans. Cleveland, in this speech at least, echoed the individualist, pro-market, “anti-capitalist” critique of Lysander Spooner, Benjamin Tucker, and their compatriots for whom justice for worker-consumers was the very basis of their seminal libertarian movement.

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Leading economists, politicians, and pundits insist we must choose between fiscal austerity and economic growth. Cutting government spending, they say, will stifle recovery. That’s Keynesian nonsense, replies James Ahiakpor.

This year marks the 50th anniversary of one of Milton Friedman’s classics: Capital and Freedom. Dwight Lee puts the great book in context.

Should the government be able to silence a blogger because he lacks an occupational license? Bob Ewing describes the case of a North Carolina man who’s found his free-speech rights threatened.

President Obama is under the impression that the government created the Internet for the benefit of business. Wrong on both counts, writes Steve Fritzinger.

Libertarians, like other people, sometimes long for a lost golden age. But Anthony Gregory advises freedom lovers to look in the other direction because the free market lies ahead.

Those ubiquitous universal product codes, which help diverse industries keep track of inventories and lower costs to consumers, are the product of private social cooperation, not government. Stephen Gross explains.

There’s an important economic lesson in the entrepreneurial effort to ship ice from America to the Bahamas in the early nineteenth century. David Hebert tells the story.

C. S. Lewis is best known as a novelist and Christian philosopher. Harold Jones shows that Lewis was also a defender of individualism and freedom.

Some of the earliest critiques of state socialism were devastatingly prophetic satires. Philip Vander Elst describes two of them.

Here’s what we’ve got in the columns department. Lawrence Reed reminds us of the importance of incentives. Stephen Davies relates the perhaps surprising origins of the London Stock Exchange. John Stossel discusses why America imprisons so many people. David Henderson unpacks the concept “survival of the fittest.” And Gary Chartier, reading a pundit’s claim that Americans should be more worshipful of their leaders, replies, “It Just Ain’t So!”

Our book reviewers have been chewing on tomes on FDR at war, legal plunder, paternalism, and dictators behaving badly.

—Sheldon Richman

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