Chapter XVII This Must Be Done First

further in his fight to outlaw corporations, he said that corporations would grow so powerful that they could and would challenge the Government itself. And that has come true. The Federal Reserve System, and not the Government rules America and is now compelling the Government to spend $32 billion annually in equipping a military force that can rule and dominate the world. Not only can corporations buy the most astute lawyers (and most of our Congressmen are corporation lawyers), but they hire our best scientific brains. The young daring Frenchman, Tocqueville, in 1831, just forty years after Jefferson failed to outlaw corporations, after a visit of several weeks in America wrote: "In an orderly and peaceable democracy (and we were a peaceable democracy then) like the United States, where men can not enrich themselves by war, by public office, or by political confiscation (that was before the Federal Reserve System of 1913) love of wealth mainly drives them into business and manufacturing." How far from being true today. Take profit out of war and war would cease. The corporation man will say that you could not run the country without us. No man would put his money in a general partnership. And that is what Thomas Jefferson said: "If any enterprise is too big for a general partnership to handle, it should be done by the Government" . . . and the Government followed that advice at once - it began to build post roads, and to establish post offices, and to provide the nation its money. But corporations came in and took over the providing of its money, creating the debt-dollar money. Today in the richest country in the world in natural resources, with the most aggressive, virile people on earth, business can not run one year on its own capital, it must return again and again to the banks for money to keep their businesses going. Cut out this fallacy of "mass production," and let all industry drop back into the "small operators' hands" and prosperity would become universal and satisfying. No "great" industry completely fabricates its machinery today. Even Ford, General Motors, Western Electric, all of them subcontract parts, and then assemble them. Corporation newspapers and journals