by Summary:
American populists are largely reactive and somewhat confused. They don’t know what hit them. And they don’t know their own, often forgotten, history. Nineteenth-century American populists were not socialists, but small-scale capitalists. They were farmers, artisans, and professionals. Private enterprise was central to their values, and they wanted to preserve it for ordinary citizens like themselves. The ideal was to own your own business, not to work for a corporation. Populists fought to keep private enterprise widely distributed among many small, independent producers, as it still was in their day, and to resist the emergence of dominating monopolies which threatened their economic security....To remedy this sad state of affairs, the populists demanded the conversion of key
Topics:
Mike Norman considers the following as important: American history, American populism, Economic History, Political Economy
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American populists are largely reactive and somewhat confused. They don’t know what hit them. And they don’t know their own, often forgotten, history. Nineteenth-century American populists were not socialists, but small-scale capitalists. They were farmers, artisans, and professionals. Private enterprise was central to their values, and they wanted to preserve it for ordinary citizens like themselves. The ideal was to own your own business, not to work for a corporation. Populists fought to keep private enterprise widely distributed among many small, independent producers, as it still was in their day, and to resist the emergence of dominating monopolies which threatened their economic security....To remedy this sad state of affairs, the populists demanded the conversion of key
Topics:
Mike Norman considers the following as important: American history, American populism, Economic History, Political Economy
This could be interesting, too:
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American populists are largely reactive and somewhat confused. They don’t know what hit them. And they don’t know their own, often forgotten, history. Nineteenth-century American populists were not socialists, but small-scale capitalists. They were farmers, artisans, and professionals. Private enterprise was central to their values, and they wanted to preserve it for ordinary citizens like themselves. The ideal was to own your own business, not to work for a corporation. Populists fought to keep private enterprise widely distributed among many small, independent producers, as it still was in their day, and to resist the emergence of dominating monopolies which threatened their economic security....
To remedy this sad state of affairs, the populists demanded the conversion of key infrastructural sectors into public utilities repurposed to facilitate rather than exploit small producers. Railroads, they argued, should be run on a regulated, non-profit basis to ensure low-cost access to markets by their customers. Similarly, banks should be run on a non-profit basis as to ensure low-cost credit to borrowers. Populists also called for the federal government to directly issue currency to pay for its expenses (instead of borrowing to do so).
The basic idea was to turn enterprises with too much monopoly power into accountable public utilities, but otherwise to allow the free market to run its course. The aim was to save free enterprise. If many independent producers have to use the same infrastructure (like railroads or the internet), or rely on a common provider of essential products or services (like energy companies or banks), those businesses, populists said, ought to be transformed into public utilities under public control....Counterpunch
Understanding Populism
Adrian Kuzminski