which we already had in this country
and when we had it we called it slave labor,
now replaced by a profitable system in which
you don't have to maintain workers - debt slavery.
To that end, corporations advocate right-to-work laws
to prevent groups of workers from bargaining,
so they have to take wages that corporations offer
or opt for their alternative right to starvation.
Corporations, which themselves are combinations,
may combine to prevent labor from combining
and by means of mergers, may combine even further
to create cartels and monopolies to fight them.
Capitalism uses the cheapest materials
in order to increase the margin of profit
and by the 19th century corporations were profiting
by watering down and adulterating food products
substituting lard for butterfat
in condensed milk, ice cream and candy,
ground nut shells for pepper and spices,
coffee "extended" with sawdust and chicory,
jam made from peels, cores and sucrose,
ketchup from pumpkin and saccharine,
colored with poisonous coal tar dyes,
and what passed as butter was oleo margarine.
The difference between value advertised
and the value of the product received
amounted to institutionalized commercial fraud.
as inferior goods were passed off as premium.
And while this annoyed the Middle Classes,
its effects on the poor were more serious.
Without federal oversight there was no guarantee
of the quality and safety of food
and a Congress purchased by corporate interests
was unconcerned about cheating the poor,
who were those who could least afford it,
and also those who most often were.
But, more egregiously, corporations were masking
decomposing foods with "preservatives" like borax,
copper sulfate and sodium benzoate,
formaldehyde and salicylic acid.
So the free market did not, in fact, act
as a foolproof mechanism for allocating resources.
And the larger corporate food manufacturers got,
the greater the opportunity for fraud and abuse was.
Corporations proved they couldn't be trusted,
so consumers had to turn to government
to insure the product information they needed
was printed on labels and, by law, was accurate.
But if people chose to use oleo rather than butter,
or drink chicory coffee or whiskey "aged" overnight,
take worthless or addictive tonics and remedies,
under the Food and Drug Act, they still had that right.
But manufacturers and retailers of food products
would find it harder to pass off cheap goods as premium
or make hidden substitutes in lists of ingredients
and deliver products that weren't what they claimed to be.
And since capitalism is about growth and profit,
businesses' politics weren't based on support
for free enterprise or the overall economy,
but their own position in a competitive market.
They saw the Food and Drug Act as a way
to serve corporate interests via the government
through direct subsidies and the control
over product entry into the market,
laws affecting substitutes and ingredients
as well as price-fixing and uniform laws,
regulation to protect existing business
through rules that affected them all,
to ensure higher than competitive rates,
and for protection from new players in the market.
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