Once upon a time ...

One hundred years ago American business leaders and politicians celebrated the free market. They praised the virtues of small government, competition, and laissez-faire capitalism. They said that with enough hard work anybody could make it to the top. Although free market rhetoric was plentiful in those days, free markets were hard to find. Almost every sector of the American economy was controlled by a handful of corporations whose executives met in secret, set prices, determined wages, and conspired to destroy labor unions. These interlocking corporate and financial monopolies had a pleasant, innocent- sounding name: trusts. There was a steel trust, a sugar trust, and a coal trust, among others. The markets weren’t free, but the trusts were—free to employ children in factories, free to make people work sixty or seventy hours a week, free to pollute rivers and streams, to hire private armies, to bribe state legislators and members of Congress, to sell what they wanted at whatever price they liked.The freedom of big business seemed limitless. Drug companies sold patent medicines containing heroin, morphine, and cocaine that promised to cure all sorts of diseases, but actually cured none of them. Food companies sold children’s candy colored with toxic heavy metals. Cheap margarine was routinely marketed as butter. Crude mixtures of apple scraps, glucose, timothy seeds, and food coloring made from coal tar were sold as strawberry jam. In the age of the great trusts, the gulf between the wealthy and the poor became enormous. Robber barons built their homes in imitation of European palaces, while millions of American workers lived in urban slums.