Death to Socialism and Fascism! Clinton health plan salutes Italys past DiLorenzo, Thomas J. Wall Street Journal. (Eastern edition). New York, N.Y.: Oct 26, 1993. pg. A22 Abstract (Summary) Thomas J. DiLorenzo says that President Clintons health care reform plan has roots in the industrial policies of Italy--from the 1930s. He says the Fascist economic philosophy, known as corporatism, has been adopted by the Clintons as the organizing principle of their health reform. Copyright Dow Jones & Company Inc Oct 26, 1993 President Clinton has stated that his health care reform plan is based primarily on Germanys system. But the proposal also has roots in the industrial policies of another European country, Italy. The key component of the presidents plan is a National Health Board of seven presidential appointees. This board will oversee all the activities of government-created and -regulated regional health care alliances, which will supposedly do the consumers bidding with health insurance providers. The National Health Board itself will have the power to set health care budgets and prices for each state alliance. Companies with more than 5,000 employees could form their own corporate alliances but would also be strictly regulated by the board. There is virtually no role for individual consumers, doctors, insurers or employers in the plan. Some years ago, the Italian government organized many of that countrys industries on just this model. For each industry or industry group, there was a legally recognized alliance called a confederation. As in the Clinton health care plan, the purpose of these groupings, according to economist and governmental adviser Fausto Pitigliani, was to allow the central government to orchestrate collaboration . . . between the various categories of producers in each branch of productive activity. Only legally recognized collaboration was permitted, just as only legally recognized regional health care and corporate alliances can purchase health insurance under the Clinton plan. The Italian confederations were free to pursue their own goals, as the presidents health care alliances would ostensibly be. But in Italy, according to Mr. Pitigliani, the principle of private initiative could be useful only in the service of the national interest as defined by a National Council of Corporations. This National Council served as a federal overseer of all the regional confederations, just as the presidents National Health Board will oversee the regional health care alliances. The purpose of the Italian arrangement, according to Mr. Pitigliani, was to ensure government control over the relations that employers, employees and consumers had with one another. The National Council of Corporations could set prices and budgets and issue regulationspowers Mr. Clinton proposes giving to his National Health Board. The National Health Board would have sweeping regulatory powers. The published version of the plan stipulates that if a state alliance does not meet all the boards regulatory requirements, the secretary of the Treasury could impose a payroll tax on every employer in the state to pay for a federally designed health insurance plan. Italys system was justified on the ground that selfish interests had led Italian industry in directions not in the service of the national interest, as Mr. Pitigliani explained. The Italian National Council of Corporations was empowered to regulate industry in a manner concordant with the interests of the national economy and to create a spirit of national collaboration. If this rhetoric sounds familiar, it is probably because of the way the Clintons have demonized the pharmaceutical industry, doctors, and other profit seekers. Italys government planners believed that regional industry alliances overseen by a national planning board would reinvent government in a way that would render it vigorous, careful and efficient, in the words of one political leader, reminiscent of the presidents promise to cut more than $200 billion in waste from the system with his plan. How well has the Italian system fared, and does it provide any lessons for the U.S.? Well, the Italian system was a big disappointment from the beginning. Instead of forcing businesses to be more responsive to the national interest, the government -- taxpayers -- ended up paying for the blunders of private enterprise, according to Italian social critic Gaetano Salvemini. An article in The Economist characterized the system as the establishment of a new and costly bureaucracy from which . . . industrialists . . . put into practice the worst kind of monopolistic practices at the expense of the little fellow who is squeezed out in the process. The system I have described is not a recent development. Fausto Pitigliani was an apologist for Mussolini. The quotations I cited earlier were from his 1936 book, The Italian Corporative State. The regional alliances were called fascist confederations; Gaetano Salveminis 1936 book, from which I also quoted, was Under the Axe of Fascism; and The Economist article was published on July 27, 1935. Most people equate fascism only with its racism and anti-Semitism, but there was also an economic philosophy, known as corporatism, that was part of its ideology. The Clintons have adopted 1930s-era corporatism as the organizing principle of their health reform. Contrary to the hoary slogans about Mussolini making the trains run on time, the truth is that corporatism was an unmitigated economic disaster for the Italian people. Lets hope that this failure will not be repeated in the U.S. --- Mr. DiLorenzo, an adjunct scholar at the Cato Institute, is a professor of economics at Loyola College in Baltimore. https://groups.yahoo/neo/groups/njdocs/conversations/topics/1057
Posted on: Fri, 26 Dec 2014 14:27:23 +0000
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