The Betrayal of the American Dream by Donald L. Barlett, James B. Steele Read Free Book Online Page A

helped create the image that there was a vast groundswell of opposition to the measure by organizing town hall meetings to attack it. Speakers often made wild, sensational claims about the legislation: at one Colorado gathering sponsored by an AFP group, a speaker contended that the bill mandated physician-assisted suicide, charging that “Adolph Hitler issued six million end-of-life orders—he called his program ‘the final solution.’ I wonder what we’re going to call ours?”
    After the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act (PPACA) was passed in 2010, the AFP bought television time on the eve of the 2010 midterm elections to condemn the new law. One featured a Canadian woman who warned about the perils of government-run health care systems. Identified on Koch’s AFP website as Shona Holmes, she delivered an unsettling message: “Many Americans wonder what the new health care bill will do. Well, I know. I am a Canadian citizen. I had a brain tumor, but if I had waited for treatment in my government-run health care system, I’d be dead.” She said she traveled to the United States for “world-class care that saved my life.” An AFP official said that her case showed how “our health is too important to leave in the hands of a government bureaucrat.” It was later revealed in the Canadian press that Shona Holmes did not have a brain tumor—only a cyst on her pituitary gland. The U.S. doctors who removed the cyst later said that they did not consider her condition life-threatening.
    Similarly, the Koch-supported Cato Institute spreads misinformation about the economy. Every year Cato and its partners compile and publish an annual index of the nations that have the most “economic freedom.” The most highly ranked have lower taxes, less government regulation, higher personal incomes, lower infant mortality rates, and fewer murders than those that supposedly restrict economic freedom. The survey is trotted out annually by Cato and other conservative think tanks with claims attesting to its scrupulous methodology, but its conclusions are based more on ideology than on science. Cato claims that nations that are “economically free out-perform non-free nations” but glosses over the fact that most of the so-called non-free nations, such as the Congo, have been poor for centuries and owe their lowly status more to ingrained poverty than current government policies.
    Even more misleading is Cato’s measure of economic freedom among developed nations. The United States is always in the top ten, but Germany, which has a dynamic, job-creating economy, always ranks well down the list largely because it has higher taxes and more regulation than the United States. In 2010, for example, the United States was sixth, while Germany was ranked twenty-fourth.
    But what is life like for people in each country? The infant mortality rate, cited by Cato as a mark of a nation’s prosperity, is much higher in the United States than in Germany—5.98 per 1,000 births compared to 3.51 in Germany. The murder rate, another Cato bellwether of economic freedom, is more than five times higher in the United States than in Germany at 4.6 homicides per 100,000 persons compared to 0.8 in Germany. German manufacturing workers earn 26 percent more in wages and benefits than their counterparts in the United States. Germany’s unemployment rate in 2010 was 7.2 percent; in the United States it was 9.6 percent. German CEOs, on the other hand, earn on average about half what their counterparts in the United States earn, and then pay higher taxes on those earnings.
    By most every significant economic measure, Germany’s policies benefit the broader society. But in Cato’s view, those very policies—higher wages for working people, higher taxes on the wealthy, regulations on corporations—are constraints on economic freedom. But whose freedom? To Cato, “economic freedom” is measured largely by how much freedom members of the economic