Sunday, July 09, 2006

Nationalize Defense?

Public Good Should Trump War Profiteering



"In 1969 John Kenneth Galbraith penned a piece for the New York Times titled The Big Defense Firms Are Really Public Firms and Should be Nationalized arguing, among other things, that it was folly for defense contractors to claim that they were private corporations. Such claims made a mockery of free enterprise.

Nearly 40 years hence, Charlie Cray and Lee Drutman have resurrected and energized Galbraith's argument in their work titled Corporations and the Public Purpose: Restoring the Balance (Seattle Journal for Social Justice, Winter 2005). They make an exceptionally compelling case for putting the defense industrial base (DIB) into the direct service of the American public through a form of nationalization: federal chartering. . ."

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