MURRAY ROTHBARD, 1992: New Jersey Health Department (a state where only 15% of the population is fluoridated) shows that the bone cancer rate among young males is no less than 6 times higher in fluoridated than in non-fluoridated areas

Now that fluoride's a neurotoxin, Murray Rothbard's 1992 article how aluminum company ALCOA got the feds to claim an industrial pollutant was an anti-cavity miracle.  https://t.co/Z2bGy1bFYP   pic.twitter.com/1Hp6HJ95DJ

— Peter St Onge, Ph.D. (@profstonge) November 3, 2024

"Fluoridation Revisited," Murray Rothbard, 1992. 

The ALAR Scare, 1989.

from the Rothbard article, 

THE DRIVE FOR FLUORIDATION 

The official drive began abruptly just before the end of World War II, pushed by the U.S. Public Health Service, then in the Treasury Department. In 1945, the federal government selected two Michigan cities to conduct an official "15-year" study; one city, Grand Rapids, was fluoridated, a control city was left unfluoridated. (I am indebted to a recent revisionist article on fluoridation by the medical writer Joel Griffiths, in the left-wing muckraking journal Covert Action Information Bulletin: "Fluoride: Commie Plot or Capitalist Ploy?" [Fall 1992], pp. 26–28, 63–66.) Yet, before five years were up, the government killed its own "scientific study," by fluoridating the water in the second city in Michigan. Why? Under the excuse that its action was caused by "popular demand" for fluoridation; as we shall see, the "popular demand" was generated by the government and the Establishment itself. Indeed, as early as 1946, under the federal campaign, six American cities fluoridated their water, and 87 more joined the bandwagon by 1950. 

A key figure in the successful drive for fluoridation was Oscar R. Ewing, who was appointed by President Truman in 1947 as head of the Federal Security Agency, which encompassed the Public Health Service (PHS), and which later blossomed into our beloved Cabinet office of Health, Education, and Welfare. One reason for the left's backing of fluoridation – in addition to its being socialized medicine and mass medication, for them a good in itself – was that Ewing was a certified Truman Fair Dealer and leftist, and avowed proponent of socialized medicine, a high official in the then-powerful Americans for Democratic Action, the nation's central organization of "antiCommunist liberals" (read: Social Democrats or Mensheviks). Ewing mobilized not only the respectable left but also the Establishment Center. The powerful drive for compulsory fluoridation was spearheaded by the PHS, which soon mobilized the nation's establishment organizations of dentists and physicians. 

The mobilization, the national clamor for fluoridation, and the stamping of opponents with the right-wing kook image, was all generated by the public relations man hired by Oscar Ewing to direct the drive. For Ewing hired none other than Edward L. Bernays, the man with the dubious honor of being called the "father of public relations." Bernays, the nephew of Sigmund Freud, was called "The Original Spin Doctor" in an admiring article in the Washington Post on the occasion of the old manipulator's 100th birthday in late 1991. The fact that right-wing groups such as the John Birch Society correctly called fluoridation "creeping socialism" and blamed Soviet Communism as the source of the fluoridation campaign (no, not Bolsheviks, guys: but a Menshevik-State Capitalist alliance, see below) was used by the Bernaysians to discredit all the opposition. 

As a retrospective scientific article pointed out about the fluoridation movement, one of its widely distributed dossiers listed opponents of fluoridation "in alphabetical order reputable scientists, convicted felons, food faddists, scientific organizations, and the Ku Klux Klan." (Bette Hileman, "Fluoridation of Water," Chemical and Engineering News 66 [August 1, 1988], p. 37; quoted in Griffiths, p. 63) In his 1928 book Propaganda, Bernays laid bare the devices he would use: Speaking of the "mechanism which controls the public mind," which people like himself could manipulate, Bernays added that "Those who manipulate the unseen mechanism of society constitute an invisible government which is the true ruling power of our country...our minds are molded, our tastes formed, our ideas suggested, largely by men we have never heard of..." And the process of manipulating leaders of groups, "either with or without thei rconscious cooperation," will "automatically influence" the members of such groups. 

Fluoride causes bone fractures and cancer.  So look to fluoride as one of the causes of hip fractures in the elderly; it's not just a "sedentary lifestyle."

In addition to the bone cancer studies for the late 1980s, evidence is piling up that fluorides lead to bone fractures. In the past two years, no less than eight epidemiological studies have indicated the fluoridation has increased the rate of bone fractures in males and females of all ages. Indeed, since 1957, the bone fracture rate among male youth has increased sharply in the United States, and the U.S. hip fracture rate is now the highest in the world. In fact, a study in the traditionally profluoride Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA), August 12, 1992, found that even "low levels of fluoride may increase the risk of hip fracture in the elderly." JAMA concluded that "it is now appropriate to revisit the issue of water fluoridation."  . . .

Despite the Young whitewash, doubts are piling up even within the federal government. James Huff, a director of the U.S. National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences, concluded in 1992 that animals in the government's study developed cancer, especially bone cancer from being given fluoride – and there was nothing "equivocal" about his conclusion. 

Various scientists for the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) have turned to anti-fluoridation toxicologist William Marcus's warning that fluoride causes not just cancer, but also bone fractures, arthritis, and other disease. Marcus mentions, too, that an unreleased study by the New Jersey Health Department (a state where only 15 percent of the population is fluoridated) shows that the bone cancer rate among young males is no less than six times higher in fluoridated than in non-fluoridated areas. 

Ed.: See also, from 2005, Fluoride Follies by Donald W. Miller, MD. 

PETER ST ONGE: 1883 Pendleton Act made bureaucrats professionals who are independent of politicians . . . allegedly to fight corruption. But note that a bureaucracy that’s independent of politicians is also independent of voters

How did the American government turn on the people? Murray Rothbard says it started with rules giving government workers independence from elected politicians.

After all, if bureaucrats don’t serve the representatives of the people, who exactly do they serve? pic.twitter.com/ozYrYF66Hn

— Peter St Onge, Ph.D. (@profstonge) October 11, 2024

"How the US Government Turned on the People," Peter St Onge, October 11, 2024.

Pendleton Act, 1883

BUREAUCRACY AND THE CIVIL SERVICE IN THE UNITED STATES, Murray Rothbard, 1995.  Here is the Mises copy.

from St Onge, 

As with the economy, the seeds of our political crisis began a hundred years ago in the Progressive era.

The Progressives' big year for taking over the economy was 1913, with the income tax and the Federal Reserve Act.

But the political takeover was earlier — according to historian Murray Rothbard, it began precisely 30 years earlier with something called the Pendleton Act of 1883.

The Act made bureaucrats professionals who are independent of politicians. This was allegedly to fight corruption, but note that a bureaucracy that’s independent of politicians is also independent of voters.

After all, politicians are the only part of the government who answer to voters. So if bureaucrats don't answer to them, who do they answer to?

Simple: they answer to nobody. The government bureaucracy becomes a self-serving occupying army. By design.

Once installed with Pendleton, this independent bureaucracy was, of course, captured by the left — socialists. Because they both wanted the same thing: increased government control.

They began in the Progressive Era with widespread regulations that were billed as “reining in” Big Business but were, of course, written by Big Business, marketed by their paid socialist activists, then implemented by bureaucrats whose funding came from politicians on the payroll — well, the donor lists — of Big Business.

And so was born our Corporatist system — of course, there’s another word for it that begins with F and ends in -ism, but then I’m not trying to get censored.  

The Long Evil History of Government Involvement in Healthcare

the combination of exempting health insurance from the World War II wage controls and then giving health insurance a significant tax break firmly institutionalized employer-sponsored health insurance in the United States.

Robert Wenzel writes. . . 

I recently reported on The Long Evil Role of Government in Creating the Education Monster, after reading Glenn Harlan Reynolds's book, The New School: How the Information Age Will Save American Education from Itself. 

Now, I am reading Reinventing American Health Care: How the Affordable Care Act will Improve our Terribly Complex, Blatantly Unjust, Outrageously Expensive, Grossly Inefficient, Error Prone System, the very evil Ezekiel Emanuel (Rahm Emanuel's brother),  who played a major role in the designing of Obamacare.

I suspect the book will ultimately outrage me but, in its early chapters, Emanuel provides a semi-decent history of government involvement in healthcare. He writes:

In the 1940s and 1950s the federal government fueled a huge expansion in the construction of hospitals...

The Hill-Burton Act of 1946 was the first major health care act that the federal government funded. Over  the next 25 years Hill-Burton contributed funds to approximately a third of all hospital construction...

Another postwar transformation in hospitals was the creation of Medicare in 1965. As Rashi Fein...has pointed out, many hospital administrators had plans for expansion...but were waiting for donors . . . 

Medicare obliterated the need for hospitals to provide free or subsidized care for poor elderly patients. In addition, to buy off hospitals and pre-empt any ideas of boycotting Medicare, the Medicare payments were made generous, Essentially Medicare paid hospitals cost plus a percentage...This wildly inflationary payment system lasted until DRGs and prospective payment were introduced in the 1980s . . . 

Before 1900...[there was] a constant battle between different sects: homoeopaths, meopaths, electics, osteopaths and allopaths... In 1904...the American Medical Association established the Council of Medical Education . . . 

To support the AMA's new standards, the Carnegie Foundation for the Advacement of Teaching commissioned Abraham Flexner, who was neither a physician nor a scientist to survey American and Canadian medical schools...Ultimately he recommended that there be fewer schools . . . 

[Note: In Making Economic Sense, Murray Rothbard provides a clue on how Flexner got his job and what was behind his decisions:

Abraham Flexner, an unemployed former owner of a prep school in Kentucky, and sporting neither a medical degree nor any other advanced degree, was commissioned by the Carnegie Foundation to write a study of American medical education. Flexner’s only qualification for this job was to be the brother of the powerful Dr. Simon Flexner, indeed a physician and head of the Rockefeller Institute for Medical Research. Flexner’s report was virtually written in advance by high officials of the American Medical Association, and its advice was quickly taken by every state in the Union.

The result: every medical school and hospital was subjected to licensing by the state, which would turn the power to appoint licensing boards over to the state AMA. The state was supposed to, and did, put out of business all medical schools that were proprietary and profit-making, that admitted blacks and women, and that did not specialize in orthodox, “allopathic” medicine: particularly homeopaths, who were then a substantial part of the medical profession, and a respectable alternative to orthodox allopathy.

Thus through the Flexner Report, the AMA was able to use government to cartelize the medical profession: to push the supply curve drastically to the left (literally half the medical schools in the country were put out of business by post-Flexner state governments), and thereby to raise medical and hospital prices and doctors’ incomes.]

Physicians, still wary [in the early 1930s] of any financial intermediary between them and patients, were hostile to any form of health insurance that covered physician services . . . .

[But the AMA softened its position.]The Great Depression depressed the utilization of physician services and physicians' income fell. Furthermore, there were increasing calls for compulsory, government-sponsored national health insurance, but the AMA viewed private voluntary health insurance preferable to government insurance...In 1934, as a prelude to the battle over compulsory health insurance that they suspected would be in Roosevelt's Social Security legislation, the AMA specified principles that should govern any insurance for physicians...

The Stabilization Act of 1942 required that the president stabilize prices and wages at September 15, 1942 levels. The day after its passage President Roosevelt issued an executive order that . . . excluded insurance benefits from controls...As a consequence, by 1950  nearly two-thirds of working Americans had health insurance for hospital stays...

Thus, the combination of exempting health insurance from the World War II wage controls and then giving health insurance a significant tax break firmly institutionalized employer-sponsored health insurance in the United States.