Land of the Free Market?

Hip…hip…hooray!

Let’s hear it for Independence Day. We licked the British at Yorktown, Virginia, with the help of the French fleet. Ever since, America has been the land of the free.

Free people. Free minds. Free markets.

But what’s this? Vicky Pelaez in El Diario La Prensa:

‘There are approximately 2 million inmates in state, federal and private prisons throughout the country. According to California Prison Focus, “no other society in human history has imprisoned so many of its own citizens.”

‘The figures show that the United States has locked up more people than any other countray: a half million more than China, which has a population five times greater than the U.S.

‘Statistics reveal that the United States holds 25% of the world’s prison population, but only 5% of the world’s people. From less than 300,000 inmates in 1972, the jail population grew to 2 million by the year 2000. In 1990 it was one million. Ten years ago there were only five private prisons in the country, with a population of 2,000 inmates; now, there are 100, with 62,000 inmates. It is expected that by the coming decade, the number will hit 360,000, according to reports.’

The prison industry complex

What has happened over the last 10 years? Why are there so many prisoners? More from Pelaez:

‘The private contracting of prisoners for work fosters incentives to lock people up. Prisons depend on this income. Corporate stockholders who make money off prisoners’ work lobby for longer sentences, in order to expand their workforce.

‘“The system feeds itself,” says a study by the Progressive Labor Party, which accuses the prison industry of being “an imitation of Nazi Germany with respect to forced slave labor and concentration camps.”

‘The prison industry complex is one of the fastest-growing industries in the United States and its investors are on Wall Street.

‘“This multimillion-dollar industry has its own trade exhibitions, conventions, websites, and mail-order/Internet catalogs. It also has direct advertising campaigns, architecture companies, construction companies, investment houses on Wall Street, plumbing supply companies, food supply companies, armed security, and padded cells in a large variety of colors.”’

We’re not going to let a little thing like forced labor spoil our Freedom Fest holiday.

Anyway, it is only poor people who get caught up in the prisons’ slave market. So, we have nothing to worry about. We can hire a shyster lawyer when we need one.

Besides, we like the Land of the Free. Which is to say, we appreciate hypocrisy. After all, it is the ‘homage that vice pays to virtue’. Without it, virtue wouldn’t get any strokes at all.

Read the rest of this article at The Daily Reckoning