Were the European and American systems similar 100 years ago or 150 years ago?
I think that’s a good question. At one time, in the 1880s, the United States was looked upon as having the most advanced system in the world, and everybody thought our system would influence all the others. We had something called the Knights of Labor, which was not a jurisdictional system, which admitted blacks and women and was not a craft system of bosses and clients at all. … In one year, the Knights of Labor were destroyed, although they had almost a million members. And the AFL [American Federation of Labor], which was basically created by the local craft unions to fight the Knights of Labor, succeeded, and we’ve been stuck with this model ever since. Whereas in Europe, about the turn of the century, they began to form genuine national unions, and the difference has just accelerated since then. And the consequence, I think, of the different models, is that the European countries basically have social democracies in which there’s national health care. And the American system is
