The musings of a physician who served the community for over six decades
367 Topics
Downtown A discussion about downtown area in Philadelphia and connections from today with its historical past.
West of Broad A collection of articles about the area west of Broad Street, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania.
Delaware (State of) Originally the "lower counties" of Pennsylvania, and thus one of three Quaker colonies founded by William Penn, Delaware has developed its own set of traditions and history.
Religious Philadelphia William Penn wanted a colony with religious freedom. A considerable number, if not the majority, of American religious denominations were founded in this city. The main misconception about religious Philadelphia is that it is Quaker-dominated. But the broader misconception is that it is not Quaker-dominated.
Particular Sights to See:Center City Taxi drivers tell tourists that Center City is a "shining city on a hill". During the Industrial Era, the city almost urbanized out to the county line, and then retreated. Right now, the urban center is surrounded by a semi-deserted ring of former factories.
Philadelphia's Middle Urban Ring Philadelphia grew rapidly for seventy years after the Civil War, then gradually lost population. Skyscrapers drain population upwards, suburbs beckon outwards. The result: a ring around center city, mixed prosperous and dilapidated. Future in doubt.
Historical Motor Excursion North of Philadelphia The narrow waist of New Jersey was the upper border of William Penn's vast land holdings, and the outer edge of Quaker influence. In 1776-77, Lord Howe made this strip the main highway of his attempt to subjugate the Colonies.
Land Tour Around Delaware Bay Start in Philadelphia, take two days to tour around Delaware Bay. Down the New Jersey side to Cape May, ferry over to Lewes, tour up to Dover and New Castle, visit Winterthur, Longwood Gardens, Brandywine Battlefield and art museum, then back to Philadelphia. Try it!
Tourist Trips Around Philadelphia and the Quaker Colonies The states of Pennsylvania, Delaware, and southern New Jersey all belonged to William Penn the Quaker. He was the largest private landholder in American history. Using explicit directions, comprehensive touring of the Quaker Colonies takes seven full days. Local residents would need a couple dozen one-day trips to get up to speed.
Touring Philadelphia's Western Regions Philadelpia County had two hundred farms in 1950, but is now thickly settled in all directions. Western regions along the Schuylkill are still spread out somewhat; with many historic estates.
Up the King's High Way New Jersey has a narrow waistline, with New York harbor at one end, and Delaware Bay on the other. Traffic and history travelled the Kings Highway along this path between New York and Philadelphia.
Arch Street: from Sixth to Second When the large meeting house at Fourth and Arch was built, many Quakers moved their houses to the area. At that time, "North of Market" implied the Quaker region of town.
Up Market Street to Sixth and Walnut Millions of eye patients have been asked to read the passage from Franklin's autobiography, "I walked up Market Street, etc." which is commonly printed on eye-test cards. Here's your chance to do it.
Sixth and Walnut over to Broad and Sansom In 1751, the Pennsylvania Hospital at 8th and Spruce was 'way out in the country. Now it is in the center of a city, but the area still remains dominated by medical institutions.
Montgomery and Bucks Counties The Philadelphia metropolitan region has five Pennsylvania counties, four New Jersey counties, one northern county in the state of Delaware. Here are the four Pennsylvania suburban ones.
Northern Overland Escape Path of the Philadelphia Tories 1 of 1 (16) Grievances provoking the American Revolutionary War left many Philadelphians unprovoked. Loyalists often fled to Canada, especially Kingston, Ontario. Decades later the flow of dissidents reversed, Canadian anti-royalists taking refuge south of the border.
City Hall to Chestnut Hill There are lots of ways to go from City Hall to Chestnut Hill, including the train from Suburban Station, or from 11th and Market. This tour imagines your driving your car out the Ben Franklin Parkway to Kelly Drive, and then up the Wissahickon.
Philadelphia Reflections is a history of the area around Philadelphia, PA
... William Penn's Quaker Colonies
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Philadelphia Revelations
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George R. Fisher, III, M.D.
Obituary
George R. Fisher, III, M.D.
Age: 97 of Philadelphia, formerly of Haddonfield
Dr. George Ross Fisher of Philadelphia died on March 9, 2023, surrounded by his loving family.
Born in 1925 in Erie, Pennsylvania, to two teachers, George and Margaret Fisher, he grew up in Pittsburgh, later attending The Lawrenceville School and Yale University (graduating early because of the war). He was very proud of the fact that he was the only person who ever graduated from Yale with a Bachelor of Science in English Literature. He attended Columbia University’s College of Physicians and Surgeons where he met the love of his life, fellow medical student, and future renowned Philadelphia radiologist Mary Stuart Blakely. While dating, they entertained themselves by dressing up in evening attire and crashing fancy Manhattan weddings. They married in 1950 and were each other’s true loves, mutual admirers, and life partners until Mary Stuart passed away in 2006. A Columbia faculty member wrote of him, “This young man’s personality is way off the beaten track, and cannot be evaluated by the customary methods.”
After training at the Pennsylvania Hospital in Philadelphia where he was Chief Resident in Medicine, and spending a year at the NIH, he opened a practice in Endocrinology on Spruce Street where he practiced for sixty years. He also consulted regularly for the employees of Strawbridge and Clothier as well as the Hospital for the Mentally Retarded at Stockley, Delaware. He was beloved by his patients, his guiding philosophy being the adage, “Listen to your patient – he’s telling you his diagnosis.” His patients also told him their stories which gave him an education in all things Philadelphia, the city he passionately loved and which he went on to chronicle in this online blog. Many of these blogs were adapted into a history-oriented tour book, Philadelphia Revelations: Twenty Tours of the Delaware Valley.
He was a true Renaissance Man, interested in everything and everyone, remembering everything he read or heard in complete detail, and endowed with a penetrating intellect which cut to the heart of whatever was being discussed, whether it be medicine, history, literature, economics, investments, politics, science or even lawn care for his home in Haddonfield, NJ where he and his wife raised their four children. He was an “early adopter.” Memories of his children from the 1960s include being taken to visit his colleagues working on the UNIVAC computer at Penn; the air-mail version of the London Economist on the dining room table; and his work on developing a proprietary medical office software using Fortran. His dedication to patients and to his profession extended to his many years representing Pennsylvania to the American Medical Association.
After retiring from his practice in 2003, he started his pioneering “just-in-time” Ross & Perry publishing company, which printed more than 300 new and reprint titles, ranging from Flight Manual for the SR-71 Blackbird Spy Plane (his best seller!) to Terse Verse, a collection of a hundred mostly humorous haikus. He authored four books. In 2013 at age 88, he ran as a Republican for New Jersey Assemblyman for the 6th district (he lost).
A gregarious extrovert, he loved meeting his fellow Philadelphians well into his nineties at the Shakespeare Society, the Global Interdependence Center, the College of Physicians, the Right Angle Club, the Union League, the Haddonfield 65 Club, and the Franklin Inn. He faithfully attended Quaker Meeting in Haddonfield NJ for over 60 years. Later in life he was fortunate to be joined in his life, travels, and adventures by his dear friend Dr. Janice Gordon.
He passed away peacefully, held in the Light and surrounded by his family as they sang to him and read aloud the love letters that he and his wife penned throughout their courtship. In addition to his children – George, Miriam, Margaret, and Stuart – he leaves his three children-in-law, eight grandchildren, three great-grandchildren, and his younger brother, John.
A memorial service, followed by a reception, will be held at the Friends Meeting in Haddonfield New Jersey on April 1 at one in the afternoon. Memorial contributions may be sent to Haddonfield Friends Meeting, 47 Friends Avenue, Haddonfield, NJ 08033.
is poorly understood without considering two issues which heavily influenced his thinking. First, he was forty years old when the Federal Reserve System was created in 1913; to him in 1929, that's still an experiment. Secondly, the use of gold money had proven over many centuries to be the one and only defense against unrelenting pressure by governments to debase the currency. Hoover's attitudes were certainly reinforced by his own career. He became a rich man consulting and investing in metal mines. Although not born wealthy, when he left the Presidency in the depths of the depression, he moved to an apartment in the Waldorf-Astoria.There are no other examples of such an energetic, imaginative and effective executive in the White House.
Hilter & Mussolini
After leaving his meteoric twenty-year business career in boredom at its lack of challenge, he took on a monumentally successful job of administering famine relief to a European continent devastated by World War I. On occasions in the course of it, he personally confronted both Hitler and Mussolini with disdain. Franklin Roosevelt was so impressed that he suggested him as a Democratic candidate for the Presidency; Hoover declined. He was nominated at the Republican convention on the first ballot, elected in a landslide. As President, he hit the ground running, simply peppering the Congress with innovative programs and proposals. A substantial part of what would be known as Roosevelt's New Deal grew out of initiatives that Hoover had begun during his short presidency.
Stock Market Invincible
Under the circumstances, it is not surprising that Hoover was disturbed by the irrational exuberance of the stock market in 1927-28, undisposed to resist proposals by George Harrison of the Federal Reserve to deflate the stock bubble by tightening the money supply. Some observers feel the fatal illness of Benjamin Strong (President of the New York Branch) weakened the resistance of the Federal Reserve to this adventurism. The stance of Hoover is not now known, but it must have been a toss-up between lifetime allegiances to hard-money and resistance to government intrusion into commerce, particularly by a comparatively new agency. In any event, tightening money worked too well. The stock market tanked in October 1929 FB is shutting down in March,
Stock Market Crash
followed quite promptly by the whole economy. The irony is that Roosevelt proceeded to run for twenty years with the claim that the Depression was caused by Hoover's failure to restrain the 1928 stock bubbles. In fact, the befuddled Federal Reserve bounced around during Roosevelt's time in office as well, turning a recession into the deepest depression in history. When England went off the gold standard, the Federal Reserve tightened again to prevent a flight of American gold to speculators. The result was a run on the banks, so the Fed loosened again, and half of the American banking system disappeared. Following the 1929 crash, the stock market continued to go down -- for fourteen years.
Milton Friedman
After a while, it became clear to everyone that three things -- the money supply, the economy, and the stock market -- go up and down together. The basic question was the same as the political one -- which one goes first, and which ones follow? Although the political parties continue to spin the facts, the world of economists seems nearly unanimous that Milton Friedman and Anna Schwartz and Milton Friedman settled the matter some time ago. Their classic work of scholarship,A Monetary History of the United States 1867-1963 , traces out four American and eleven foreign examples of shifts in monetary tightness which were unrelated to the economy, and demonstrate that the economy promptly follows the direction of the money supply. Almost all of these anomalies took place during the interval after World War I, when the gold standard was temporarily suspended. Different countries returned to gold at different times, and after the 1929 crash abandoned it in different ways at different times. Since the publication of Friedman's work, independent scholars have provided over forty confirmations of the sequence, money leads, the economy follows. And politicians posture. There is a disconcerting note, however. Almost all of the examples studied by monetary scholars could be used as proof of quite a different slogan. In almost every case, a country rescued itself by abandoning the gold standard, and the sooner it got rid of gold, the better it did. That would, of course, be true, during a period of concealed deflation where exuberant economic growth exceeds the expansion of gold supplies. A serious weakness of the gold standard has certainly been identified, leading to expressions like barbarous relic and crucifixion on a cross of gold. But there is the other, time-honored, side of it; since the beginning of history, governments have been tempted to inflate the currency in order to dishonor their debts. Governments will do so again at the first opportunity. Without the discipline of a gold standard, the only dependable defense against the catastrophe of hyperinflation is now the courage of the Federal Reserve, and the rather faint hope that we have learned everything about monetary policy that is important to learn.
REFERENCES
Herbert Hoover: The American Presidents Series: The 31st President, 1929-1933: William E. Leuchtenburg, ISBN-13: 978-0805069587
Steep yield curves (the normal situation) are good for banks; inverted curves (a rarity) are not. The 2006 inversion was caused by the bond market accepting abnormally low long-term interest rates, so the "spread" between risky loans and safe ones displayed a diminished "risk premium".
The Federal Reserve then lowered short-term rates by printing more currency. This caused an inverted yield curve to return to its normal shape, but the 2006 problem was caused by too much(Chinese) money and this action added to it. The banks were rescued, but the currency was inflated.
This innovative response will probably become a standard readjustment. But it only keeps the ship from tipping over after a sudden wave; it doesn't address the approaching storm.
Risk premiums soared in August 2007.
What seemed safe, abruptly was risky, and only available at higher prices.
What happened in August?....The "risk premium" --and, consequently, mortgage interest rates-- suddenly went back to normal. About $90 billion of foreclosures seemed probable. We had built far too many houses for people who couldn't afford them. Surplus houses remain for ten years, depressing all real estate prices, making everybody feel poor. Recession, anyone?
What did the Federal Reserve do? To protect the banks, Bernanke dropped short term interest rates. (This steepens the yield curve.) As the panic spread, he dropped rates some more (This floods the country with money). Inflating the currency cheapens the dollar, which robs foreign investors. Foreigners sold stock to escape, prices fell. Seeing prices fall, everybody else sold a stock. 1929, anyone?
So what? They're only foreigners. If Bernanke raises interest rates, we get a recession. If he keeps them low for too long a time, we may get hyperinflation. So, he probably hopes to drop them for a few months, then raise them again. Jimmy Carter got "stagflation" trying this sort of thing. Green eyeshades, anyone?
Remember how naughty "redlining" was? Well, now we bash the banks for "stupid mortgages". Banks issued cheap mortgages for inflated real estate -- and immediately sold the "subprime loans" to investment bankers as "collateralized bonds". We are still uncertain who holds these things, but at least $40 billion were in the hands of Wall Street when the music stopped. Wall Street had to sell perfectly good (?) stock to pay their debts. Blue chips, anyone?
Why was the risk premium so low? The Far and the Middle East had something to do with it. But mainly, securitization led to undue emphasis on statistics. In a housing boom, foreclosure rates seem to go down but are really only being diluted by new loans. The fall of BNP Paribas was a sudden wake-up. Then, the computers of the "quants" exposed a flaw in their programs when they detected heavy selling of perfectly good stock and announced the End of the World..
Thank heaven it happened before things got serious.
Let's make this as succinct as we can: The Trader's Option is this: what risks will the trader likely take with his employer's money, when he is placed in the position of getting half of any winnings, but when he fails, he only gets fired. Almost any newspaper reports the millions and millions commonly available to lucky traders. There are indeed some timid souls who refuse to take risks of this sort, but on Wall Street, no one wants to hire them. Wall Street wants buccaneers, unafraid of risks. Make your pile as big as you can, take your lumps when you stumble, goodbye. Most of the time, someone else will hire you after six or ten months. No one will ask whether your failures were due to lack of skill or lack of luck. Napoleon once summed it up. He didn't hate unlucky generals, he just fired them.
The odds for the trader are not bad: The Trader's Option compensates richly for the turmoil of a sudden short period of unemployment, which tough-minded traders regard as the price of doing business. But what about the employer? It was his money the trader lost; if the mistakes are bad enough, the firm will go out of business. Unfortunately, often not.
If the traders are poorly trained and poorly controlled if the risk management is more talk than performance, the managers, of course, need to be fired, but ultimately the company goes out of business. But if the Federal Reserve comes along and rescues the company with an infusion of cash when no one else will consider it, moral hazard is created. The Buccaneers will take this rescue as a challenging dare to take even more risks in the future; in the long run, more banks will fail because of soft-heartedness than from tough love. No one worries about the offending bankers, the worry is that the innocent bystanders will get hurt. This is counterparty risk. If the bank is big enough, tangled up with every other major firm, almost everyone in the country could be an innocent bystander.
We will probably never know for certain whether the chaos from letting Bear Stearns fail would have been worse than the moral hazard we now have from rescuing Bear Stearns. What's absolutely clear is that we must quickly get out of the position where these choices have to be made. The completely sensible position is laid out in the proposal by the Federal Reserve to establish a central clearinghouse for financial instruments like Credit Derivatives, which will collect proportional assessments from all participants in the market, to be held in reserve against a market collapse. Not to protect the offending firm which mismanaged its affairs -- that firm must die -- but to protect all the innocent bystanders, the counterparties whose funds were tied up and possibly lost by the offender. The purpose of this insurance policy is not to protect the offender, but to free the hand of the Fed to snuff him out promptly. No one gets hurt here except the offender, and he better get wallopped.
Because the assumption is that a well-run firm will police its ruffians better than an outside regulator can ever hope to do, and will do so even more vigorously if there is absolutely no hope of pardon. The alternative to this bloody-minded approach is the regulation approach -- the Keystone Kops approach.
Western civilization now takes One-man, One-vote for granted in any variant of national governance, and a good thing, too. The Romans modified ancient Greek democracy models into a Republic, allowing slightly modified democracy to become practical for larger governments. Citizens elect representatives, and it is possible to imagine groups of representatives electing their own representatives to higher bodies, and so on, up to the line. As long as democracy remains inflexibly the model for a united Europe, other mechanisms must be adjusted for the obvious inequalities of huge population masses. Since money is the main means of exchange in national systems of compromises, it is a handicap for them to freeze a monetary system in place before governance negotiations have even begun. As a reminder of the American experience, remember that in 1787 Virginia was by far the largest and richest state, not at all the case at present. Indeed, the political landscape then consisted of nine small states ranged against four big ones. Virginia, Pennsylvania, and Massachusetts are no longer considered big states, and New York is fast receding from the top tier. Organizing monetary structures around the size can prove crippling to future designs of unified government, particularly if sufficient time elapses between the two steps. At the very least, leisureliness creates an opportunity to cloak opposition to unification within delaying tactics, presenting arguments to "wait and see" how the monetary system works. At worst, it creates an incentive to make certain the monetary system will not work.
Bitting Gold Coin
However, a bridge player must play the cards as they are dealt with him, and Europe has decided on a piecemeal approach to organizing an eventual political union. The first step of monetary union is in its tenth year, and in deep trouble. Therefore, a new alternative to be considered is whether to have a monetary union without a government to oversee it. Since the Spanish doubloon was for centuries the medium of maritime exchange for the whole western world, it can be done. The doubloon was a gold coin worth its weight in gold, the so-called "piece of eight". Since that kind of money proved entirely workable, the issue of feasibility is one of backing for the currency. When gold from the New World ran low, it was hard to support a growing world economy with a shrinking currency; the price of everything went steadily downward, and local shortages were common. So silver was substituted, and then the coinage became fractional. That is to say, paper money was issued in a fixed ratio to the gold in government vaults. Finally, paper money had no metal backing at all and was issued by central banks in response to the prevailing prices of goods. Using an arbitrary figure of 2% to represent population growth, if the consumer price index plus 2% goes down, the Federal Reserve (or equivalent national central bank) prints more money. Conversely, if it goes up, the Federal Reserve bank stops issuing paper money. The currency is thus "inflation indexed" and its worth guaranteed by the government against an international financial panic. World opinion has a lot to do with the value of a national currency, although in theory, the financial reserves are the sum total of all businesses and property available to the government to confiscate. By encumbering its national property, the government monetizes its assets. Even if it were possible to arrive at a tolerably accurate estimate of the total net worth of a nation, much of it is illiquid and has a considerable cost to monetize it. In practice, however, everyone realizes that the government will never sell an island or peninsula, probably going to war to prevent it happening, or simply going bankrupt or defaulting on its debts. The reserves which are listed as backing its money supply are largely frozen in the face of an actual financial panic. Everyone could name a dozen nations which would probably default, should creditors ever trust them, and there are many more who would seriously consider it. However, there are enough "speculators" who take a chance on this scenario for a fee, to keep the system running. If things start looking ugly, these intermediaries quickly disappear and the "markets are frozen". To protect their economies from this sort of chaos, governments look to merging their currencies, or to promising to rescue other member nations in trouble. A big pool of reserves is inherently safer than a small one, so currency unions are attractive to almost everyone.
GooseStepping
Currency unions, however, look like sausage factories when you get inside and look at the details. Some parts of New England are essentially piles of pebbles with a thin layer of topsoil, while the topsoil in Illinois is mostly four feet deep. Some rivers are full of fish, others are full of pollution, and so forth. As long as we are one united country, local differences are largely ignored; if you can't farm the pebbles in Connecticut, you can move to Greenwich and sell Credit Default Swaps. If that doesn't work, you can move to Illinois, and if you don't like big city political machines, you move to Utah. There's a frictional cost to all of this, but it remains a practical alternative. For Europe, it's not so easy to learn a new language, the schools are not so good in Kosovo, and the price of a taxicab in Paris is astonishing. If you are a gypsy, you are very likely to encounter pitchforks after your first night in the campground. No doubt most of this difference between the continents would disappear after fifty years of political unification, but there would be enough problems to make the survival of the E. U. somewhat questionable for two generations, at least. During all of that time, interest rates would reflect the existence of a real risk, and occasionally crises will appear. Madison, Jefferson, and Hamilton were bosom chums in the 18th Century; within five years of the new nation, they were at each other's throats. Founding Father Robert Morris, one of the richest men in America, was denounced and his motives questioned on the floor of the Legislature by a Western Pennsylvania nobody, within weeks of the Constitutional Convention. Vice President Aaron Burr put a bullet through Secretary of the Treasury Alexander Hamilton. Social upheavals are just that: upheavals. The problems associated with piecemeal approaches to the monetary union and the political union have been mentioned. The other side of it may be that many of the unique monetary problems of Europe have been brought to the surface by the current financial panic, and political solutions to monetary difficulties can be devised in advance if anyone has time to do it.
The political side of Europe is becoming plain. The Germanic tribes to the North are rich and have a history of trying to conquer all of Europe; the Latin tribes of the South are poor and nurse a fairly recent memory of defeated military occupation. The Germans are nevertheless the only possible rescuers of the present financial panic. It will not be easy for the Latin component of Europe to humble themselves before a German financial rescue, but they must do so for decades into the future. Although both groups suffer from the debility of a Welfare mentality, the South has it worse and their financial reserves are very questionable. Unless they are ready to do unlikely things like selling real estate sovereignty, they are going to find the ownership of their companies in German hands, and very likely have to endure the sight of the children of Wehrmacht officers managing their local economy. They will have to be tolerant. The Germans are not happy to work long hours so the Greeks may work shorter ones, and must be forgiven for indignation that German funds donated to rescue the Greek Welfare state are diverted for the personal use of corrupt Greek officials. Nevertheless, such affronts eventually become tolerable; a dozen American cities are at least as corrupt, and the California beaches appear to be utterly devoid of the famous American work ethic. Nevertheless, the most likely stark alternative would seem to leave only America, India and China in charge of major viable economies.
Newsmedia speak of medical "prices", the government speaks of medical "cost" -- what's the difference? Well, for fifteen years in my practice, and before that for thousands of years, prices and costs were nearly the same thing, or at least bore some relation to each other. The person who did the work set the price, and the person who paid the bill agreed to the price.
But out on the West coast they told us Henry J. Kaiser during World War II had expanded the idea of the Mayo Clinic into a pre-paid health system of clinics and pre-agreed patients, paying a set annual fee for all the care you could use in a year. By 1970 I was sent by my local medical society to see what this was all about. I learned a lot, including the main thing which made it so cheap rested on two government tax exemptions, one for the employer and a second one for the employee. They recruited doctors with the promise of relieving them of the business nuisances of medicine, plus instant practice-builders of employee groups of patients. Doctors in the neighborhood didn't like Kaiser at all, particularly after the Maricopa decision of the U.S. Supreme court made it an antitrust violation for doctors to do the same thing. For lawyers reading this, it is a particular irritant that this decision was 4-3 (not a majority), based without a trial of the facts, solely on upholding a motion of summary judgment.
Turning from historical legalities to practical economics, turning that is, from one doctor both doing the work and setting the price, into a third party with no doctors setting the price, the third party (the insurance company) paid its own reimbursement price. So not only did the physicians eventually lose control of pricing their own work, but that price rapidly drifted away from the audited cost in a capricious manner, responding to forces entirely unrelated to medical care. The accountants protested this lack of relationship between cost and price, and it was a legal requirement for hospitals to report (but not make public) the ratio of prices to cost. While the ratio was always high, it was also extremely variable. In effect, a fact demonstrated when the "diagnosis-related" system fixed inpatient costs by groups rather than individually, the disparity was only used to compete for out-patients with outside market prices. However, instead of forcing hospital prices down, it enticed drug companies to force prices up, often to absurd levels. Some hospitals negotiated discounts and applied them as invisible mark-ups to the uninsured patients. Cheap mortgages stimulated hospital building, and the situation spiraled out of control, as it does in any inflation. Nobody ever cured an inflation, except with brute force and lots of pain.
In our system, the money supply is governed by the Federal Reserve issuing and/or buying bonds. In so doing, it is issuing unheard-of amounts of debt for which there is no market, forcing interest rates down. Although the Japanese allow their central bank to buy common stock, Congress is adamant that buying ownership of corporations amounts to Communism with a demonstrated history of universal failure. Congress will probably never permit government take-over of corporation ownership, but Mr. Obama simply spent money beyond Congressional limitation and dared Congress not to pay the bill (and thus to ruin our national credit). Congress is not compelled to make a rational choice between inflation and government control of the private sector, but you can be certain it has been discussed.
I never took a course in economics but it seems to me, a couple of million individual citizens building up half-million dollar portfolios of indexed common stock might provide an adequate balance for three trillion dollars of excess debt. That is, holders of Health Savings Accounts would hold voting control of corporations, without the organization to abuse that power, and that power could never pass into foreign hands because it is contingent on American-based health care. Plenty of other regulations, good and bad, would have to be added for the system to become stable and tamper-proof, but it's a suggestion for debate and study of a possible solution to an entirely unrelated subject. One for which there has been an international shortage of fresh suggestions.
109 Volumes
Philadephia: America's Capital, 1774-1800 The Continental Congress met in Philadelphia from 1774 to 1788. Next, the new republic had its capital here from 1790 to 1800. Thoroughly Quaker Philadelphia was in the center of the founding twenty-five years when, and where, the enduring political institutions of America emerged.
Philadelphia: Decline and Fall (1900-2060) The world's richest industrial city in 1900, was defeated and dejected by 1950. Why? Digby Baltzell blamed it on the Quakers. Others blame the Erie Canal, and Andrew Jackson, or maybe Martin van Buren. Some say the city-county consolidation of 1858. Others blame the unions. We rather favor the decline of family business and the rise of the modern corporation in its place.
Originally the "lower counties" of Pennsylvania, and thus one of three Quaker colonies founded by William Penn, Delaware has developed its own set of traditions and history.
Start in Philadelphia, take two days to tour around Delaware Bay. Down the New Jersey side to Cape May, ferry over to Lewes, tour up to Dover and New Castle, visit Winterthur, Longwood Gardens, Brandywine Battlefield and art museum, then back to Philadelphia. Try it!
Millions of eye patients have been asked to read the passage from Franklin's autobiography, "I walked up Market Street, etc." which is commonly printed on eye-test cards. Here's your chance to do it.
In 1751, the Pennsylvania Hospital at 8th and Spruce was 'way out in the country. Now it is in the center of a city, but the area still remains dominated by medical institutions.
Grievances provoking the American Revolutionary War left many Philadelphians unprovoked. Loyalists often fled to Canada, especially Kingston, Ontario. Decades later the flow of dissidents reversed, Canadian anti-royalists taking refuge south of the border.
