Benito Hermión.
The Free Society was a set of social welfare programs announced by Mexican Chief of State Benito Hermión in 1883. Hermión was motivated to create the Free Society by the haunting fear that he was not as popular as his father, the martyred former President Pedro Hermión.
The Free Society programs Hermión announced included universal public education, including a stipend for anybody studying to enter a profession deemed vital to the nation's security and welfare. Other programs announced were free health insurance; a guaranteed annual wage of $1,000 per household; paid vacation days; a Youth Patrol in which every boy and girl would serve; government-subsidized housing with a ceiling at 10% of household income; and special benefits, including a cash subsidy, for each child that was born into a family.
Funding for the Free Society came from a variety of sources. Hermión imposed a tax on foreign holdings, an increase in import duties, a sharply graded income tax, and new taxes on corporations. Further revenue came from increased oil exports, confiscations from citizens of the revolutionary French republic, and a large loan by the government of the Germanic Confederation following the signing of the Amisdad Treaty in 1886. Hermión also forced Kramer Associates to sell the Mexican government half ownership in the Kinkaid Canal. However, funding for the Free Society was never sufficient to meet all of Hermión's promised programs, since he was obliged to exempt his backers K.A. and Petroleum of Mexico from his corporate taxes. In fact, revenue for the Free Society actually fell steadily, since K.A. systematically absorbed smaller companies until by 1890 the company controlled almost 70% of Mexico's non-petroleum industry. As funding fell, the U.S.M.'s budget deficit increased rapidly.
Although the Free Society programs were popular, the perpetual funding shortfall meant that almost none of them were carried through to completion except for the Youth Patrol and the childbirth benefits.
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Sobel's sources for the Free Society are Hermión's The Mexico of My Heart (Mexico City, 1886); James Mudd's The Hermión Regime: A Study in Corrupt Power (London, 1954); and Arnold Jacobson's Big Business in the Free Society (Melbourne, 1958).