The Case For Big Government

From Right Democrat:

Jeff Madrick argues for an activist role by government in a new book. Here's a description of The Case for Big Government from the publisher's website:

Political conservatives have long believed that the best government is a small government. But if this were true, noted economist Jeff Madrick argues, the nation would not be experiencing stagnant wages, rising health care costs, increasing unemployment, and concentrations of wealth for a narrow elite. In this perceptive and eye-opening book, Madrick proves that an engaged government--a big government of high taxes and wise regulations--is necessary for the social and economic answers that Americans desperately need in changing times. He shows that the big governments of past eras fostered greatness and prosperity, while weak, laissez-faire governments marked periods of corruption and exploitation. The Case for Big Government considers whether the government can adjust its current policies and set the country right.

Madrick explains why politics and economics should go hand in hand; why America benefits when the government actively nourishes economic growth; and why America must reject free market orthodoxy and adopt ambitious government-centered programs. He looks critically at today's politicians--at Republicans seeking to revive nineteenth-century principles, and at Democrats who are abandoning the pioneering efforts of the Great Society. Madrick paints a devastating portrait of the nation's declining social opportunities and how the economy has failed its workers. He demonstrates that the government must correct itself to address these serious issues.

A practical call to arms, The Case for Big Government asks for innovation, experimentation, and a willingness to fail. The book sets aside ideology and proposes bold steps to ensure the nation's vitality.

Jeff Madrick's most recent book is Why Economies Grow. He is a regular contributor to the New York Review of Books and a former economics columnist for the New York Times. He is editor of Challenge magazine and senior fellow at the New School's Schwartz Center for Economic Policy Analysis.

Read the first chapter of The Case for Big Government here (PDF).

Huge numbers voted Democrat last year because they wanted their country back. The name of that country is America. She is the country that long led the world in protecting high-wage, high-skilled, high-status jobs both against the exportation of that labour to un-unionised, child-exploiting sweatshops, and against the importation of those sweatshops themselves. And she is the country that could until very recently say that she led the world in that she “did not seek for monsters to destroy”.

For she is the country of big municipal government, of strong unions whose every red cent in political donations buys something specific, of very high levels of co-operative membership, of housing co-operatives even for the upper middle classes, of small farmers who own their own land, and of the pioneering of Keynesianism in practice.

At the same time, those same voters made it clear at exactly the same polls that (in Florida and California) they wanted back the country where marriage only ever means one man and one woman, that (in Colorado) they wanted back the country that does not permit legal discrimination against working-class white men, and (in Missouri and Ohio) that they wanted to preserve the country where gambling is not deregulated. The name of that country is America, too.

The betrayal of those voters by Obama where appointments are concerned has already cost the Democrats a Senate seat in Georgia, and thus a filibuster-proof Senate majority.

Midterm meltdown awaits unless both Obama and the Congressional Democrats wake up to these realities.