Past & Present

The economic crisis has made us think again about how much a government should intervene in the economy and for what purposes. The silly exchange this week between Barack Obama and Joe (the plumber) Wurzelbacher has focused the question on the idea of “spreading the wealth.”

I don’t know this blog at all, but I found Mahablog did a terrific job of excavating President Theodore Roosevelt’s ideas on capitalism, state intervention, and economic justice. Very timely. Here ’s Mahablog quoting TR:

“The absence of effective State, and, especially, national, restraint upon unfair money-getting has tended to create a small class of enormously wealthy and economically powerful men, whose chief object is to hold and increase their power. The prime need is to change the conditions which enable these men to accumulate power which is not for the general welfare that they should hold or exercise.

My only moral to the story is to try to tamp down this anti-intellectual streak in political talk that wants to replace social science with anecdotes and gotchas: The U.S. government is going to play a role in a twenty-first-century economy. Do not pretend we are all Jefferson’s yeoman farmers any more or the pin-maker of Adam Smith.  The smarter question is what that government role should be, and to whose benefit? By saying “don’t spread the wealth”, conservatives are leaving unsaid their real message: “keep spreading it upward.”

The New York Times gives a video-and-sound format for comparing our current economic crisis and the Depression of the 1930s. That’s good for the text-averse, but this isn’t that exciting. Thankfully it has some nice images at the end.