Inequality lies at the heart of contemporary American politics—from the dizzying power of corporations and the billionaire class to the racialized and gendered dimensions of wealth and income disparities. Yet the question of economic justice, as well as the struggle to attain it, also has long historical roots. Mark Paul joins The Marc Steiner Show to discuss his new book, The Ends of Freedom: Reclaiming America’s Lost Promise of Economic Rights, an historical treatment of historical pursuits of economic equality in America spanning centuries.
Mark Paul is an Assistant Professor of Economics at the Edward J. Bloustein School of Planning and Public Policy Rutgers University. He is a political economist working in the areas of inequality and environmental policy.
Studio / Post-Production: David Hebden
Transcript
The following is a rushed transcript and may contain errors. A proofread version will be made available as soon as possible.
Marc Steiner:
Welcome to the Marc Steiner Show here on The Real News. I’m Marc Steiner. It’s great to have you all with us again. We’re going to talk about a book today. It’s called The Ends of Freedom. It’s a really fascinating book by Rutgers professor Mark Paul. Its subtitle is reclaiming America’s Lost Promise of Economic Rights. It takes us on a journey from the legacy of Thomas Paine and Alexander Hamilton to Lincoln and the Radical Republicans, FDR, A. Philip Randolph, Henry Wallace, Martin Luther King, and some of the folks we might not remember, like Harry Hopkins, all of them fighting and organizing for everything from the Freedom Budgets to the Bill of Economic Rights.
This is not just a journey through our past struggles. It looks at the struggles between negative and positive freedoms, the battles for the soul and future of our nation, and what all that says about where we are today. I said our guest is Mark Paul. He’s assistant professor at the Bloustein School of Planning and Public Policy at Rutgers. His work has appeared in numerous publications, New York Times, Economist, Washington Post, The Nation, Financial Times, covering the spectrum, and joins us now to talk about this book, the Ends of Freedom, Reclaiming America’s Lost Promise of Economic Rights. And Mark, welcome, good to have you with us.
Mark Paul:
It’s wonderful to be here with you.
Marc Steiner:
So this is a pretty expansive book. I mean…
Mark Paul:
I just did off a few things.
Marc Steiner:
Yeah, just a couple of things. Just a couple of things. So let’s take it from the beginning and talk a bit about your approach to this subject, what we face in the world today, but why you took us on this journey and what that journey was.
Mark Paul:
Look, I didn’t grow up wanting to be an economist. I don’t know about you.
Marc Steiner:
Who does?
Mark Paul:
Some people grow up wanting be a journalist, but I don’t know any six year old that wants to be an economist when they grow up. But from when I was 14, I really wanted to be a chef. And thanks to public broadcasting, Julia Child on PBS helped me learn how to cook. And I worked in restaurants since I was 14 and I loved it and I still love it here today. And the reason I start here is because this is what got me interested in economics. It was the real world. It was working on the line at high-end restaurants next to immigrants who had been showing up for work 60 hours a week every week. And they were making marginally above minimum wage, maybe $10 an hour, $12 an hour, but they were nowhere close to being able to make ends meet.
And none of us, with the exception of the head chef and sous chef, could actually afford to eat in the restaurant we’re cooking in. And this got me interested in inequality, and this notion of the American dream and work hard, you’ll get ahead. And I just kept realizing so many people around me are working so incredibly hard, yet the barriers of inequality are just blocking their road to success time and time again. And it’s at that point that I really started studying the economic system and started realizing that here in the United States we have 40 million people in poverty. We have another a hundred million people living just a paycheck away, a lost paycheck away from economic imprecarity. And there’s nothing natural about that. It really is a policy choice. And so I went to school for economics, but let me tell you, economists don’t really study history these days.
And it was later in my time as a graduate student studying economics that I decided to look back in American history and understand a little bit more about this promise of the American dream and this promise of freedom here in the United States. Jefferson’s proposed life, liberty, and pursuit of happiness. Because I realize that in order for those words to ring meaningful, to be held true, we not only need political rights, we not only need social rights, we not only need reproductive rights, all rights which are increasingly coming under attack, but we also need economic rights. We need food on the table, a roof over our head, healthcare when we’re sick and the like. So that set me on a course to study American history and better understand how we’ve been thinking about this notion of economic provisioning throughout American history because the story we tell today, which is a story of unfettered free markets coupled with limited government, delivers us to heaven essentially just isn’t working for the vast majority of people.
And I wanted to try to figure out a different story. And the main reason I focus on US history is precisely because today the right completely owns the US story. They completely own the American story. Freedom for instance, the most powerful word in our political discourse is completely associated with the Republican Party today. And I think that’s something that we need to understand and reconsider at a much deeper level because the Republican Party is not exactly delivering freedom for the American people through their policies. And so I wanted to take a look and think about what is a more meaningful robust notion of freedom that lets people actually live dignified lives and be and do what they themselves have reason to value.
Marc Steiner:
So as I was reading the book, one of the things that struck me was your discourses on freedom and how that has been a debate about what America is from the very beginning, and that there have been periods as you write about when your notions of freedom you can, let’s talk a bit about these kinds of ideas about freedom and how they interact and how they confront one another. But this has been the struggle in America from the beginning. That to me rang really true in this book.
Mark Paul:
So when we talk about freedom today, people often think of the Don’t Tread on Me flag. They think of Grover Norquist famous quip, you want to shrink government down to size where you can strangle it in the bathtub coupled with access to markets, which is really a notion of freedom. That is a radical notion of freedom itself. And I think part of what I wanted to do is challenge that. The common understanding we have of freedom today is not the common understanding throughout American history. It’s not the understanding of freedom for those who partook in the Freedom March or wrote the Freedom Budget during the civil rights era. They had a much more robust understanding of freedom, as did our founders. And what they realized was that yes, we need negative freedoms, which are so famously articulated in the Bill of Rights, freedom from government.
But let’s also remember when the founders wrote the Bill of Rights, we were not rebelling against a government of the people for the people by the people. The people were rebelling against a monarchy. So it’s a very different situation than we find ourselves in here today. But those negative freedoms, freedom from government, which are important, we need access to free speech, we need personal protections, but those aren’t sufficient. And that’s where positive freedom comes into play as well. And this idea was articulated clearly by Isaiah Berlin, an Oxford philosopher, but also by another wonderful Oxford philosopher that I wish were better known, T.H. Green, who really talked about to live a dignified and meaningful life, we need our basic economic rights met.
And what’s fascinating is when you look back at the American story, you realize that these were always central to it. Thomas Paine, who wrote the most incendiary pamphlet of the Revolutionary Era, Common Sense, talked at length about the notion how everybody, every single citizen deserved a piece of the collective economic pie, not as charity, not as welfare, but as their birthright. Because to be a citizen, it meant that everybody got not just those political rights, but also economic stability. And we actually see this play out through American history. The Homestead Act might be the most famous example of this, where Lincoln and the radical Republicans intentionally redistributed land larger than Texas today to try to provide economic security to new settlers.
Marc Steiner:
So a couple of things here, one is that when you look at the struggles in this country historically, before we get into your ideas about what these struggles tell us about where we could go and we can talk a bit about how we can get there, is that there’s always been this battle in America over the notion of freedom and what that means. And a lot of it was based that you touch on in portions of your book around race, around enslavement, around racism, segregation that also has hurt the struggle for freedom as well as advancing the struggle for freedom.
So I’m curious, having gone through all of this, when you look at Thomas Paine and even Hamilton, when you look at the struggles in the Civil War and the three acts that you focus on of the radical Republicans that they created, we can talk about, and then you look at how that was defeated and thrown back, and you look at then the New Deal that you spent a lot of time talking about and how that kind of changed America in profound ways. And again, the pushback that puts us in the place where we are today in struggling for what freedom and equality actually means and economic freedom. So talk about how you see that historic dynamic, why it has been played out the way it’s played out, and where you think that takes us.
Mark Paul:
Yeah, I think it’s a crucial point. Look, I just mentioned the Homestead Act a moment ago. And the Homestead Act, it’s important to note largely was available to white male settler. And in general, the vast majority of blacks were excluded from the Homestead Act. Now we did for a brief moment, have 40 acres and a mule, which unfortunately was essentially repealed following the assassination of Lincoln. But this country is founded on settler colonialism and we do need to reckon with that fact. And Aziz Rana’s work, The Two Faces of Freedom is just absolutely brilliant for folks who want to dig into that notion more. But when we come into the New Deal, for example, we see there too, the New Deal was essentially a Faustian bargain between Roosevelt and Southern segregationists where in many instances, women and black workers, particularly in the South, were excluded from sufficiently benefiting from New Deal programs. So there is a long racist history in this country.
Now the question arises then, does that mean that we should forget that history or does that mean that we need to reckon with that history and when developing legislation to correct it to actually consider how is it that we build the strongest policies moving forward so that we don’t have a real fracturing of the working class, which is what has been happened so many times throughout American history? And this is where the work of King, A. Philip Randolph and Bayard Rustin during the 1960s, I find so instructive. When King for instance, turned his attention to the Poor People’s campaign, he made it very clear that this was not a campaign for poor black Americans. This was a campaign for all of America because he understood that the only way to build meaningful and enduring freedom in this country is for all to be free.
And that meant, and we can get into the policy discussion a little later, but that meant that we have to develop universal policies that benefit everybody. Now the best example of this in our modern political era is when we look at Medicare versus Medicaid. Now Medicare is a high quality program because everybody over the age of 65 is benefiting from it. Medicaid on the other hand, is a substantially lower quality program and comes with much more stigma, particularly because it is a program designed for the poor. So as Wilbur Ross quipped, he’s said one of the chief architects of the New Deal and Great Society programs for the Poor Make Poor Programs. And I think that rings true.
And I think the same thing can be said for race specific programs. If we were to develop a lot of programs just targeted, for instance, towards Black Americans or towards Brown Americans, I think that we would not only create substantial political divides, but I also would not have faith in our ability to build strong and politically enduring programs through that approach. So what we call this, and we can chat about it more, is targeted universalism, programs that apply to all but disproportionately benefit the least well off in society.
Marc Steiner:
So it really screamed out at me from your pages, the different parts of history you talked about, whether it was period of Lincoln and the radical Republicans and the two acts, the Pacific Railroad Act and the Homestead Act, and also the Moral Act. But those first two, especially to me, of course they were, were built on the backs of colonialism and genocide against indigenous people even to be able to make those things happen in the first place.
Mark Paul:
Absolutely.
Marc Steiner:
But that what the radical Republicans tried to do with the freedmen in the South through the 1860s and 70s to what Roosevelt attempted to do and the contradictions of race that you just mentioned that happened there, and then with King and the movement around the Poor Peoples campaign, which I was lucky enough to be really part of. So my question is, what do you think from all the work you’ve been writing about with all of this, what is the dynamic that allows the New Deal to take that as an example, those policies that completely transform America kind of put restraints on capitalism in many ways to fail and give rise to neoliberalism? Do you know what I’m saying? There’s always these push forwards and it seems like there’s this huge pushback because we can’t have that. We can’t have black folks having freedom. You can’t attack the fundamentals of capitalism in America. So why do you think as an economist and a historian as well, why that constantly happens and where that places us now?
Mark Paul:
Yeah, it’s a great question. Often the way I talk about this is as if there’s a pendulum swinging. So prior to the New Deal, the pendulum had swung to the right. We had Hoover, which largely embraced this notion of laissez-faire kind of free markets. And in reaction to Hoover is what precisely gave rise to Roosevelt in the New Deal. And then fast-forward and in the 1960s and early 70s, the reaction to war Keynesianism is precisely what gave rise to modern neoliberalism, which many people start with Reagan. But I would contend actually that Jimmy Carter was our first neoliberal president, Democrat mind you who just hugely embraced the deregulatory state. I mean in his first State of the Union address, he talked about deregulation at great length and really fought to limit government’s capacity. And here today we’re still struggling with the repercussions of what he started.
Now the question arises why. I think that there’s lots of reasons. And the second chapter in my book, I really try to outline how did we get here, meaning the neoliberal state that we are struggling with today. And I think it’s a really challenging question. On one hand, I think that we did have a rise of a coherent theory through the works of folks like Milton Friedman and Frederick Hayek who really outlined what we today call neoliberalism very methodically and very much took this to the people. They did not sit there and exclusively write academic papers. Instead, they worked at length to bring this to the business community and the political community. Friedman famously created a multi-part PBS series to explain his ideas to general audiences. And so they really took these ideas to the street in ways that just had a profound impact.
I think it’s a complicated story though. A number of the other things that occurred was very much the war, Vietnam and kind of the downfall of LBJ. I mean Johnson’s Great Society in general passed multiple pieces of incredible legislation, but was also largely a domestic failure due to his international policies that in part fueled inflation, which kind of opened the door to cracking down on domestic spending programs. So I think in part it was a failure to integrate a domestic progressive agenda with a broader progressive international worldview and agenda.
The final thing I’ll say here is that I also think a substantial part of this was Democrats themselves moving away from the New Deal. I mean Gary Hart for instance, ran on a stump speech, actually entitled The Death of the New Deal. I mean Hart lambasted the New Deal as a Democrat. And so we had the Democrats themselves running away from this as party lines started shifting and the white working class of the South started moving away from the Democratic Party following the civil rights movement.
Marc Steiner:
Again in the book towards the end of the book, you really outlined it in a very profound ways, policies that could actually alter America and move it in the direction that both New Deal and radical reconstruction actually attempted to do and did to an extent. So I’m curious kind of reflecting on your book, let’s talk a bit about those proposals, but also how you think you get there. I mean, clearly the resistance to change has caused the control among Republicans earlier and Democrats now to move to the right and they really have. And now the rise to the right is a profound moment. We’re in that moment at this moment. We see a rise of the right across this country and it’s a pushback even when the idea that we talk about are not in sway and in control. So talk about politically how you see looking at history again, how that begins to change and how you take the ideas that you talk about the end of your book and actually make them both palatable and understood and part of a movement to change.
Mark Paul:
If I had a full answer to that question, I think we’d be in a much better situation than we found ourselves in today. But look, let me do my best here. I mean, one of the reasons I wrote this book, which is it’s meant for a broad audience. I didn’t write this for other economists, I wrote this for your average person who is interested in politics. So for all of those of you who watch the news regularly, I think you’ll found this quite digestible.
Marc Steiner:
And accessible. Very accessible.
Mark Paul:
Yeah. And I think that that’s part of it. Neoliberals did a very nice job making simple supply and demand curves very understandable and accessible to the people. One of the most common classes in college is Economics 101, which teach you basic things like rent control is terrible, minimum wages will implode the labor market, so on and so forth. And guess what? Modern economics, and this is not progressive economics, just modern empirical economics, debunks most of the central tenets of neoliberalism. And so what I try to do is try to arm people with economic literacy so they can understand and think about how many of these progressive ideals programs like college for all, Medicare for all and the like make economic sense. And I try to arm folks with those arguments. And I think that’s very important because we have seen the Democratic Party for decades either embrace neoliberalism or be on defense against neoliberalism.
But what’s really been missing is an affirmative vision about how we can and should structure the economy and why. And that’s precisely what I try to outline with my economic bill of rights. I try to provide us with a North star so people understand what’s the connective tissue between so many of these policy programs that leftists have been talking about certainly for about a century in many instances, but at least in our recent political discourse really since Sanders’s 2016 run. But I think even Sanders himself really struggled to tie this together for voters so that they could understand why is college for all connected to the Green New Deal connected to Medicare for all? What are you really trying to work for versus just having a laundry list? So I think having a coherent vision is really important. And I also think grounding this in the American tradition is crucial to build a broader net than the kind of current left has today.
Marc Steiner:
What does that mean? What do you mean by that, grounding it in the American tradition?
Mark Paul:
Yeah, so a lot of what I’m trying to do here is almost a Howard Zinn economics version where I’m trying to lift up all these stories here in the United States where we’ve struggled for so many of these ideas that get labeled as radical or lefty here today. When you go out and you talk to voters, and we actually did this, and you outline the ideas in an economic bill of rights, not only do we see a vast majority of Democrats supporting it, in fact 92% of Democrats under 45 embrace the notion, but the majority of independents and Republicans do as well. Why? Because freedom is an American idea. And everyday people understand in order to live a free life, you need food and housing and healthcare and the like. And so these ideas are wildly popular and in part they’re popular because they come out of our own American tradition here in the United States that we don’t need to say, hey, look what Finland does. Let’s import those policies. We should do that to a degree. We can learn a lot from our neighbors, don’t get me wrong.
But I also think providing an alternative history to just, we have capitalism, every man works for themselves type of narrative, which is what’s common in the Republican Party is really detrimental. And so people need to be proud while recognizing the struggles we’ve had in the US of this kind of decades and in many cases centuries long struggle for economic justice. In many cases this is what some of our founders really put front end center, not only Paine, but also Hamilton and Jefferson talked about these ideas at length.
Marc Steiner:
So that’s interesting what you just said here, and I was thinking about that I was also was reading in the book that the stories you tell around Thomas Paine, the stories that most people have not heard about ever. I mean like Mr. Hopkins, to most people he’s lost to history are happy because people don’t know who he is or who he was. The question becomes for me how you tell these stories and how you would tell these stories because you do it here. You tell the stories of these men, predominantly men in the book, but men who have pushed these ideas and really fostered change that people could really kind of support. If you look at the polls you talk about, they talk about people actually support these ideas that we call left, but they really become universalist ideas for people for Americans to have a better life. I just wanted to take your book and figure out how to translate that into stories in a broader sense to bring people in to say there can be a different way.
Mark Paul:
Yeah, yeah, that’s absolutely right. Well, let me focus on one of the women that I put front and center in the book-
Marc Steiner:
Go ahead. Yes, please.
Mark Paul:
… Who I absolutely adore is Frances Perkins. I mean she’s somebody that I wish every high school graduating senior had to read about her. She is first of all the longest serving Secretary of Labor in US history. And she was also the first female cabinet member in the United States government. She was Roosevelt’s Secretary of Labor. And when Roosevelt was building his cabinet, he called her in and wanted to ask her if she would serve. And she had long been a labor activist. And when asked this question, she, unlike most people, did not just say yes. Instead, she marched into his office and said, I have a list of demands. If you are willing to back my demands, which included disability insurance, unemployment insurance, modern day social security for retirees, universal health insurance, which is one of the main things she did not win.
In short, she put it to Roosevelt, and this was actually her phrase, “cradle to grave economic security,” which Roosevelt then embraced that idea moving forward. She was really one of the chief architects behind what we call the New Deal today. Yet she doesn’t get near enough love and attention. And I think lifting up these types of historic stories is really important to simply raising awareness of how we got to where we are here today.
Now how do we tell those stories? I think what I try to do, at least in the book, is kind of integrate three pieces to every story. One piece is the historic struggle. So let me give you an example of this. Here in the United States in 1910, we had roughly 12% of the US population graduating from high school and people didn’t want to make high school universal because disproportionately white wealthy people were going to high school. And why would broad-based taxation be applicable to serving the elites, was kind of the argument. The exact same argument mind you that we hear about college for all today. The high school movement, a grassroots movement was able to push forward broad based taxation across the country to publicly finance higher education. Within decades, just a couple of decades, we shot from just over 10% high school graduates to more than half of America graduating high school. It was a tremendous achievement in public education.
And the reason I bring this up is because the arguments levied against it were literally the exact same arguments levied against universal college, college for all here today. And so those stories are so powerful because when we have these debates, often it’s like it’s the first time we’ve had this debate, but in fact, two factoids are important to lift up. One is we’ve had this debate before as it applied to high school, and second, hey, guess what? That thing called the Moral Act that created land grant universities across the country, it was created with the intention of having free college in the first place. And so in fact, the foundation, the bedrock of our modern day higher education system had enshrined into it these notions that were fighting here still hundreds of years later, that education should be free and universal. And lifting those up I think helps people kind of connect the dots that where we are here today didn’t just happen, we legislated it, and that in fact we can choose a different path forward.
Marc Steiner:
I think that that’s a really good example to use. And the Moral Act I think we will look at it and think about, we’re talking about something that happened in 1862, is that right?
Mark Paul:
That’s right.
Marc Steiner:
1862, we’re talking about free education and people understand that as a legacy. And as you go through the book, you also really weigh in on what should be the rallying cries today and how that really does resonate with the American people. But with a neoliberal control of the Democratic Party, it’s almost impossible to get that out. Not impossible, but it makes it tougher. I’m curious if all the things you’ve written about what responses got from certain political leaders?
Mark Paul:
It’s a really great question and some of these ideas that I’ve laid out in the book already have quite a bit of traction. So the one that has the most traction of course is probably Medicare for All. It was a centerpiece of both the 2016 and 2020 Democratic primaries. And we see just tremendous support, including majority support across the nation. So that’s the idea that’s been fleshed out the most. But many of these ideas have been adopted by political leaders. Another one I talk about at length in the book is the idea of a job guarantee, ensuring everybody has access to a well-paying job. This is how overnight we eradicate unemployment and we also eradicate poverty level wages. And actually Senator Booker introduced a pilot program to Congress on this idea. Representative Ayanna Pressley also introduced a very extensive job guarantee resolution. And so many of these ideas have gotten substantial buy-in. I’m lucky enough to have worked with Representative Lee and Jayapal’s offices who just last week introduced a resolution calling for an economic bill of rights into Congress.
So these ideas are starting to gain steam. And my hope is that they continue to do so as we move forward. And I think progressives are excited about it, but I also think it’s time to hold center’s feet to the fire. I mean, Roosevelt’s portrait right now is in the Oval Office. Biden is the first president to hang up a portrait of Roosevelt rather than a portrait of Washington. And in fact, if Biden wants to actually carry the mantle of the New Deal as he says he does, he needs to realize and hopefully embrace what that actually means. And for Roosevelt, the cherry on top of the New Deal, the culmination of the New Deal was economic rights. And so I think that the struggle here needs to not just be for the left wing of the party to embrace these ideas, which they increasingly are, but to connect this to the long struggle for what the Democratic Party actually stands for or at least should stand for.
Marc Steiner:
And given that we are in a place in America now where people are so economically insecure, where people can lose their homes over nothing. And almost half of US families can’t even afford the basics of food and rent. I mean this is, we’re at that moment where it could go one way or the other. And what your book is doing here to me is outlining the real potential to look at the New Deal, to look at the radical Republican era, to look at some of the founding folks, fathers of this country to say, the kernel of that is there. And we have to expand that and understand it and explain it, put it out there, and the people will come.
Mark Paul:
That’s right. I think that by providing this message to people and by helping them understand what is a coherent alternative to neoliberalism, I think that it’s a really important unifying message and rallying cry. I mean, we all have a dozen books on our bookshelves that talk about how neoliberalism dead or almost dead, or it might be done soon. And what they all do is in the last chapter, they squish in, and this is what we should do now. And I flip that formula on its head, and the bulk of this book is really talking about what is the economy we want? How do we build it? And answering the important question, is it feasible? And not to give it all away, but the answer is yes, it is feasible.
We can do these things. We can afford to ensure that we eradicate unemployment and that we actually house each and every person here in this country, and that we actually educate those who want a college education. We can do these things. It’s not an economic problem, it’s a political will problem. And I think really pulling back those curtains is crucial to help the electorate wake up and demand more.
Marc Steiner:
And it is one of the ways to clearly fight the rise of the right and in the process, fight the racism that plagues this nation and build something different. And let me just say one of the things, Mark Paul, that really struck me about this book. I’ve been doing this for years and sometimes I’m loathed to pick up a book by an academic, even though many of my friends are academics because they can be so bloody ponderous. But your book is not ponderous at all. It’s really accessible and really well done and I appreciate it. The book is The Ends of Freedom, Reclaiming America’s Lost Promise of Economic Rights. And Mark Paul it’s been a great discussion. I look forward to actually having you rejoin us for different discussions as we look at this and parse it out and bring you into discussions with other kind of activists and political leaders to say, this is where we are and this is where we can go. So I deeply appreciate the work you did and for joining us here today on the Mark Steiner Show at The Real News.
Mark Paul:
It’s been a great pleasure.
Marc Steiner:
Thank you so much. I hope you enjoyed our conversation today with Mark Paul about his book, The Ends of Freedom, Reclaiming America’s Lost Promise of Economic Rights. It’s a really good read, it’s highly accessible. Check it out. And thank you all for joining us today. Please let me know what you thought about the conversation today, what you’d like us to cover. Just write to me at mss@therealnews.com and I’ll get right back to you. And by the way, while you’re there, stay there for a minute. Go to www.therealnews.com/support. Become a monthly donor, become part of the future with us. For David Hebden and Kayla Rivara and the crew here at The Real News, I’m Marc Steiner. Stay involved, keep listening, and take care.
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