The Ends of Freedom

"Economist Mark Paul considers the history of American rights and freedoms as determinants of American economic well-being. The failed promise of FDR's New Deal and LBJ's Great Society programs to secure positive rights for all Americans (the right to a decent education, a good job, adequate health care, and a greater capacity for economic flourishing) have left the country fractured by inequality and stifled in social mobility. Paul traces this shift not only to the unrealized promise of the twentieth-century reforms, but to the simultaneous rise of neoliberalism (the conflation of freedom and markets, the vilification of government intervention in public life) as a persisting source of American injustice. Building on the history of this trend, he offers policy prescriptions to reinvigorate American equality and mobility, including economic ones for the question: how do you pay for it?"--