New Republic editor John Judis has a couple of insights about the Obama administration’s economic and social goals. He points out that, for more than a century, Progressive and free-market forces have gone through cycles of “reform and reaction.”
The Progressives — who the Antiplanner’s faithful ally John Baden calls the “American counterrevolutionaries” — have repeatedly sought to increase the size and scope of government: railroad regulation, public land agencies, and the income tax in the 1900s; social security, low-interest home loans, and government ownership of power plants in the 1930s; medicare, the war on poverty, and environmental laws in the 1960s.
In between, friends of free markets tried to roll back these reforms, but were never completely successful. Thus, each successive reform era has further increased government power and reduced free markets.
