From Delancey Place:
Today's selection -- from The Middle Out by Michael Tomasky.
In his new book, The Middle Out,
political journalist Michael Tomasky charts an alternative version of
capitalism with the objective of broader prosperity. As part of that, he
examines the history of political and economic thought since World War
II:
"It should be said that none of [the U.S.] growth and prosperity [in the years following World War II] was inevitable. Early during World War II, as it became clear, in the United States and the U.K. in particular, that the Allies were likely to win the war eventually, economic and political minds turned toward the postwar economy. They did so with considerable trepidation. To appreciate this, we have to imagine the wartime economy, barely comprehensible to us today in our age of unquenchable consumerism. This was a time when millions of people were doing without. Meat, sugar, rubber, gasoline, and many other goods were rationed. Governments issued pamphlets to housewives instructing them on how to squeeze everything they could out of the groceries they were allowed to buy. There was a Home Front Pledge that even Eleanor Roosevelt took: 'I will pay no more than top legal prices. I will accept no rationed goods without giving up ration points.' As the end of the war approached, some critics observed that the upper classes were growing a bit weary of all this. The historian Isser Woloch wrote that in the summer of 1944, in his regular newspaper column, George Orwell noted that certain cars on the British rail system were once again being designated first-class, a distinction that had disappeared after the war's onset, and that some gated private parks in London, 'which had been opened to the public when the government requisitioned their iron railings for scrap metal in 1940,' were once again being closed off.
"There was deep fear among policy makers in both the United States and the U.K. that the economy would tank when the war ended. The wartime economy put everyone to work, including women, who had previously mostly stayed at home; the transition to a peacetime economy would surely reduce employment and lead to some serious dislocations and a period of labor strife. Inflation fears were rampant, too, because wartime laws on price stabilization across a host of sectors were due to be lifted.
"Wartime planners like the New Dealer Chester Bowles, who as the war drew to a close headed the Office of Price Administration (where a young Richard Nixon worked for a time), saw all this coming and wanted to avoid these shocks. But they were also driven by larger, historic motivations in both the United States and Britain: that these nations, the world's two most durable democracies, must not simply revert to the way things were before; that they were going to emerge from the war, first, in a new position of economic and political supremacy vis-a-vis the rest of the world and, second, with something of a duty to deliver on the mighty ideals they had invoked in fighting Hitler and would continue to invoke against Stalin during the Cold War....
....MUCH MORE
