Remember the Gilded Age
[No boom and bust] was greater than the financial crisis that began in September 1873 with the collapse of Jay Cooke & Co., the nation’s premier investment bank [which] launched the first economic crisis of the Industrial Age. ... In the face of economic calamity and skyrocketing unemployment, the government did, well, nothing. ...
The vast disparities between rich and poor, the spectacular concentration of wealth amassed by the richest Americans in the previous two generations, and the inability of government policies to mitigate the crisis brought the nation to the edge of class warfare and social disintegration. ...
Today, new fortunes have been accumulated that rival those of the Gilded Age. ... Before [rich conservatives] and their allies in Congress move forward with the dismantling of the welfare state, however, they might think harder about the reasons such policies were put in place.
The Gilded Age plutocrats who first acceded to a social welfare system and state regulations did not do so from the goodness of their hearts. They did so because the alternatives seemed so much more terrifying.
- "What history teaches us about the welfare state" by Francois Furstenberg, Washington Post, July 1
The vast disparities between rich and poor, the spectacular concentration of wealth amassed by the richest Americans in the previous two generations, and the inability of government policies to mitigate the crisis brought the nation to the edge of class warfare and social disintegration. ...
Today, new fortunes have been accumulated that rival those of the Gilded Age. ... Before [rich conservatives] and their allies in Congress move forward with the dismantling of the welfare state, however, they might think harder about the reasons such policies were put in place.
The Gilded Age plutocrats who first acceded to a social welfare system and state regulations did not do so from the goodness of their hearts. They did so because the alternatives seemed so much more terrifying.
- "What history teaches us about the welfare state" by Francois Furstenberg, Washington Post, July 1