Things We Read Today: Arbitrary Distinctions Edition
[Harry] Hopkins did not often wax eloquent about his vision for the WPA [but] as Flanagan related later in her memoir, Arena, he talked “about engineering, about the building of airports, about the cities, about the countryside through which we were passing; but no matter what we started to talk about, it ended up with what was at that time the core and center of his thinking–the relationship of government to the individual. Hadn’t our government always acknowledged direct responsibility to the people? Hadn’t it given away the national domain in free land to veterans and other settlers? Hadn’t it given away vast lands to railroad companies to help them build their systems? Hadn’t the government spent fortunes on internal improvements, subsidizing the building of roads and canals, waterways and harbors? Hadn’t the government subsidized infant industries by a protective tariff? Hadn’t the government also given away other intangible parts of the public domain, such as franchises to public utilities, the power to issue currency and create credit to banks, patent rights to inventors? In all of these ways, government enlarged industries, put men to work and increased buying power.
“[The works program] would accomplish these same ends by giving of the nation’s resources in wages to the unemployed, in return for which they would help build and improve America.”
–From “American Made: The Enduring Legacy of the WPA” by Nick Taylor.
“Flanagan” was Hallie Flanagan, who was the head of the WPA theater program (for more on which see Tim Robbins’ excellent 1999 film “The Cradle Will Rock.” The reason that Hopkins felt obligated to make the list that he did, then contrast it with direct aid to workers, is that then and now, government subsidies for banks and industries are commonplace, but even in extraordinary emergencies, helping individuals is controversial. There’s obviously nothing wrong with the things that Hopkins listed; they are all ways the government can help keep the economy primed. However, dough that’s supposed to trickle down doesn’t always trickle, and you’ve got to help both ends of the system, producer and consumer, lest the latter turn into the roadkill of capitalism. The weird part of it is that somehow, in the Herbert Hoover calculation that still holds sway with many, when government helps the people, it is destroying the power of moral hazard and taking away their initiative, but when it compensates banks that decided to play dice with the economy it’s not doing the same thing.
See also: Senator Borah’s comments in a previous Things We Read Today.
