A Leftist Against the New Deal

Over at Counterpunch. I haven’t had time to read the whole thing but this paragraph certainly struck my fancy:

Indeed, the New Deal did not even work in rescuing capitalism, which was Roosevelt’s stated goal; it took the total militarization of the U.S. economy to accomplish that. However, even before entering the war, nearly every New Deal economic recovery and development program enriched already existing corporations, such as Bechtel and Brown and Root, as well as creating new ones. The ground was set for rapid militarization through contracts with these new corporate giants and massive employment through the military draft and wartime production. The military-industrial complex is the essential result of New Deal policies.

Hat tip Jesse Walker.

David Beito is a Research Fellow at The Independent Institute and editor of the Independent book, The Voluntary City: Choice, Community, and Civil Society (with Peter Gordon and Alexander Tabarrok).
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