University of Chicago Press, 2023.
Reviewed by Trudy Goldberg
In this ambitious, important book–especially for advocates of economic justice—economist Mark Paul “offer[s] a comprehensive prescription that aims to address the problem of persistent economic insecurity in America, one based on an expanded notion of American freedom and grounded in an alternative model of economic thought.” In The Ends of Freedom, Paul “proposes a new Economic Bill of Rights that is geared to the twenty-first-century economy.” Mark Paul is Assistant Professor at the Bloustein School of Planning & Public Policy, Rutgers University.
The “right to work” is central to Paul’s new Economic Bill of Rights. Acknowledging that the term has been “co-opted and corrupted by conservatives to mean the ability to evade unions through open-shop workplaces,” Paul intends to rehabilitate the term. His definition: “the right to a job at a living wage.” The terms Job Guarantee, Full Employment, and Employment Assurance—also at a living wage–convey the same idea–without the conservative corruption.
American Freedom
In the book’s first section, “American Freedom,” Paul makes the case for his 21st Century Economic Bill of Rights—the need for it; the neoliberal, negative freedom policies that have created economic hardship for millions of Americans; and an alternative conception of economic freedom on which his proposed Economic Bill of Rights is based. In the interest of brevity, this review omits Paul’s extensive, impressive documentation of the “current economic challenges faced by Main Street.”
Neoliberalism has been our reigning economic philosophy since the late 1970s and is responsible for the reversal of one of the important achievements of the New Deal order—growth in national income and concomitant increase in the incomes of people at the bottom half of the income distribution. During the “neoliberalism order” the poorest half of Americans “saw their incomes flatline.” “While growth during the period increased incomes in the United States by 61percent on average, that growth bypassed one out of every two Americans” (1980 to 2014).
Paul writes that “our economic reality, our division into haves and have nots, is the creation of policy makers, or perhaps just the economists on whom they’ve chosen to rely.” U.S. policy has been guided by the author of Capitalism and Freedom, Milton Friedman, for whom Freedom is negative–freed from, not freedom to, and above all, associated with so-called “free markets” and limited government. Larry Summers, economic advisor to Democrats Bill Clinton and Barack Obama, once declared, “We are all Friedmanites now.” Neoliberalism, however, was more than economic policy and a pro-business agenda. As Deepak Bhargava and Stephanie Luce point out, the movement also “tapped into a resurgence of racism and patriarchal ideas.”[1]
Paul correctly observes that Democrat Jimmy Carter began neoliberalism with deregulation policies and “cutting government down to size.” The election of Ronald Reagan “wouldn’t be just a Reagan revolution but a Friedman revolution as well.” He would go further than Carter, implementing Friedman’s “trifecta”: deregulation, cuts to taxes and spending, and labor movement suppression. And the Reagan regime, one adds, would see high unemployment as well. The era of neoliberalism, in addition to severely constraining workers’ freedom, has been marked by significantly slower economic growth than in the Keynesian era.
America’s Other Freedom
The US, writes Paul, has a tradition of positive freedom. That tradition includes Founding Fathers Tom Paine and Alexander Hamilton; two of our greatest presidents, Abraham Lincoln and Franklin Roosevelt; and civil rights leader Martin Luther King, Jr. Paine, “one of history’s great proponents of liberty, equality, and democracy,” developed “the powerful idea that political freedom and economic freedom were ‘mutually interdependent.’” His proposal of universal pensions for the elderly was “setting the groundwork for what was to become Social Security.”
Drawing on the work of economic historians Christian Parenti and Michael Lind, Paul writes that Hamilton, our First Secretary of the Treasury, saw a strong centralized state as a “better guarantor of liberty” than the free market. For Hamilton, the general welfare clause of the Constitution mandated a robust state that would utilize “the means proper” to deliver freedom from want. Hamilton’s ideas were “side-lined in favor of small-government initiatives during the Jeffersonian Revolution of 1800 that favored a minimalist state.”
The inauguration of Lincoln “marked the revival of the American developmental state” — with the enactment of the Homestead Act’s “radical land distribution program”; the Pacific Railroad Act that ceded million acres of land to the railroad companies; and the Morrill Act that “helped create America’s public higher education system.” Although these policies benefited many Americans—and the railroad companies–I note that their effects on Native Americans were disastrous.
Paul discusses the New Deal response to the Great Depression that “laid bare the devastating failures of the laissez-faire order.” He cites Roosevelt’s Commonwealth Club Address, delivered prior to his nomination for the presidency, “in which he spoke of a new ‘economic declaration of rights’ that would fulfill, once and for all, the Founders’ promise of life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.” Paul refers to the well-recognized failure of the New Deal–that despite “massive infusions of cash,” New Dealers never spent enough to end the Depression—until the exigency of a world war forced them to do so. To gain Americans’ willingness to make the sacrifices necessary for waging a world war, Paul observes, Roosevelt “made the war about freedom.” In his 1944 message, with full employment achieved by the requisite government spending, Roosevelt proclaimed the landmark Second or Economic Bill of Rights, asserting that political rights had “proved inadequate to assure us equality in the pursuit of happiness.” “Necessitous men,” he proclaimed are not “free men.”
Included in the panoply of economic freedom proponents, Martin Luther King, Jr. “pivoted from talking about the long denial of civil rights to the long denial of economic rights.” The prior Civil Rights March, however, had already made that connection. It was a March for “Jobs and Freedom.” King joined A. Philip Randolph and Bayard Rustin, authors of A Freedom Budget for All Americans, in emphasizing full employment and assurance of decent and adequate wages. He planned a Poor People’s Campaign–a multiracial march of a million poor people on the Capitol. His speech, “We Need an Economic Bill of Rights,” drafted in preparation for the Poor People’s Campaign, was never delivered, owing to his tragic assassination.
A 21st Century Economic Bill of Rights
In the wake of the Great Recession, “the Left began to organize.” Signs of a “revived Left” were Occupy Wall Street, the Fight for $15, Black Lives Matter, Moral Mondays, a revived Poor People’s Campaign…. This New Left “reinvigorated old conceptions of freedom, including the demand for economic rights.” Also indicative of reviving progressivism was the insurgent 2016 presidential campaign of Senator Bernie Sanders who “spoke engagingly of an economic bill of rights” in some campaign speeches and called for rights to housing and health care. However, Paul writes, “he backed away from earlier calls for economic rights and justice or a comprehensive vision that tied the individual policies together.”
The value of an Economic Bill of Rights, Paul emphasizes, is that it is “a unified vision—a north star of economic reform….” One asks what significance this has for economic justice advocacy–perhaps a unified movement on behalf of the various rights?
An Economic Bill of Rights for today, however, is not a matter of simply repeating FDR’s pronouncement. Some rights can be deemphasized, such as “farmers’ rights to a fair income”–which nonetheless should “most certainly be guaranteed.” Other rights, such as “the right to a safe and clean environment, are more pressing.” These are the Economic Rights that Paul proposes and justifies: The Right to Employment; The Right to Housing; The Right to an Education; The Right to Health Care; The Right to a Basic Income and Banking; The Right to a Healthy Environment. The Ends of Freedom has chapters on each of these rights with impressive documentation of unmet need and consequent hardship along with proposed means of meeting the need or achieving the right.
Paul wishes he’d given some attention to additional rights, such as the right to unionize. In view of the deep decline in union density since the 1950s; the fact that unionized workers earn higher wages and have more workplace benefits than non-union workers; and the repeated failures of Congress to enact federal legislation to protect collective bargaining rights, I believe it is important to include, “The Right to Collective Bargaining.” In fact, Paul writes that the Protecting the Right to Organize Act “is languishing in Congress.”
The Right to Work
Full employment requires:
- a commitment from the federal government to run the economy at full capacity
- a permanent increase in public unionized employment at the local, state, and federal levels
- a federal job guarantee
Expanded public employment is a vital component of the employment guarantee. “One public employment program that could absorb “scores of job-guarantee workers is a CCC [Civilian Conservation Corps] reimagined for our rapidly warming world.” To guard against involuntary unemployment, “the economy needs one final piece: a federal job guarantee.” Paul calls attention to renewed interest in the job guarantee and writes that William Darity, Jr., Darrick Hamilton, and he “established just how the program could be organized.” I would add that HR 1000, the Jobs for All Act, pending in Congress from 2013 to 2019, for which the National Jobs for All Network was the chief consultant. At one point, that bill had 60 congressional co-sponsors and the support of over 50 national and local organizations, including the United Auto Workers. Direct government job creation is the means by which HR 1000 proposed to provide jobs for all who want them Paul’s proposed minimum wage is $15 an hour with an average of $17.50—a sufficient wage so long as the other rights proposed by Paul—to housing, education, health care…are guaranteed.
In his 1945 State of the Union Address—when President Roosevelt repeated his call for an Economic Bill of Rights, he referred to the employment guarantee as “the most fundamental, and one on which the fulfillment of the others in large degree depends.” This, I would point out, was borne out in the Swedish welfare state which was a full employment state. According to the distinguished Swedish sociologist Walter Korpi: “The full employment policy … has probably been the most important part of the policy package …. Social policies directed toward decreasing want and improving economic security have of course been valuable but would probably not have been sufficient.” [2]
(The commitment to run the economy at full capacity is discussed in the section below, “How Do We Pay for It?)
The Right to Housing
Paul focuses on two aspects of a “Homes Guarantee”: a government commitment to a robust social housing program providing high-quality public housing to whoever wants it and a government-instituted universal rent program “to stabilize the private rental sector and rebalance the power differential between renters and landlords.”
The Right to an Education
Paul favors free public education at both ends of the educational age span. He proposes that all four-year colleges and universities as well as public community colleges and trade schools be made free for all. Expansion of the public education system to cover pre-school for three and four-year-olds is important at the other end of the educational age span. And federally-subsidized universal day care is also a prescribed right. Paul observes that while neoliberals consider college an individual investment benefiting only the student, there are benefits to the public as well–“a whole swath of positive externalities.”
The Right to Health Care
Despite expanded coverage through Medicare and the Affordable Care Act, over 33 million American are without health care coverage, and another 41 million are “underinsured”—with such poor-quality insurance that they are unable to afford medical treatment. Yet, the US spends more on health care than any other country—twice the share of GDP and 50 percent more per capita than the next highest spender. Racial differentials in health care coverage and outcomes are another US deficiency.
The solution: Medicare for All–nobody left uninsured or uncovered; no copayments or deductibles (in this sense superior to Medicare); comprehensive coverage, including dental, vision, and hearing; and no differential access for particular groups. It would be expensive, but the Congressional Budget Office estimates that such a single-payer system would result in a 5 percent reduction in national health care expenditures on an annual basis while providing quality coverage for the 33 million Americans who are still uninsured and the 41 million underinsured. “Delivered in a Medicare for All-type program, this right would save tens of thousands of lives a year.”
The Right to a Basic Income and Banking
This is an innovative proposal. Whereas Full Employment and the Basic Income Guarantee are often seen as either/or, Paul proposes both. “With the full slate of economic rights in place, a basic income set at $12,880 annually—or $1,073 a month—would eradicate poverty.” The basic income would be for people 18 and over. To satisfy the aims of a basic income a child allowance must be included. The basic income would be phased out as a Negative Income Tax for adults but not the child allowance.
Indicative of how carefully Mark Paul has thought about the lives of poor Americans is his proposal of a banking right. “Being poor is expensive. Poor people are hit with fines and fees at nearly every turn—for cashing a check, for having too low a balance in their bank accounts….” Paul proposes a postal bank that could achieve the goal of universal access to financial services.
The Right to a Healthy Environment
“Without a habitable planet, the discussion of economic rights…becomes absurd.” Thus, “the right to a healthy environment is…the most important right of all: it’s the ground from which all other rights… spring.” Three categories of initiatives are required—green investments, smart climate regulations, and carbon pricing. What does “smart climate regulations” entail–what restrictions on the freedom of individuals and businesses to pollute does Paul envision?
The carbon pricing initiative refers to halting negative carbon pricing (the tens of billions a year the government spends in subsidizing fossil fuel companies) and making carbon-intensive goods increasingly expensive.The next step is a carbon cap that would limit the number of emissions allowed each year. The government would auction permits which firms would need in order to pollute. Carbon-intensive goods would become increasingly expensive, resulting in decreased demand for them and reduced carbon emissions. Paul concedes it won’t be easy, one reason being that fossil fuel companies will have to forgo $10 trillion in wealth” in order to “strand” fossil fuel reserves in the ground.
Would this be enough? What about pollution by the U.S. military which is the world’s largest institutional consumer of petroleum and emitter of carbon emissions—accounting for an estimated 5.5% of global emissions and more than three-quarters of the U.S. government’s total emissions (2021)—one of many reasons, including the huge drain on resources, why we need a vibrant peace movement.
How Do We Pay for It?
Not unexpectedly, Paul turns to Keynes for an approach to affordability. Do we have the actual resources–“enough nurses, medicines, hospital beds, and MRI machines to make sure every American can get decent health care once they are insured?” And he asks similar questions about the resources to deliver the other proposed rights. His answer to most of these questions is yes. But supply isn’t unlimited, so it’s necessary to ask whether there are real resource constraints or “supply constraints” and how they can be overcome.
Paul maintains that the United States can always find the necessary resources to fund its priorities and that it’s “a matter of public and political will.” Such thinking was blasphemy during the reign of neoliberalism, but Paul points to some resurgence of Keynesian thought in response to the 2008 financial crisis and to the growing influence of proponents of modern monetary theory (MMT)—the idea that countries that issue debt in their own currencies, like the U.S., can spend without constraint up to resource limits.
Whether we do have the resources sufficient for Paul’s ambitious agenda is an important question. The economy, he holds, is almost always operating below potential resources, including unemployed workers. A federal job guarantee, Paul emphasizes, would be a means of increasing the supply of goods and services needed to fulfill economic rights. “Price controls,” he observes, “are a vital tool for keeping inflation down and inequality in check when supply constraints are present”–and “were a key feature… of the booming economy during World War II.”
One way of addressing the issue of resources is to consider how efficiently we are using current resources. Take the $916 billion defense budget (2023). According to Representative Barbara Lee (D-CA), co-sponsor of the People over Pentagon Act to Reduce Defense Spending Act, “a large portion of these taxpayer dollars are used to pad the pockets of the military industrial complex, fund outdated technology, or are simply mismanaged.” The Act would cut $100 billion from the Defense budget and reallocate the funds to the American people’s most urgent needs.
Given the scale of the requisite economic transition, new and higher taxes will be required. One response to the consequent political problem is that if wages rise, housing is affordable, and health care or college education becomes free, political opposition to tax hikes is reduced. Big increases in revenues, Paul points out, could come from a wealth tax, such as those proposed by Senators Warren and Sanders during the 2020 presidential primaries—raising respectively an estimated $210 and $335 billion annually. Besides the huge revenue potential, Paul observes that such wealth taxation would reduce the power of the wealthy to “distort and degrade the political system.”
Paul points to some promising signs for securing economic rights–such as the near capture of the Democratic presidential primary in 2020 by a “self-proclaimed democratic socialist”; the huge Black Lives Matter protests that arose amid the pandemic; and an upsurge in union organizing drives. At the same time, these are “dire times,” with fascism “again sprouting in America”; the “planet careening towards disaster”; civil and political rights under attack; “the courts … more interested in stripping rights than with strengthening them.”
Since The Ends of Freedom was published, our times have become more dire. To resist dictatorial forces and inspire our pursuit of economic freedom, we have Mark Paul’s stirring proposal for a 21st Century Economic Bill of Rights–grounded in his impressive knowledge of economic and political history, current social problems and their solution, and passionate advocacy of economic freedom.
[1] Deepak Bhargava and Stephanie Luce. Practical Radicals: Seven Strategies to Change the World, New York: The New Press, 2023.
[2] Walter Korpi, The Working Class in Welfare Capitalism: Work, Unions and Politics in Sweden, London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1974.
Trudy Goldberg is Professor Emerita of Social Work and Social Policy at Adelp[hi University and Chair of NJFAN. She is the author of numerous popular and scholarly works on comparative welfare states focusing on the poverty of women, the New Deal, and the struggle for economic justice.