Ends of Freedom: Reclaiming America's Lost Promise of Economic Rights

"The freedoms established by the Bill of Rights are celebrated as a part of America's national identity. But are they everything? Do freedoms from government persecution offer enough to live the American Dream? In Freedom Is Not Enough, economist Mark Paul considers the history of American rights and freedoms as determinants of American economic well-being. The failed promise of FDR's New Deal and LBJ's Great Society programs to secure positive rights for all Americans-the right to a decent education, a good job, adequate health care, and a greater capacity for economic flourishing-have left the country fractured by inequality and stifled in social mobility. Paul traces this shift not only to the unrealized promise of the twentieth-century reforms, but to the simultaneous rise of neoliberalism-the conflation of freedom and markets, the vilification of government intervention in public life-as a persisting source of American injustice. Building on the history of this trend, he offers policy prescriptions to reinvigorate American equality and mobility, including economic prescriptions for the most American question of all: how do you pay for it? A trenchant and deeply researched synthesis of economics, history, and public policy, Freedom Is Not Enough is anew case for one of America's founding promises. It promises to serve as a blueprint for positive change in a challenging time"--
An urgent and galvanizing argument for an Economic Bill of Rights—and its potential to confer true freedom on all Americans. Since the Founding, Americans have debated the true meaning of freedom. For some, freedom meant the provision of life’s necessities, those basic conditions for the “pursuit of happiness.” For others, freedom meant the civil and political rights enumerated in the Bill of Rights and unfettered access to the marketplace—nothing more.  As Mark Paul explains, the latter interpretation—thanks in large part to a particularly influential cadre of economists—has all but won out among policymakers, with dire repercussions for American society: rampant inequality, endemic poverty, and an economy built to benefit the few at the expense of the many. In this book, Paul shows how economic rights—rights to necessities like housing, employment, and health care—have been a part of the American conversation since the Revolutionary War and were a cornerstone of both the New Deal and the Civil Rights Movement. Their recuperation, he argues, would at long last make good on the promise of America’s founding documents. By drawing on FDR’s proposed Economic Bill of Rights, Paul outlines a comprehensive policy program to achieve a more capacious and enduring version of American freedom. Among the rights he enumerates are the right to a good job, the right to an education, the right to banking and financial services, and the right to a healthy environment. Replete with discussions of some of today’s most influential policy ideas—from Medicare for All to a federal job guarantee to the Green New Deal—The Ends of Freedom is a timely and urgent call to reclaim the idea of freedom from its captors on the political right—to ground America’s next era in the country’s progressive history and carve a path toward a more economically dynamic and equitable nation.