The first federal income tax paved the way to income redistribution. Williams Jennings Bryan campaigned against Wall Street and its “cross of gold.” Congress passed the first antitrust laws. Not surprisingly, these “giants” attracted popular hostility and resentment - Teddy Roosevelt called them “malefactors of great wealth.” Their success and attendant wealth unleashed a populist backlash. “People seldom achieve great things without being willing to ride roughshod over the opposition,” the authors note. Cyrus McCormack’s threshing machine displaced a quarter of the world’s agricultural workers. The rise of their great corporations, not to mention the industries they helped build and finance, from railroads to autos to retail chains like Sears, Roebuck, displaced millions of workers and small-business owners who were rendered obsolete. That they also produced social and economic upheaval for many is a small price to pay, the authors contend. While “Capitalism in America” begins with the colonial era, when Americans were already enjoying “the world’s fastest growth rate,” Greenspan and Wooldridge hit their narrative stride and ideological sweet spot when they reach the late-19th-century “Age of Giants,” a name they prefer to the prevailing “Robber Barons,” who may have been rich but, as self-made men, were neither robbers nor hereditary barons. “Capitalism in America” is Greenspan and Wooldridge’s plea to re-embrace America’s long-held capitalist traditions and entrepreneurial culture in order to rescue the country from its current “fading dynamism.” Other than a few paragraphs arguing the case that the Fed’s easy money policy had little to no impact on the housing bubble that led to the Great Recession, “Capitalism in America” has almost nothing to say about Greenspan’s own role in recent economic history, and he offers no defense of his tenure as Fed chairman.īut that isn’t his purpose here.
Less a conventional history than an extended polemic, “Capitalism in America: A History,” by Greenspan and Adrian Wooldridge, a columnist and editor for The Economist, explores and ultimately celebrates the Austrian economist Joseph Schumpeter’s concept of “creative destruction,” which the authors describe as a “perennial gale” that “uproots businesses - and lives - but that, in the process, creates a more productive economy.” While this approach risks oversimplifying centuries of American economic history, it provides a useful lens for analyzing America’s current polarization and for understanding the centrifugal forces that have given rise to a President Trump, on the right, or a Bernie Sanders on the left. At the time it all seemed like the ultimate triumph of democratic capitalism.
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That a lifelong champion of free markets and an early acolyte of the objectivist author and philosopher Ayn Rand could so successfully straddle the political spectrum for so long is a testament to the bipartisan free-market ideology that followed the end of the Cold War. Greenspan was appointed by Ronald Reagan in 1987 and reappointed by three successive presidents from both parties. Dubbed a “rock star” by The Economist, Greenspan achieved an unprecedented level of celebrity for a Fed chairman as stocks soared to record levels in the 1990s, and then notoriety, as his legacy was undermined by the Great Recession that began in 2008, less than two years after he left office. He was the second-longest serving chairman of the Federal Reserve (after William McChesney Martin).
$35.Īt age 92, Alan Greenspan remains a towering figure in American finance. CAPITALISM IN AMERICA A History By Alan Greenspan and Adrian Wooldridge Illustrated.
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