Putting Government In Its Place: The Case for a New Deal 3.0 tells the story of the House that FDR Built. Responding to the Great Depression, President Franklin Roosevelt and his New Deal team—most prominently, Frances Perkins and Harry Hopkins—created four new clusters of domestic policy. Those policy clusters—(1) broad-based economic security guarantees, (2) means-tested welfare programs, (3) across-the-board market regulation, and (4) massive market manipulation— emerged quickly during the original New Deal of 1933-1938 (Version 1.0). For the next 80 years, both Democrats and Republicans added dozens of new programs within the same four policy clusters, shaping today’s New Deal writ large (Version 2.0).
The model worked fairly well during the post-WWII era when the U.S. dominated the world economy and technology remained generally benign. But since the mid-1970s, the New Deal settlement has sputtered in the face of rising international competition and highly disruptive technology. For decades, we’ve been stuck on a plateau of little-to-no progress—at times, deterioration—in economic security and market effectiveness.
Putting Government In Its Place: The Case for a New Deal 3.0 explains the major gaps, flaws, and mistakes of the New Deal settlement. Equally important, the book spells out, in outline and detail, the fundamental and sweeping changes needed to revive the New Deal. The proposed New Deal 3.0 would guarantee far greater economic security for all Americans, make our market economy dramatically more productive, and enlarge the nation’s wealth. The result: America’s next birth of freedom.