Aaron Slodounik

2448 days ago

This fear of large concentrations of wealth and power came to fruition in America’s first Gilded Age at the end of the 19th century, and it has again today. It is the present-day oligarchy that led Sitaraman back to earlier egalitarian visions in search of an alternative path. While he gives us a large sweeping historical narrative, Sitaraman speaks unabashedly to the present moment. He believes his book’s argument—that America cannot be America without a strong middle class—is essential to understanding the world we live in today

A Billionaires’ Republic

thenation.com

“A constitution is not intended to embody a particular economic theory,” wrote Supreme Court Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr. in 1905. Holmes was dissenting from the Court’s majority opinion in Lochner v.