A funny thing happened to the First Amendment on its way to the public forum. According to the Supreme Court, money is now speech and corporations are now people. But when real people without money assemble to express their dissatisfaction with the political consequences of this, they’re treated as public nuisances and evicted.
Robert B. ReichTags: politics democracy government first-amendment rights corporations supreme-court public-assembly u-s-politics
The problem was not that Americans spent beyond their means but that their means had not kept up with what the larger economy could and should have been able to provide them. the American economy had been growing briskly, and America's middle class naturally expected to share in that growth. But it didn't. A larger and larger portion of the economy's winnings had gone to people at the top.
Robert B. ReichIt is still possible to find people who believe that government policy did not end the Great Depression and undergird the Great Prosperity, just as it is possible to uncover people who do not believe in evolution.
Robert B. ReichThey call themselves conservatives but that’s not it, either. They don’t want to conserve what we now have. They’d rather take the country backwards – before the 1960s and 1970s, and the Environmental Protection Act, Medicare, and Medicaid; before the New Deal, and its provision for Social Security, unemployment insurance, the forty-hour workweek, and official recognition of trade unions; even before the Progressive Era, and the first national income tax, antitrust laws, and Federal Reserve. They’re not conservatives. They’re regressives. And the America they seek is the one we had in the Gilded Age of the late nineteenth century.
Robert B. ReichTags: conservatives poitics robert-reich
The problem is that the choice we make in the market don't fully reflect our values as citizens. We might make different choices if we understood the social consequences of our purchases or investments and if we knew all other consumers and investors would join us in forbearing from certain great deals whose social consequence were abhorrent to us.
Robert B. ReichWhen Republicans recently charged the President with promoting 'class warfare,' he answered it was 'just math.' But it's more than math. It's a matter of morality.
Republicans have posed the deepest moral question of any society: whether we're all in it together. Their answer is we're not.
President Obama should proclaim, loudly and clearly, we are.
Tags: politics morality society liberalism economics united-states class-warfare conservatism barack-obama mathematics republican-party-united-states
It turns out that what money buys has rapidly diminishing emotional returns ... As long as we're not destitute, happiness depends less on getting what we want than appreciating what we already have.
Robert B. ReichTags: happiness aftershock
Along with individual responsibility goes some societal responsibility to enable young people and their parents to do what they need to do. Otherwise, what is a society?
Robert B. ReichTags: society responsibility young-people
A smaller government reflecting the needs of the middle class and poor is superior to a big government reflecting the needs of the privileged and powerful.
Robert B. ReichTags: wealth class government privilege poor middle-class upper-class
Figure out for yourself what you want to be really good at, know that you'll never really satisfy yourself that you've made it, and accept that that's okay
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