And while he boasted of how his grandparents had come to Arizona when “there was no federal welfare system, no federally mandated employment insurance, no federal agency to monitor the purity of the air, the food we ate, or the water we drank,” and that “everything that was done, we did it ourselves,” the Goldwater family’s money had come to them the same way it came to other western entrepreneurs: from U.S. government investment. After 1905, federal subsidies for the Roosevelt Dam provided paychecks for workers who spent their earnings at the Goldwater family’s department stores. Then more
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