Land of Promise Quotes

“Every few generations, the familiar American republic falls apart and must be rebuilt in a generation-long struggle. To date, each American republic has provided more freedom and more opportunity than the one that preceded it. The First Republic abolished aristocracy and feudalism on American soil. The Second Republic abolished slavery. The Third Republic eliminated widespread destitution and sought to suppress the exploitation of wage labor. And each republic has used the technological tools of its era to create a more productive economy with gains shared by more Americans.”
― Michael Lind, Land of Promise: An Economic History of the United States

“The American immigration system needs to be reformed, so that the main criterion for immigration is not race, or nationality, or kinship to particular American citizens, but the potential to contribute to America’s economy. Immigrants should be admitted to America on the basis of their talents, not their genes.”
― Michael Lind, Land of Promise: An Economic History of the United States

“While it can always be enlarged in the future if necessary to maintain an adequate population, in the near future the numbers of unskilled immigrants legally admitted to the United States each year should be reduced. Family-based immigration should be limited to immediate family members. The illegal immigrant workforce, which is largely unskilled, should be reduced by a combination of strict sanctions on employers with the help of a national ID card, tough border enforcement and, if necessary, a one-time amnesty for some illegal immigrants coupled with symbolic penalties for their violations of law. No immigration policy is possible unless immigration laws are enforced.”
― Michael Lind, Land of Promise: An Economic History of the United States

“The combination of automation and offshoring has destroyed many routine clerical and lower-level managerial jobs. With the disappearance of middle-skill jobs, the American job market has become polarized between highly paid managerial and professional jobs and poorly paid jobs in the service sector.”
― Michael Lind, Land of Promise: An Economic History of the United States

“The maldistribution of income and wealth that has occurred in the United States since the 1980s should not have come as a surprise. What else could one expect to happen, once unions were crushed, the minimum wage was reduced by inflation, labor markets were flooded with low-wage immigrants, taxes on the rich were dramatically lowered, and salaries and stock options for corporate executives were raised to obscene levels?”
― Michael Lind, Land of Promise: An Economic History of the United States

“Government in America has never been limited to enforcing property rights, educating workers, and acting as an impartial umpire in competitive markets. Industrial policy is not alien to the American tradition. It is the American tradition.”
― Michael Lind, Land of Promise: An Economic History of the United States

“Rethinking American manufacturing policy means rethinking the relationship between the American nation-state and the multinational corporation. There are two possible options. The United States can select certain US-based multinationals as “national champions” and favor them over foreign corporations. Or it can treat all multinational enterprises, no matter where they are chartered, as American to the extent that they carry out production and employ people in the United States, and foreign to the extent that they have activities elsewhere. In a multipolar world, America’s decisions about how to treat corporations must be influenced by the policies of other countries. If other nations rely on state-owned enterprises or national champions, the United States may have no choice but to compete by using similar methods.”
― Michael Lind, Land of Promise: An Economic History of the United States

“Americans should look for guidance in trade policy not to Jefferson Davis but to George Washington, who, in his first annual address to Congress in January 1790, declared that “a free people ought not only to be armed but disciplined” and that “their safety and interest required that they should promote such manufactories as tend to render them independent of others for essential, particularly military, supplies.”
― Michael Lind, Land of Promise: An Economic History of the United States

“The most important reason for maintaining a world-class industrial base is national security.”
― Michael Lind, Land of Promise: An Economic History of the United States

“A twenty-first-century American System needs to have four elements: innovation policy; manufacturing policy; infrastructure policy; and financial policy.”
― Michael Lind, Land of Promise: An Economic History of the United States

“Today, as a former hegemon in relative decline, the United States is no longer served well by a simple-minded strategy of liberalizing trade and deregulating the economy. It needs a sophisticated, long-term national economic strategy—a new American System.”
― Michael Lind, Land of Promise: An Economic History of the United States

“The United States turned a blind eye to their mercantilist export-promotion policies, sacrificing its own industries in the interest of alliance unity and specializing in military spending and finance.”
― Michael Lind, Land of Promise: An Economic History of the United States

“The purpose of American economic policy in the twenty-first century is no longer to catch up with industrial Britain, but to allow the United States to participate in high-value-added global supply chains in a world of transnational production, without sacrificing strategic industries.”
― Michael Lind, Land of Promise: An Economic History of the United States

“In a plutonomy there is no such animal as ‘the U.S. consumer’ or ‘the UK consumer,’ or indeed the ‘Russian consumer.’ There are rich consumers, few in number, but disproportionate in the gigantic slice of income and consumption they take.”
― Michael Lind, Land of Promise: An Economic History of the United States

“The ability of the working-class majority in the United States to bargain for higher wages was undermined after the 1960s by several purely domestic phenomena: the declining real value of the minimum wage as a result of inflation, low-end labor markets flooded with unskilled, low-wage immigrants, and the decline of labor unions.”
― Michael Lind, Land of Promise: An Economic History of the United States

“In the new age of financial-market capitalism, as in the era of finance capitalism in the early 1900s, American industry was subordinate to finance. But there was a profound difference. Finance capitalists like J. P. Morgan were long-term investors who sought to profit over many years from the industrial corporations and utilities that they owned. The new financial-market capitalism, by contrast, was marked by short-term ownership of stocks by the agents of millions of anonymous investors, most of whom had no idea what company stocks were being bought and sold on their behalf.”
― Michael Lind, Land of Promise: An Economic History of the United States

“The United States was now the world’s largest debtor and Japan was the world’s largest creditor. The Japanese central bank bought huge quantities of US government bonds to keep the yen artificially low, thereby subsidizing Japanese exports while hurting American exports. The same mercantilist technique would be adopted on a much larger scale by China a few decades later, with disastrous results for the economy of the United States and the world.”
― Michael Lind, Land of Promise: An Economic History of the United States

“By making speculation cheap, the low-interest-rate policy also encouraged speculation that led to bubbles in real estate and stocks. The funds from Japan’s enormous trade surpluses permitted easy credit creation by Japanese banks, which led to a real-estate bubble in Japan. Prices rose far out of relation to fundamental values. At one point, the Imperial Palace grounds were said to be worth more than Tokyo. The collapse of the Japanese real-estate and stock-market bubbles produced decades of slow growth in Japan, beginning in the 1990s.”
― Michael Lind, Land of Promise: An Economic History of the United States

“Following the technically illegal merger of Citicorp and Travelers Insurance in 1998, the repeal of the Glass-Steagall ban on the combination of investment banks and commercial banks took place in 1999. The result was a wave of mergers among banks and other financial institutions. Between 1990 and 2007, the number of FDIC-insured commercial banks dropped from more than twelve thousand to around seventy-five hundred. In 2007, the ten largest banks had 51 percent of banking industry assets and 40 percent of US domestic deposits.55”
― Michael Lind, Land of Promise: An Economic History of the United States

“When resource exhaustion turned out not to be a problem, the apocalyptic imagination of the environmentalist movement invoked other threats—peak oil and global warming—to justify its critique of industrial society and consumerism.”
― Michael Lind, Land of Promise: An Economic History of the United States

“While besieged by a newly confident and aggressive free-market Right, New Deal liberalism was attacked from the Left by Marxists and environmentalists. Marxist scholars denounced “corporate liberalism,” declaring that New Deal liberals like Roosevelt and Johnson were pawns of the capitalist class and rewriting history to make industrial regulation a conspiracy by the industries themselves.”
― Michael Lind, Land of Promise: An Economic History of the United States

“The policies of the Nixon administration can be understood as an attempt to deal with the problems caused by the contradiction between the New Deal order at home and the global economy by sacrificing America’s post-1945 hegemonic grand strategy in favor of a more overtly nationalistic US foreign military and economic policy.”
― Michael Lind, Land of Promise: An Economic History of the United States

“The United States made one-way trade concessions in order to secure the cooperation of other countries needed as allies, first in the struggle against the Axis powers and then against the Soviet bloc during the Cold War. Between 1939 and 1943, the United States offered unbalanced trade concessions to Iceland, a number of Latin American countries, and Turkey, in order to lure them away from Nazi Germany and its allies.”
― Michael Lind, Land of Promise: An Economic History of the United States

“The postwar settlement in the world and at home was clearly falling apart. In the United States and other Western democracies, the post-1945 truce between labor, business, and government was threatened by inflation. The rate of economic growth in every industrial democracy slowed abruptly in the 1970s, reviving only in the late 1990s. At the same time, the demands of organized labor for higher wages added “wage-push inflation” to the causes of inflation. Inflation reached a peak of 18 percent in the last years of the Carter administration.”
― Michael Lind, Land of Promise: An Economic History of the United States

“What Galbraith later called “countervailing power” was described by the journalist John Chamberlain as the essence of the “broker state” created by the New Deal: “The labor union, the consumers’ or producers’ co-operative, the ‘institute,’ the syndicate—these are the important things in a democracy. If their power is evenly spread, if there are economic checks and balances to parallel the political checks and balances, then society will be democratic. For democracy is what results when you have a state of tension in society that permits no one group to dare to bid for total power.”57”
― Michael Lind, Land of Promise: An Economic History of the United States

“The post-1945 boom, by allowing many firms to finance themselves to a greater degree from retained earnings, reduced the influence of the financial sector over corporate America even more.”
― Michael Lind, Land of Promise: An Economic History of the United States

“The War Assets Administration, succeeded by the General Services Administration, oversaw the sale of these assets to the private sector at a fraction of their actual cost, providing a massive transfer of public resources to private industry.”
― Michael Lind, Land of Promise: An Economic History of the United States

“Far from being an embarrassing aberration, the NIRA was the unacknowledged blueprint for the prosperity of the Golden Age between World War II and the 1970s. Resurrected in the wages and hours laws of the NLRA, the price supports and subsidies of the agricultural sector, the infrastructure industries with price-and-entry regulations, and the oligopolies of the industrial sector with de facto tripartite bargaining among business, labor, and government, together created what might be called a “Virtual NIRA” structured much of the American economy after World War II until it was partially dismantled between the 1970s and 1990s.”
― Michael Lind, Land of Promise: An Economic History of the United States

“While the electric grid and the highway grid were visible manifestations of the second industrial order, the unseen motors hidden in household appliances were just as revolutionary. The industrialization of the household with the help of labor-saving appliances like refrigerators, washing machines, and dishwashers allowed the members of America’s new mass middle class to spend time formerly devoted to household chores on other activities, including listening to the radio, watching television shows, and going to the movies.”
― Michael Lind, Land of Promise: An Economic History of the United States

“Abandoning his campaign pledge to balance the budget, Roosevelt engaged in deficit spending. In the introduction to the first volume of his presidential papers, FDR wrote: “To balance our budget in 1933 or 1934 or 1935 would have been a crime against the American people. To do so we should have had to make a capital levy that would have been confiscatory, or we would have had to set our face against human suffering with callous indifference.”46 Deficit spending continued until 1937, when Roosevelt and Congress repeated Hoover’s mistake by prematurely trying to balance the budget, throwing the country back into recession.”
― Michael Lind, Land of Promise: An Economic History of the United States