We learn in grade school that American citizens are endowed with certain inalienable rights, but basic necessities like housing and education aren’t protected by the Constitution. Imagine how different this country might be if affordable health care and guaranteed employment were included in our Bill of Rights. That’s the vision that economist Mark Paul outlines in his new book, The Ends of Freedom.
Mark Paul is an assistant professor of economics at the Bloustein School of Planning and Public Policy at Rutgers University. His research and writing have appeared in the New York Times, Economist, Washington Post, Nation, American Prospect, and Financial Times, among other publications.
Twitter: @MarkVinPaul
The Ends of Freedom https://press.uchicago.edu/ucp/books/book/chicago/E/bo195791875.html
Website: https://pitchforkeconomics.com
Twitter: @PitchforkEcon
Instagram: @pitchforkeconomics
Nick’s twitter: @NickHanauer
Nick Hanauer:
We get to talk to our old friend, the economist, Mark Paul, about his new book, which argues for an economic Bill of Rights.
Mark Paul:
So what are economic rights? Things like Medicare for all, universal college, or pre-K. It means providing people with the right to basic essentials like a home.
David Goldstein:
I think a lot of people listening, Paul, will be a little skeptical. Can we afford it? The answer in the long run is yeah.
Speaker 4:
From the home offices of Civic Ventures in downtown Seattle, this is Pitchfork Economics with Nick Hanauer. The best place to get the truth about who gets what and why.
Nick Hanauer:
I’m Nick Hanauer, founder of Civic Ventures.
David Goldstein:
I’m David Goldstein, senior fellow at Civic Ventures. A couple episodes back we talked with the economist and philosopher, Erik Angner, about his book, How Economics Can Save the World. And this week, Nick, we’re talking to another author with a new book, which has some specific ideas on how to do that through some real policies, kind of well, an economic Bill of Rights.
Nick Hanauer:
Yeah. And this week we get to talk to our old friend, the economist, Mark Paul, about his new book, the Ends of Freedom, which argues for an economic Bill of Rights that actually will save the world.
David Goldstein:
Or at least contribute to it.
Nick Hanauer:
That’s right. As a reminder to listeners, we had Mark on the podcast last year for an episode on a very consequential topic, macroeconomic models in the CBO, which we invite you to go listen to or re-listen to. But today we’re going to explore Mark’s new book on basically a new conception of how we should think about what people deserve in an economy as abundant and wealthy as we have in the United States.
Mark Paul:
My name is Mark Paul. I’m an Assistant Professor of Economics and Public Policy at the Bloustein School at Rutgers University here in lovely New Jersey. And I am the author of the The Ends of Freedom: Reclaiming America’s Lost Promise of Economic Rights, which is coming out this spring with Chicago.
Nick Hanauer:
So for our listeners, kind of give us a summary of the arguments you’re making in your book.
Mark Paul:
So the book sets out to do a couple things. But most importantly, it sets out to provide a pathway through which we can ensure that all Americans actually have meaningful and enduring freedom. Thomas Jefferson promised us the life, liberty and pursuit of happiness. And I question what that actually means. And while we’re used to talking about civil rights and political rights, and of course, these days, reproductive rights, which are all absolutely essential to have a meaningful and free life. What we haven’t been talking about much recently, but in fact, America has a rich history in debating, is this idea of economic rights. So what are economic rights? Things like Medicare for all, which is arguing for the right to healthcare. Healthcare is a human right. Things like universal college or pre-K, to expand our education system, recognizing that this decade, more than 70% of jobs require training beyond a high school degree.
And so just like we expanded the right to an education to encompass high school, we now need to expand that right to education again, to encompass college as times change. It means providing people with the right to basic essentials like a home. Roughly 4 million Americans are homeless at some point in any given year, disproportionately youth. And these are problems that we can actually eradicate. So what I do in the book is really two things. One is talk about these various economic rights. And as an economist I ask the crucial question of can we afford them? And look at how neoclassical economists have long misunderstood many of these ideas. As you might remember in the 2016 Presidential primary, a lot of these ideas I’m talking about got called crazy or argue that they would bankrupt the nation. And so I deal with those arguments. But the other thing I do that I think is really important is try to reclaim the very word freedom.
This is a word that, I think, progressives have wrongly seeded to the conservative right. And I do this through tracking the fight for economic rights throughout American history from the more radical founders like Thomas Payne, who thought that egalitarian economy was inseparable from democratic success. To Lincoln who engaged in massive land redistribution and helped create our modern public higher ed institutions. To Martin Luther King, who actually his final essay published after his death was entitled, We Need An Economic Bill of Rights, yet we failed to teach that more radical side of King and the Civil Rights Movement.
Nick Hanauer:
You are really getting to the difference between negative and positive freedom. I mean, the right wing conception, the market fundamentalist conception, the neoliberal conception of freedom is freedom from constraint. Like freedom to freedom, exploit others within the marketplace-
David Goldstein:
Freedom from government.
Nick Hanauer:
Yeah. Right.
David Goldstein:
Get government out of the way and now you’re free.
Nick Hanauer:
Yeah. But there is this other affirmative definition of freedom, I suppose, that mostly proceeds from Amartya Sen and others, that freedom means capabilities. It means the freedom to have a decent life. That if you’re incredibly poor, you may be free from constraint, but you’re not in any reasonable way free, right?
Mark Paul:
That’s right.
Nick Hanauer:
You can’t do anything. And won’t surprise you to learn that we’re big fans of that argument, that the negative definition is pretty constraining. And really all it is a cover for power. It’s a way of disguising the fact that some people have power and most people don’t. And the people who have a lot of power want to have more. And the less constrained they are, obviously, the more power they get.
Mark Paul:
That’s exactly right. So negative freedom is the story that we think of today when we talk about freedom. It’s the Bill of Rights, which is perhaps the most clear articulation of negative freedom. But let’s remember, when the Bill of Rights was penned. I mean the colonists were revolting against a monarchy. And yes, we need rights such as those outlined in the Bill of Rights. But those weren’t the only rights they were fighting for. And we’ve really lost the more holistic vision of freedom that has been part of the American conversation since there indeed was an American conversation. As Cara Mark says, workers are free to sell their labor power to an employer for whatever they’ll pay or they’re free to starve.
I think just focusing on negative freedom, freedom from coercion largely from the government, totally misses where we spend the vast majority of our waking hours though, which is at work, where indeed our employer has a tremendous amount of course of ability to make us do things we don’t necessarily want to do and to bend us workers to their will. And so, by bringing in positive rights freedom to things, freedom to and education, freedom to housing, you’re actually providing people with the ability to lead meaningful dignified lives, and to be who and what they have reason to value.
Nick Hanauer:
Yeah. So what would an economic Bill of Rights look like?
Mark Paul:
Yeah, that’s a great question. So the idea really first came to fruition in 1944 when Roosevelt proposed an economic Bill of Rights as the culmination of the New Deal. He was in office for more than a decade at that point. And they had won so many victories, the creation of social security, the creation of unemployment insurance. Roosevelt knew the job wasn’t done. And so as part of his promise to the American people, as the allies were turning the tides in World War ii, it was to provide all with freedom from want. And so we can look at the legislative battles that we’ve been having in the country for more than a century now to just gain insight into what this would look like today. Or we can just look at what some of the more progressive members of Congress have been introducing. So let’s talk about a couple examples.
The right to employment means passing a job guarantee bill. So I know you’ve talked about this on the podcast before, means a fundamental right to employment at a decent wage. That’s one example. The right to housing. What this would look like is essentially building out what we call a homes guarantee. A homes guarantee has kind of a multiple components. But the two most important are social housing, which is high quality public housing for Americans, rather than just kind of low quality public housing that we’ve had to date in this country, that’s really prioritized low income Americans that’s kind of exacerbating both economic and racial segregation. It’d be high quality public housing available to people across the income distribution. And we couple that with rent control because at the end of the day, most people live in privately owned housing units and it would be time to better regulate those markets.
We believe in regulating the labor market through minimum wages. It’s okay to say that we need to use similar types of regulations in the housing market to protect renters. Be passing things like Medicare for all, to sever the link between people’s ability to pay and their very right to life, saving and affirmative care. So there’s a whole host of policies that I outline in the book that I think folks will find to help them wrap their mind around what enacting this would actually look like. And we get into the dollars and cents too, thinking about both how to structure these programs and also how to pay for them.
Nick Hanauer:
I’m sympathetic to most of these ideas myself, but it is reasonable to ask how much is enough? There is such a thing as going too far.
David Goldstein:
Why is there such a thing as going too far? Why can’t we have the best possible world that we want? Because I think, Nick, that if you look at what he outlines in the book as economic rights, right to employment, to housing, to education to healthcare, to basic income, to a healthy environment, these are all things that, I think you would agree with, are necessary to be and to feel fully included in a 21st century economy and a 21st century democracy. And that without any of these things, you’re not fully included. And in fact, if you look at our focus on building a large, thriving, diverse, robust middle class, there are also necessary fulfilling… I think we’ve talked about this. What I feel is the most fundamental aspect of being middle class, is to not live in constant fear of falling out of the middle class.
It’s that sense of economic security. And when you talk about going too far, the question is, well, obviously we’re not giving everybody a three bedroom, penthouse apartment. There are limits to… Resources are not infinite. But certainly this is a world of abundance that we’re living in now. And we can certainly afford to do a lot better than we currently do. And the other thing I know that you agree with me on, Nick, is that when we include people in these things more fully, the economy actually grows faster and allows us to this virtuous cycle.
Nick Hanauer:
There are existence proofs of this, Finland, right?
David Goldstein:
Yeah, the Nordic countries.
Nick Hanauer:
Right? But Mark, do you agree with that proposition that if you go to a place like Finland, they have effectively implemented this plan?
Mark Paul:
I don’t think they’ve implemented it hook, line and sinker. But I think that they’re far closer to it than we are here in the United States. I mean, on this idea of going too far, I think we need to accept the fact that we can all have nice things. We need to move beyond this scarcity mindset that neoliberalism has drilled into us from day one. And we need to realize that we have enough. I mean, you can find policy makers talking about the fact that we have enough for almost a century now. That here we are multitudes richer and we still have 40 million Americans in poverty. That is a choice. And we can choose to build a different society, and this is how we do that.
Nick Hanauer:
Yeah. Every time I think about how we would afford something, I just remind myself of the trillion dollars in stock buybacks that we just right witnessed.
Mark Paul:
Yeah, I’m not going to lie to folks. An economic Bill of Rights will not be cheap, but that’s okay. I don’t view that as a bug. I view it as a feature. What we need to do is reorient the government budget away from subsidizing violence, pollution, and kind of bad greedy behavior towards helping healthy wellbeing state flourish where people are treated like human beings. I mean, the freedom budget, which was a cornerstone of the Civil Rights Movement, written by a Philip Randolph, Bayard Rustin, and Martin Luther King was just on this exact fact, that we have to reorient our government budget to set our national priorities and our national priorities need to provide for all Americans.
David Goldstein:
So I’m curious, mark, one of the arguments the founders had against including the Bill of Rights was the fear that if they enumerated rights, people would understand that to mean they don’t have any other rights. They only have the rights that are enumerated in the Constitution. And yet, these positive rights, while not enumerated, are clearly assumed, if not in the Constitution, certainly in the Declaration of Independence in that line, life, liberty, and particularly the pursuit of happiness, which was a peculiar choice of words for the time and a departure from the Lockean, I think what the literally was right to it, to state essentially to owning property, to property. And so Jefferson replaces it with the pursuit of happiness. If you could go a little bit more into that, what you’re talking about here is part of our history, isn’t it?
Mark Paul:
It is. And that’s a history that I think we’ve lost to our own detriment. And so a lot of what I try to do in the book is uncover the America’s other freedom. It’s folks like Thomas Jefferson, and Payne, and Hamilton, some of the more radical founders who fought for a more robust understanding of freedom. I mean, even Jefferson truly believed that for everybody to be free, they all needed to be the landholders. He believed that people needed to own the means of subsistence in order to live free lives.
David Goldstein:
And he believed they needed to be well-educated.
Mark Paul:
Absolutely.
David Goldstein:
He was a big supporter of public education. I mean, yes, he was a slave holder, so he meant it for white people, mostly white men. But he never lost sight of that. But that is a bias that persisted for another 200 years. Well, persists to this day, so even longer than that.
Mark Paul:
And on that point though, I mean we have other examples in US history, for instance, in reconstruction. I mean 40 acres in a mule was to provide economic security to previously enslaved blacks in the United States. The whole idea here was how do we allow them to be free, providing freedom to somebody who is penniless and land analysts is to mock their condition. And Lincoln understood this and embarked on a massive land redistribution to try to write that historic wrong. Unfortunately, he was assassinated and really ground reconstruction to a halt. But that remains the vision. And we can track the fight for these rights, both from the founders, to Lincoln and the radical Republicans, through Roosevelt in the New Deal, to the Civil Rights Movement.
I mean, economic rights were always a cornerstone of the Civil Rights Movement, yet it’s something that we’ve really taken out of the history books. We don’t talk about nearly enough about the fact that the march on Washington was the march on Washington for jobs and justice. The most common sign held that the march was jobs equal freedom. People understood that without economic security, the fight for freedom that helped them win the Civil Rights Act and Voting Rights Act was only partially accomplished.
David Goldstein:
Yeah. And in fact, another thing don’t realize is that the minimum wage increase that they had specifically named in that march would’ve been today even higher than a $15 minimum wage. Of course. But I think you would agree that it looks like we’re living through the collapse of the neoliberal era. It’s coming to an end right now.
Mark Paul:
Well, it’s coming to an end, or at least it’s being phased out. But we need something to replace it. And I think that’s what progressives and Democrats lack right now as a north star. And I think economic rights could be that, at least for the economic realm. It helps provide us with an understanding of what ties the Green New Deal, to college for all, to tax the rich? What is it that links these different ideas? And neoliberalism had a fairly simple and straightforward story. Now, it was a lie. But it had a story that was easy to sell.
And here, a big part of the reason I decided to write this book is that if you stopped somebody on the street and ask somebody, what do Democrats stand for? I don’t really think they could tell you. I think they could say, “Oh, Democrats aren’t for poverty. Democrats aren’t for neoliberalism.” But what are they for? Okay, they’re for a higher minimum wage. But that’s not a coherent vision of where we bring our society. It’s not a coherent vision of how do we build shared abundance for everybody, given that we are in the richest nation to have ever existed. Scarcity is not our problem. No distribution is our problem. And so that’s the question we need to be grappling with today.
David Goldstein:
I think if you ask the Biden administration what Democrats stand for, it’s building the economy from the bottom up in the middle out. It’s a narrative they keep repeating that, of course, we’re very happy to hear them keep repeating it. But it’s one that a lot of other Democrats haven’t and their allies haven’t been fully comfortable coming on board with. Even though the administration is relentless in using that language.
Mark Paul:
Yeah, I think that the Democratic Party is searching for its own soul right now. I mean, one encouraging sign I see is that President Biden does not have Washington hanging in the Oval Office. He has FDR hanging in the Oval Office. What I’d like to see today is Democrats really reclaiming their progressive history. I mean, the right to a job was a cornerstone of the Democratic Party platform from 1944 to 1988, where it kind of silently died. But we need to be pushing Democrats to get back towards an economy that centers, as Henry Wallace fought for it, the common man today, we should be saying common person of course. But I think that some Democrats are working in that direction.
But the Biden administration, I think has a tremendous amount of work still to do. I mean, they are getting a lot of things right. But President Biden is not out there using the bully pulpit to argue for a more holistic vision of the economy that we need to the extent I think he should be. But when we saw his campaign speech, his speech launching his presidential campaign just a few days ago, what did he center? He centered freedom and the ability of Americans to have a say in their life, and not just be at the whim of their employers, not just be in the whim of a fascist white nation state. But instead actually have a multiracial, multiethnic, vibrant democracy that embeds the economy and society rather than making society subservient to the economy.
Nick Hanauer:
So where do you think we should start?
Mark Paul:
That’s a great question. I think that one of the most straightforward places to start is education and healthcare. So right now, one of the most pressing topics is student debt. And it’s because people were told, get a education and you’ll be able to live the American dream. And what that dream really is for most people today is mountains upon mountains of debt. And we can create a free public higher education system, coupled, I should say, with free universal Pre-K, and these programs would largely be substantially cheaper than the state of things today. I mean, just to give you one example, the rate of return on universal pre-K in United States is over $8 per dollar invested. Nick, you were previously a businessman. If you were told you’d get an $8 ROI per dollar invested, you’d take it in a heartbeat, wouldn’t you?
Nick Hanauer:
Sure. Sure, of course. Yeah.
Mark Paul:
But for some reason we’re not. And in higher education, it’s the same thing. What we need to think about is yes, free higher education would be expensive. But you know what is really expensive? Our current education system. All the lost doctors, and teachers, and nurses that we’re not getting because they can’t afford to go to school or they dropped out due to financial reasons. Likewise on healthcare.
David Goldstein:
What about the moral hazard? I mean, if we provide free high quality pre-K to these three and four year olds, how will they have the incentive to go out and get a job?
Mark Paul:
Well, I mean, as we unfortunately, see some states are readily repealing child labor laws.
Nick Hanauer:
It’s just…
David Goldstein:
Oh, there you go.
Nick Hanauer:
… Unbelievable. Just when you think they can’t go lower.
David Goldstein:
Well, you know that with the CHIPS Act, those chips are really small. So we need the-
Nick Hanauer:
Small, you need tiny little fingers to put them-
David Goldstein:
Those tiny little preschool hands to assemble those chips so we can compete with the Chinese.
Nick Hanauer:
Yes, exactly. Oh my gosh. Yeah.
Mark Paul:
I was going to say, one thing that I do want to point out here is putting kids in school isn’t only about benefiting the kids, it’s also about freeing caregivers, disproportionately women from making the choice of, do I want to stay home or do I want to go to work? So we talked about Finland earlier. Finland has a much higher labor force participation rate by women. In other words, far more women are actively working. And one of the big reasons is they actually have a wellbeing state that allows women to take some time off from work to have a child and be with their very young child. But then it allows them to go back to work because there are affordable state provided options for childcare.
And this too would boost our economy. I mean, there’s so many caregivers that aren’t actively working today because they can’t afford to both work and send their kid to daycare. I have a nine-month-old, I know this all too well. We toured daycares, and let me tell you, they told us they were $3,000 a month. But there was a rather sad looking daycare that was for the cheap price of $1,800 a month. And let me tell you, we’re not even touring the fancy daycares. Those were north of $4,000 a month.
Nick Hanauer:
I mean, $3,000 a month is more than a cost to go to college.
Mark Paul:
Well, in fact, you just nailed it. Daycare is more expensive than college in the majority of states today. That’s the broken system-
David Goldstein:
Well, clearly what the solution is, these kids should be taking out loans to pay for their daycare.
Nick Hanauer:
Oh my God. $3,000 a month.
David Goldstein:
We’re investing in developing their own human capital with which they own. So why should the taxpayer pay for it? Here I am just channeling neoliberalism again.
Mark Paul:
Let me agree with Jeb Bush here for a second. I think we should finance this through an income based repayment plan. You know what we can call it? A progressive income tax.
Nick Hanauer:
Yeah.
Mark Paul:
I mean, truly. It’s that simple.
Nick Hanauer:
Yeah.
David Goldstein:
That is what a progressive income tax is. I mean, when you break it down, that’s all it is. We make these jokes, they’re sad jokes. But we make them because it points out how perverse the neoliberal frame is, the cognitive frame in all this that has forced us into this scarcity mindset that says, we can’t afford not just the things we want, but the things we need in the wealthiest nation on the planet. And so it was fascinating reading your book. You just get right past that and go through the specifics, this, this, this, this, and this. That’s the economic Bill of Rights. These are the things that we need. And I think, again, Nick, we focus a lot on the middle class. Every single one of these rights, which you outline in your book are things that are necessary for building a healthy middle class. And that is our goal to have everybody able to climb into or stay in the American middle class because that’s the engine of growth and prosperity and dignity in this country.
Nick Hanauer:
Yeah, absolutely. So a couple of final questions, Mark, and you’ve articulated it already pretty well, but it’s our benevolent dictator question. If it was you, what would you do?
Mark Paul:
Well, I would pass the economic rights I lay out in the book. It’s time to pass the Pro Act. It’s time to implement Medicare for all. It’s time to ensure that everybody has the right to an education regardless of ability to pay. We could implement these and more. They’re eminently affordable and they would make us all richer for it. I mean, look, poverty’s not only about hurting low-income people. But it’s a drag on the rest of us for all of the wonderful humans that we miss out on fully developing.
Nick Hanauer:
Yeah, for sure. Poverty’s expensive for everyone.
Mark Paul:
But to do that, I would also tax the rich and tax them a lot. One idea that hasn’t come back to… That really hasn’t entered the political discussion is this idea of a maximum income. That’s something I talked about in the book. Economic rights are about setting floors in markets, but we need ceilings in markets too, in order to protect our democracy. So we’d implement a maximum income. I don’t know what the right number is there. And I think that’s a question for a healthy democracy to struggle with. Maybe it’s $400,000, which is the adjustment for inflation. If we took Roosevelt to maximum income that he proposed in his day. Or maybe it’s a million dollars, I don’t know. But I’d like to see us discussing this much more than we have been so far.
David Goldstein:
And that’s not a radical proposal in a sense. The what, 91-92% top marginal tax rate during the Eisenhower administration was the equivalent of a maximum income. Because everything above-
Mark Paul:
Do you remember what party he belonged to?
David Goldstein:
The Republican Party. That’s right. That’s why I bring him up. And you think the way that works, if you’re a CEO at a big company and you’re making $10 million a year, and you want $20 million a year. Well, if there’s a 92% top marginal tax rate, you’re not getting most of that raise. So it makes it kind of pointless to be competing for that. And corporations and their boards will know that and they won’t pay it. So that is the function of a high top marginal tax rate. The vast majority of people would never pay it. And in fact, fewer people would pay it because there’s no reason to earn that much anymore.
Nick Hanauer:
It’s true. So Mark, one final question. Why do you do this work?
Mark Paul:
I do this work to try to help build the society that I think we all deserve. I took a different path to becoming an economist. I used to work in kitchens. I love cooking. And I always joke that one day I’ll go back and just cook for a living. But I got too interested in politics and economics, and the fact that I couldn’t afford to eat in the restaurant that I cooked in, and nor could most of the other people working on the line with me. And that’s what set me on my path to economics, is how do we make sure that everybody can eat good food? I’m fine with work, I like working. But I wanted to understand how do we build the economy that that provides for all? And I’m continuing on that path and I think that economics is really where we need to be focusing most today.
Nick Hanauer:
Yeah, that’s a fantastic answer. I didn’t know that you were a former chef. Yeah.
Mark Paul:
I’m a French chef by training.
Nick Hanauer:
Wow. So cool. Well, Mark, thank you again for being on the podcast. And best of luck with the new book.
Mark Paul:
Thank you. It’s been a pleasure.
Nick Hanauer:
So Goldie, should Americans have an economic Bill of Rights?
David Goldstein:
Absolutely. And I think a lot of people listening to this, even allies of us, some people on the left will be a little skeptical. Like you raised the issue, how far is too far? And really it’s that idea of can we afford it? And the answer in the long run is, yeah. I mean, it might be challenging at the start when we talk about guaranteed employment, guaranteed housing, guaranteed healthcare, guaranteed education, a guaranteed income, some sort of basic income, all this stuff sounds expensive. But when you understand the economy, Nick, the way we understand the economy, this middle out perspective, that the economy grows from the middle out, when you include more people in the economy, the faster it grows. And then you have more resources to afford to put into these programs, into these rights that help build the middle class that creates the growth, that helps build the middle class, et cetera, it is that virtuous cycle.
And Mark talked about this scarcity mindset that we’ve been forced into over the past 40-50 years of neoliberalism, that basically tells us, oh, this stuff would be great, but we can’t afford it. It’s not true. There’s just not economics. There’s no good economics to tell you that that is true, that we can’t afford these things. And one of the reasons why we know that is because we see other market, democratic nations providing these things. And people are living very well. They’re living longer than we are living. They don’t have homeless encampments on the streets. They don’t have 2 trillion of student debt. They don’t have people who are living without healthcare, or housing, or education. So clearly it can be done if we wanted to do it. I think that, Nick, there’s another more philosophical question that is raised in this book. And that has to get to that distinction between negative and positive freedom, which I know to a lot of people feels really esoteric and pedantic, but it’s not at all.
And you brought up Amartya Sen, the philosopher and economist, Amartya Sen. He makes this really in incredible point that there’s a difference between fasting and starving. Even though materially, they’re both the same thing, not eating food. But the difference is that the person who is fasting is doing it by choice. They have the freedom to make the choice of whether to eat or not. And that is very different from the person who is starving, who doesn’t have the choice, who’s not eating because they don’t have access to food. And that distinction, I think, can be extended to the rest of the economy. There is a difference between not getting a good education because you don’t have access to one. And saying, “You know what? College isn’t for me. I want to work with my hands there.” There’s a huge difference.
And even though the same people, he might end up in the same sort of job working with their hands, the person who wanted to go to college and couldn’t because they couldn’t afford it, is going to be far less happy than the person who’s actually pursuing their dream. This is what they want to do. And we get back to the Declaration of Independence, that pursuit of happiness, that is our fundamental right. It’s not in the Constitution. But it is deeply seated in the American tradition and in the founding of this nation, however hypocritical the authors of that founding document were.
Nick Hanauer:
And in fairness, even if it wasn’t embedded in our founding documents, what’s the point of having a society if it’s not geared towards making life the best that it can possibly be for the majority of citizens? This is the only legitimate source of legitimacy for a government, is that it exists to improve the lives of the people it serves. And those people broadly, not just the people at the top.
David Goldstein:
And I would betcha our audience, the people listening to this podcast, the overwhelming majority of you consider yourselves middle class. You might make some distinction between upper middle class and lower. I don’t know how you see yourselves, but most people in this country see themselves as middle class. And when you think about your own life, and your own lifestyle, and your own dreams, and your own ambitions, you cannot deny the importance of having a right to work to a job, having a right, to housing, to education, to healthcare, to a basic income, enough to get by and to a healthy environment. That these are things that you value within your own lives, and you couldn’t live the life you wanted. You couldn’t make the choices, the substantive choices as Amartya Sen would say, that you want to make, without these things. So to say that these aren’t rights is to say that other people don’t deserve the things that you have.
Nick Hanauer:
Yeah. Well, there are clearly a lot of people who want to believe that.
David Goldstein:
Well, hopefully not amongst our listeners.
Nick Hanauer:
Yeah. Well, in the world.
David Goldstein:
Again, the book is The Ends of Freedom: Reclaiming America’s Lost Promise of Economic Rights by Mark Paul. There’s a link to it in our show notes. And as always, you can buy it wherever you want. You have the substantive freedom to buy that book from whoever you want. But we’d recommend your local independent bookstore.
Speaker 4:
Pitchfork Economics is produced by Civic Ventures. If you like the show, make sure to subscribe, rate, and review us wherever you get your podcasts. Find us on Twitter and Facebook at Civic Action and Nick Hanauer, follow our writing on Medium at Civic Skunk Works, and peek behind the podcast scenes on Instagram at Pitchfork Economics. As always, from our team at Civic Ventures, thanks for listening. See you next week.