Patrick Newman describes this volume as the second act in a three-act play, the bridge connecting the country’s founding to the modern America of the present generation.
Cronyism: Rise of the Corporatist State, 1849–1929
Patrick Newman traces the birth of the American corporatist state across eight decades, from the collapse of the Jacksonian Democrats in 1849 to the dominance of Wall Street and big business before the Great Depression. Defining cronyism as government intervention that benefits special interests at the expense of the public, he follows the campaigns that cartelized finance, transportation, manufacturing, food, and medicine: railroad land grants and the Interstate Commerce Commission, protective tariffs and the trusts, the National Banking System and the Federal Reserve, the Federal Trade Commission, meat inspection and the pure-food laws, and the rise of the dollar as a world reserve currency.
The sequel to Cronyism: Liberty versus Power in Early America, 1607–1849, with a foreword by Thomas J. Sargent. Narrated by Christian Pollack.
Thomas Sargent places Patrick Newman in a tradition of American historians—Charles Beard, Forrest McDonald, Richard Hofstadter, and Murray Rothbard—who compress data and look for patterns in how the state is designed and managed.
Patrick Newman defines cronyism as government intervention that benefits special interests at the expense of the public interest, and argues the corporatist state was built in stages over eight decades rather than arriving at once.
Patrick Newman shows how liberty-minded reformers, once holding the levers of power, were pulled toward favoritism of their own.
A transcontinental railroad was unprofitable on market terms, but attractive once Congress supplied land and subsidies.
