Kim Phillips-Fein > Quotes

“Irénée, the middle of the three brothers and the most politically passionate, complained that the new Securities and Exchange Commission, created to regulate the financial markets, marked an attempt to change human nature, disrupting the inevitable risks at the heart of life: “Men are by nature speculators, and Nature enforces the necessity of speculation on all of us.” Pierre argued that the Roosevelt administration’s opposition to child labor meant government interference with the intimate details of domestic life: “No Federal law or constitutional amendment will abolish child labor unless the parents in the community are convinced that child labor should not exist.”
― Kim Phillips-Fein, Invisible Hands: The Businessmen's Crusade Against the New Deal

“While the city’s financial problems were real enough, its elected leaders’ evasion of these political arguments—the attempt to use debt to settle problems that were at heart political—was the deeper failure.”
― Kim Phillips-Fein, Fear City: New York's Fiscal Crisis and the Rise of Austerity Politics