The Ends of Freedom: Reclaiming America's Lost Promise of Economic Rights

by Mark V. Paul

An urgent and galvanizing argument for an Economic Bill of Rights—and its potential to confer true freedom on all Americans.

Since the Founding, Americans have debated the true meaning of freedom. For some, freedom meant the provision of life’s necessities, those basic conditions for the “pursuit of happiness.” For others, freedom meant the civil and political rights enumerated in the Bill of Rights and unfettered access to the marketplace—nothing more.  As Mark Paul explains, the latter interpretation—thanks in large part to a particularly influential cadre of economists—has all but won out among policymakers, with dire repercussions for American rampant inequality, endemic poverty, and an economy built to benefit the few at the expense of the many.

In this book, Paul shows how economic rights—rights to necessities like housing, employment, and health care—have been a part of the American conversation since the Revolutionary War and were a cornerstone of both the New Deal and the Civil Rights Movement. Their recuperation, he argues, would at long last make good on the promise of America’s founding documents. By drawing on FDR’s proposed Economic Bill of Rights, Paul outlines a comprehensive policy program to achieve a more capacious and enduring version of American freedom. Among the rights he enumerates are the right to a good job, the right to an education, the right to banking and financial services, and the right to a healthy environment.

Replete with discussions of some of today’s most influential policy ideas—from Medicare for All to a federal job guarantee to the Green New Deal— The Ends of Freedom is a timely and urgent call to reclaim the idea of freedom from its captors on the political right—to ground America’s next era in the country’s progressive history and carve a path toward a more economically dynamic and equitable nation.
 

Genres: Politics, Nonfiction

320 pages, Hardcover

Published May 12, 2023

Reviews

[Dean Baker · Rating 5 out of 5]

Why We Do This Crap: Review of The Ends of Freedom, by Mark Paul



Mark Paul has done a useful public service in etching out the goals of progressive economic policy. Many of us get bogged down in debate over things like whether the Average Hourly Earnings series is more accurate than the Employment Cost Index, or whether Section 230 protection is giving Facebook, Twitter and other Internet giants a subsidy compared to competitors in print and broadcast media.

But the technical aspects to these arguments at the end of the day are not important. Few of us aspire to be experts on wage indexes. We care about these issues because we care about building a fair economy: an economy that allows people to live decent lives and to achieve their aspirations for themselves and their children. Mark Paul’s book is a reminder of what that society looks like.

The book is an effort to lay out and expand upon the goals etched in Franklin Roosevelt’s Four Freedoms and the often-neglected economic agenda that Martin Luther King espoused in his speeches and writings. In these troubled times, it is refreshing to be reminded of the aspirations of these great progressive voices of the last century.

The economic rights that Paul wants to add to our political rights are the right to a job, the right to housing, the right to an education, the right to health care, the right to a basic income and banking, and the right to a healthy income. This is a big agenda, which is the point.

I won’t go through each of these (get the book), but I will make a few points on some of them, starting with the right to housing. In ensuring that housing is affordable, Paul revives the argument for rent control. He compares the conventional attitude of economists to rent control to their view of the minimum wage before the 1990s. It was standard for economists in 1980s to be dismissive of minimum wages, claiming that the result of setting a wage above the market-clearing wage will simply be to create unemployment among the low wage workers we want to help.

Three decades of research have overturned this view. It turns out that monopsony is a common feature of labor markets. As a result, a law that requires employers to pay a higher wage may often lead to little or no effect on employment levels. In the last quarter century many states and cities have raised their minimum wage well above the national level, increasing the income of low-paid workers by thousands of dollars a year.

I am not sure that we can tell a similar story of monopolistic landlords, but I think economists have been guilty of the same sort of narrow thinking on rent control as they had been with minimum wages in prior decades. Paul is well aware of the fact that rent controls can be poorly implemented, noting the failures of the “first generation” rent controls put in place doing World War II. However, he points to a second generation of controls, which have allowed for greater flexibility, most importantly allowing rents to rise with costs, which have been more successful in allowing people to stay in their homes with an affordable rent.

Another key part of the second generation rent control story is the exemption of new construction from controls, at least for a substantial period of time. This means that builders will not be discouraged from adding new units, since they will be able to get market rents for a long enough period of time to cover their investment.

When I taught intro economics several decades ago, I used to have fun with the conventional argument about rent control leading to housing shortages. I would draw a vertical supply curve and then a downward sloping demand curve. I would then draw in a rent-controlled price at a level below the intersection of the two lines. I would then point to the fact that demand exceeded supply at the rent-controlled price. Everyone could then see that we had a shortage of housing.

Then I said, suppose we eliminated the control, do we still have a shortage? Students would all nod and say that we got rid of the shortage.

Then I would ask them how many more people now have housing? The correct answer is of course zero. If the supply curve is vertical, there is no more housing for people to get, we eliminated the shortage by making it unaffordable for a substantial segment of the population.

Supply curves are never literally vertical, but if we asking about the supply of housing at a point in time, a fixed supply can be a reasonably good approximation. Our choice is whether we allow tenants to get affordable housing, or whether we let landlords profit from a housing shortage. There is not an obvious economic case for the latter option.

Paul points out that people who own a home in effect have rent control. They have paid a fixed price for their house, which does not increase if the value of the property goes up. In fact, they get to pocket an increase in property values when they sell the house. And, because of our perverse tax code, they are likely to avoid paying taxes on their gains.

A person who lives in a house for five years and sees a gain of $400,000, gets to keep this money tax free, at least at the federal level. On the other hand, if they earned $400,000 from working five years ($80,000 a year) they would pay around $80,000 in income taxes, not counting their Social Security and Medicare taxes. In this context, it is hard to get upset about people, including some relatively well-off people, benefitting from rent control.

Paul recognizes that ultimately, we need more housing. He notes that NIMBYism has limited construction in many areas and argues that we will have to overcome it if we are to get an adequate supply of housing.

He also suggests that public housing can play an important role. This is likely to raise a few eyebrows. While there are places around the world where public housing provides comfortable middle-class shelter, the record in the United States is at best mixed.

Part of the story is racist policies designed to keep Black migrants from the South out of white communities. But there are other problems associated with public housing, like corrupt contracts, excessive bureaucratic delays, and the persistence of racism. It would be nice to think that public housing can play an important role in solving the country’s housing problems, but it hard not to be a bit skeptical.

There is a similar story with Paul’s advocacy of a job guarantee supported by public service jobs. The obvious reference point here is the Civilian Conservation Corps (CCC), which provided jobs to millions of workers at the worst points of the Great Depression.

The CCC was tremendously valuable in providing jobs to workers who desperately needed them, and also in building many infrastructure projects that still serve us today. But there is little downside risk to putting people to work on infrastructure projects when we have 25 percent unemployment relative to the current situation where the unemployment rate is under 4.0 percent.

The basic issue is that we presumably want any jobs in a federal jobs program to be decent jobs in terms of pay and work conditions. But this would mean pulling people away from private sector employment. There is no problem in principle in giving people working at unpleasant low-paying jobs in the private sector a public sector alternative. But if we do this and end up with tens of millions of workers in public sector jobs, then we have to be damn sure that these jobs are productive.

That might be possible, but we can’t just wave a wand and make it so. To my view, the best way to go in this direction would be to do some trial projects. Have public sector jobs in areas of especially high unemployment or restrict them to workers who have been unemployed for at least a year. This sort of trial will both demonstrate that a public sector jobs program can be successful and also provide a chance to address some of the problems that will inevitably arise.

Paul pushes for a universal Medicare program as a way of guaranteeing the right to healthcare. He argues that this is far more efficient than our current health care system, where an enormous amount of money is wasted on administrative costs. It is also a cesspool of rent-seeking activity, which allows people to get rich, often at the expense of patients.

This is very much on the mark, but the political path to getting to universal Medicare is chock full of land mines. The bad guys have a lot of political power and are quick to use it to protect their pocketbook.

Anyhow, we know the route to a good society is not easy, but it is useful to having an outline of what it looks like when we get there. This is what makes The Ends of Freedom most worthwhile.

[Greg · Rating 5 out of 5]

Professor Paul of Rutgers University writes forcefully and to the point with few, if any, extraneous words. And he gets “things moving” from the very opening of his Introduction where he notes that the United States frequently and openly calls out other nations for their alleged failings in maintaining the human rights of some of their citizens, including such things as providing adequate sustenance and suitable shelter, and yet “the United States does not itself treat such economic and social conditions as rights for its citizens. Rather, the US government remains focused on defending so-called negative rights – freedoms from interventions or suppressions that could induce intimidation, coercion, or even violence….” (P. 2)

“For Americans, the invocation of freedom, liberty, or rights is typically framed in the classically negative sense of ‘not being interfered with by others.’” But such negative freedoms prove “insufficient when it comes to the destitute and desperate.” (P. 3)

Accordingly, in this book, Dr. Paul reintroduces the important companion concept of positive freedom, that is, the freedom to do and become, the ability to thrive. (And this, by the way, is what Jefferson had in mind when in the Declaration of Independence he wrote about the inherent right of every human being to enjoy “life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.” Jefferson’s concept of happiness was far fuller than simply “joy” but, rather, implied human flourishing.)

“In what follows,” Professor Paul writes, “I offer a comprehensive prescription that aims to address the problem of persistent economic insecurity in America, one based on an expanded notion of American freedom and grounded in an alternative model of economic thought. The United States can eradicate poverty and build an economy that works for everyone…by adopting social and economic (“positive”) rights: the right to a well-paying job, the right to health care, the right to an education, the right to a home, and more…. (P. 3)

Although likely not as well known to many contemporary US citizens, the history of positive freedom in American thought and politics is also extensive. In fact, social and economic rights have been part of the American conversation since before there was an American conversation…. Positive freedom amounts to individuals’ capacity to act on their free will – to live the good life and pursuit happiness.” (P. 3-4)

Drawing on the ideas of President Franklin Roosevelt and his announcement of the Four Freedoms and in his calling for an economic bill of rights, as well as those of Dr. Martin Luther King whose pursuit of economic justice was every bit as powerful as his commitment to civil rights, “this book proposes a new economic bill of rights, one geared to the twenty-first-century economy. That means, in addition to many of the rights Roosevelt enumerated in his 1944 address, the inclusion of the right to a healthy environment and the right to an income and basic banking services.
“In detailing a contemporary bill of economic rights, I present a new vision for the role for the state in both structuring and limiting the reach of markets…. It is increasingly essential that we recognize the merits of allowing governments to structure those markets so they support human flourishing and economic security; a society can derive all the benefits of markets while also regulating them.” (P. 4-5)

“One of the more regrettable turns in the mostly noble history of noble freedom is its co-opting and radicalization by a group of influential economics during the second half of the twentieth century. These theorists, whose primary goal was to dismantle the redistributive mechanisms of the New Deal and the Great Society, preached an extreme form of market fundamentalism – “neoliberalism” – that prescribed privatization and marketization for every economic ill. For the past sixty years, policy makers on both sides of the aisle have been held in thrall by all this set of beliefs, and the results are patent: egregious levels of inequality and child poverty, persistently high unemployment and underemployment, and sickness and mortality rates higher than those of democratic countries of comparable wealth.
“…America’s social and economic crises are not obscure, unpredictable, or ‘natural’; rather they stem from intentional policy choices….
“In what follows, I lay out the history of and intellectual case for positive rights as an economic good.” (P. 5)

And so he does in the remainder of the book.

He also devotes a full chapter to How Do We Pay for It, one that will certainly discomfort those who wish to wish to keep their over-sized gains of the past 50 years. And, while I do not agree with everything in that chapter, I do endorse most of it. And I especially concur with his argument that we seriously look at all of the revenue that has been taken off the table through tax cuts for the rich in recent decades. When we talk about “what we can afford” it is as if those dollars no longer exist as part of the pie, real or potential. And yet, they do.

Repeatedly, as in Cathonomics, he asks us what can we really afford? In questions of paying out additional dollars, of course, but also in terms of the losses we will collectively experience if we do not pony up and pay more. What we can “afford” is usually expressed in dollars and cents; he asks us to consider what it also means in terms of children left behind, people without jobs that pay a living wage, families without health care. The question is more than an economic one; it is an ethical one of the highest order.

Moreover, in his call for a return to an American commitment to an economic bill of rights very similar to what FDR called for 79 years ago – such as the right “to work, to housing, to education, to health care, to basic income, and to a healthy environment – his argument and reasoning reminded me of Anthony Annett’s moral case for such a “just economy” in his underappreciated work Cathonomics.



Whereas Annett’s argument is rooted in two millennia of Roman Catholic teaching, Paul’s argument taps into the justice and equality convictions of the Declaration of Independence. In both cases, however, their argument that much-needed change is imperative now strikes me as sound and valid.

I recognize that for persons wedded to the distortions of laissez-faire economics and the fallacy of trickle-down economics, this book – like Cathonomics – will likely strike them as yet another call to the dangerous doctrines of socialism.

But this is because we Americans have been rather successfully indoctrinated by the economic arguments that are funded and distributed by the wealthiest among us precisely so that they can continue to reap in ever-more while the rest of us scrabble for what remains.

But, in fact, the moral argument behind Catholic social justice teaching and the right to flourish of all who live in a democratic republic argue that our current way of regarding economics is seriously upside-down. “We the people” is not just some meaningless phrase, nor is it one restricted merely to the right to vote; it is also an all-encompassing pledge to each other that we will see justice done to each other by leaving no one behind, nor anyone permanently left in wretched second- or third-place status.

Another book full of hard truths, undeniable facts, and moral challenges. How likely is it, though, that many Americans will read it?

[David Dayen · Rating 3 out of 5]

If you're looking for a coherent left economic playbook, this is for you.

[David · Rating 1 out of 5]

Here is the way the argument of this book is structured:

1. Here are a list of things I would like everyone to have.
2. Let us call these things I would like everyone to have rights.
3. The government should adopt and finance these rights using the economic bill of rights.

Will it cost a zillion dollars? Yeah. Can the government afford it? For sure. Yeah, I see you scratching your head. You've never really considered yourself to be a genius, but you've always convinced yourself that you knew how government financing works. The government pays for deficits by taxing or it'll risk inflation, right?
You see, the author is not entirely wrong. The government can really afford this without raising taxes or triggering an apocalyptic inflation, but you can only understand what this is anchored on if you follow the argument down to the last chapter. This is something only the United States can afford. Not because it is wealthy or because it has a particularly strong economy. No. Just and ONLY JUST BECAUSE its currency is the main currency for international trade and its treasury bonds are the benchmark for asset safety. In other words, the policies that the author wishes to have the government implement would drown Valery Giscard d'Estaing's worry about USA's exorbitant privilege in a sea of dollars. The US government is the only government that can afford the ends of freedom, BY EXPLOITING THE TRUST OF THE REST OF THE WORLD.

To understand more about this, I'd recommend The Deficit Myth: Modern Monetary Theory and the Birth of the People's Economy by Stephanie Kelton.

[Maddie Zook · Rating 5 out of 5]

I rated this so highly because I think it does a good job presenting a topic that often is poorly and negatively discussed and covered by traditional media.
I still struggle with some of the ideas more in terms of how to work against so many years of negative public connotations. I also wish there were a little more hard number support for the Economic Bill of Rights concepts, as the How to Pay for It chapter was a little lacking. All in all I think it’s a great read for people and does the work of creating a more palatable and positive version of something that would greatly benefit the public.

[Jeffrey · Rating 5 out of 5]

In "The Ends of Freedom," Mark Paul invites us to envision a world where people are valued over profits, where qualitative experiences take precedence over quantitative measures. He challenges us to ask ourselves: What kind of world do we want to live in? According to Paul, we must adjudicate ends, define our collective goals, and then create the policies and governance structures that will provide the means to achieve these ends.

I interviewed Mark on his book: https://youtu.be/iLxMu2XkzaA

This is a stark departure from the neoliberal economic order that has dominated since the mid-1970s. This system, championed by figures like Reagan and Thatcher, discourages us from questioning predetermined ends which promotes a man-made marketplace where individuals are free to engage in economic transactions without responsibility for the outcomes as these actions are improperly naturalized. Paul argues that this modern mythology, built on the theories of Hayek, Friedman, and others, is a recent development in modernity. There was a time when society valued quality over quantity.

Paul's exploration of the difference between negative and positive freedoms is particularly insightful. He argues that we must articulate a new vision of the good life that addresses our needs and desires for our time. An economic bill of rights is one of the core pillars in this articulation. However, Paul acknowledges that this book is only one part of what must become a grassroots campaign that weaves together new moral narratives, along with new forms of governance and economic systems. This call to action echoes the philosophy of John Dewey, who emphasized the importance of looking at consequences rather than causal explanations. Dewey warned against viewing the public as a collection of atomized individuals operating in their own isolated domains, he argued that everything we do is inherently social, and our actions inevitably generate consequences. These consequences create externalities that impact not only the immediate parties involved but can also reverberate across society, affecting people far and wide and we have a responsibility to these consequences.

In this era of shifting societal values, where personal fulfillment and societal contribution are increasingly prioritized over traditional measures of success, the insights of both Dewey and Paul are more pertinent than ever. As we navigate these changes, let's remember their call for a participatory and progressive society. Let's rise to the challenge, acknowledging that we possess the agency, the creative capacity, and the collective courage to reclaim the moral narrative that has been usurped by the manufactured myths of Neoliberalism.

[BAM who is Beth Anne · Rating 5 out of 5]

This book was extremely readable.

The basic gist Mark Paul argues that all Americans should have the right to a good job, education, housing and access to financial services.

He sets up the history of how we’ve gone wrong, the path to recovery and how we can reasonably pay for it.

The book is laid out clearly, written in a way even a non-economy major can understand and lays out a plan. Not just a concept, but a plan, that someone should be paying attention to.