• Choose a category
• All
• Classic-Fiction

By Root 6802 0

with the introduction of the Social Security and unemployment insurance programs in a 1935 Fireside Chat, he founded the American social safety net, which is itself an indirect guarantor of capitalism. The competition that is central to a free-market economy produces losers as well as winners. This process of “creative destruction” so central to capitalism is just that—creative and destructive—and we cannot sustain the destruction without the social safety net that affords some protection to the losers. Without it, they might seek to bring down the very system that has made Americans wealthy. As America enters a necessary debate about how generous unemployment insurance, Social Security, and Medicare should be, it is well to remember that this social safety net ensures the legitimacy and stability of the free-market economy.

While FDR did not significantly expand immigration, which had been curtailed in the 1920s, thousands of Europeans, many of them Jews, made their way to America as refugees from Nazi Germany in the middle to late 1930s. Many were elite scientists, physicists, writers, artists, musicians, historians, and intellectuals. This “brain wave,” epitomized by Albert Einstein, played a critical role in shifting the world’s intellectual leadership from Europe to the United States.

The administration of FDR’s successor, Harry Truman, saw the enactment of the Servicemen’s Readjustment Act of 1944, known as the GI Bill of Rights, which provided college tuition and vocational training to returning World War II veterans. (After World War I, most discharged veterans got little more than a $60 stipend and a train ticket home.) According to the Department of Veterans Affairs website,

Thanks to the GI Bill, millions who would have flooded the job market instead opted for education. In the peak year of 1947, veterans accounted for 49 percent of college admissions. By the time the original GI Bill ended on July 25, 1956, 7.8 million of 16 million World War II veterans had participated in an education or training program. Millions also took advantage of the GI Bill’s home loan guaranty. From 1944 to 1952, VA backed nearly 2.4 million home loans for World War II veterans.

Also in the Truman administration came the establishment of the National Science Foundation, in 1950, through which the federal government distributed, over the years, billions of dollars for scientific research. Truman’s successor, Dwight Eisenhower, is often caricatured as a retired general more interested in golf than in legislation. In fact, he made huge contributions to America’s growth-promoting formula. He built on the government’s partnership with science during World War II, which had produced the first atomic bombs. He also capitalized on the national alarm over the Soviet Union’s launch of the first Earth-orbiting satellite, Sputnik 1, in 1957. We forget today how Sputnik both electrified and challenged Americans and why it prompted us to update our formula so energetically.

Within a year of Sputnik’s launch, Congress passed the National Defense Education Act, which supported the study of science, foreign languages, and the history, politics, and economics of foreign countries. To improve defense research and innovation, the government established the Advanced Research Projects Agency, later the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, which over the years made concrete contributions to the Saturn V rocket, the one that propelled the Apollo astronauts to the moon; the world’s first surveillance satellites; the research network that was the precursor to today’s Internet; new materials now used in high-speed integrated circuits; and the computer mouse.

Eisenhower, who had been impressed by the German autobahn system, also made a monumental contribution to America’s infrastructure. He won support for the creation of the interstate highway system on the grounds that it was necessary to move around military equipment, troops, and supplies more efficiently in the event of a war with the Soviet Union. Today there is a ringtone you can download