"The ethos of the New Deal is gone today."

"'The era of big government is over,' President Clinton proclaimed, and, with a stroke of his pen, stripped welfare from its moral underpinnings. Social Security, one of the last tangible policies of the New Deal era, has been divorced from the spirit of Roosevelt's vision.... If we reject this conservative framework, we can replace it with our own. If we argue that government has a responsibility to the most vulnerable, we can make the debate about the methods government will use to fight injustice, rather than about how small government should become. If we take this stand, not only will we fulfill the moral imperative of the New Deal, but we can, once again, build a progressive electoral majority."

-- John West of Oberlin College
the winner of a national student essay contest to commemorate the seventy-fifth anniversary of the New Deal sponsored by The Roosevelt Institution and The Nation.

Is the problem really government? If so, the anarchists and the super-capitalists are in agreement: no impediments to rapacity.

Is big government really the problem? Believing so absolves our leaders and us, the citizens, of political sloth.

The ethos of the New Deal is gone, part 2.