But in hindsight this was wrong, the feared inflation never came, and the economic recovery was slowed because of the Republican fixation on tight money. But in the preceding eight years, wage-earning Americans suffered unnecessarily because of a wrongheaded right-wing counsel of despair. Maybe it isn’t possible to recreate a family wage for a less unionized and more feminist age — but are we sure? It’s just that conservatism has given up — once again, in unwarranted despair — on earlier assumptions about how public paternalism can encourage private virtue. The deeper point here is that public policy is rarely a cure-all, but it can often be a corrective.

Source: New York Times January 12, 2019 19:30 UTC