Fred Siegel’s The Revolt Against the Masses

“Within this newly constructed horizon, liberalism’s redistributionist impulse, never far below the surface, metastasized into a zero-sum approach ─ a strictly competitive game in which one person’s gain must entail someone else’s loss. Richard Barnet, of the left-wing institute for Policy Studies, captured the new mood by embracing the virtues of scarcity. The West, said Barnet, is on a collision course with nature, and the entire world suffers from the West’s pathologically ceaseless desire to better itself. But progress cannot help, he argued, because progress is merely “creative plunder.” Regulation and managed economies are best because they force us to succumb to the “rediscovery of limits.” ─ The Revolt Against the Masses, copyright © 2013 by Fred Siegel, Encounter Books, Page 153.

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“Before the 1960s government regulation was aimed at specific industries. But with the creation of the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (1964), The Environmental Protection Agency (1970), The Consumer Products Safety Commission (1972), and the vast expansion of the Federal Trade Commission, government asserted its influence over the entire economy.” [This is why The United States of America is in decline] ─The Revolt Against the Masses, copyright © 2013 by Fred Siegel, Encounter Books, Page 154.