● Land of Promise: An Economic History of the United States
By Michael Lind
Review via History Book Club
This election year offers Americans an unusually clear choice between competing visions of the republic: On the one hand a minimalist government presiding over a lightly-taxed populace left free to succeed (or not) on their own devices; or a more actively engaged government intervening in economic development and social policy to pursue what it perceives as the general welfare. Michal Lind’s splendid new economic history of the United States shows that these two competing visions are almost as old as the republic itself. This is a book that would be welcome anytime, but that is especially timely in the run-up to the 2012 elections. Anyone even slightly acquainted with American history will recognize these as the Jeffersonian and Hamiltonian strains of American public policy. Yet history is full of ironies: Jefferson remains one of the great heroes of the Democratic Party, but the real Jeffersonians of our time are the Tea Party Republicans, while Democrats tend to be Hamiltonian in outlook. The strands of history make a tangled skein. Michael Lind untangles those strands for us in this lucid, fascinating, highly readable book. He presents American economic history as a succession of “republics,” each characterized by its own economic forces and policies, each destabilized by the forces that would create its successor.
