A Sorely Needed Defense of Government’s Possibilities

This post was originally published as part of a series on The Regulatory Review. Reprinted with permission.

In How Government Built America, Sidney A. Shapiro and Joseph P. Tomain offer a sweeping account of the role of government in building the United States. Readers will encounter a tour de force of U.S. history that includes topics as diverse as the regulation of early taverns; founding-era debates over bureaucracy; Andrew Jackson’s spoils system; the post office; the Civil War; monopolies and the Gilded Age; immigration, tenements, and slums; populism and muckrakers; Keynesianism and the New Deal; nuclear power development and the space race; the civil rights movement; the Vietnam War; Rachel Carson and Earth Day; Ralph Nader and consumer protection; the War on Poverty; Alfred Kahn, President Jimmy Carter and deregulation; Reaganomics; the Affordable Care Act; governmental outsourcing; the judiciary’s evolving role in government; January 6; COVID-19 and Anthony Fauci; and climate change and the Inflation Reduction Act.

Altogether, the authors suggest, this history illustrates the importance of the federal government in building the modern American economy and establishing guardrails on it that serve the greater good. The authors’ ability to synthesize a vast range of government interventions into a coherent whole is truly impressive. Although it means they are unable to probe deeply any particular topic, the upshot is a connective tissue among these diverse topics that are infrequently linked.

I was expecting the book to be a history of infrastructure—how the government built literal things. At times it is. I very much appreciated the authors’ throughline of how a Hamiltonian vision of infrastructure development—marrying public and private initiatives to spur economic growth—has undergirded the development of many key U.S. industries, including the railroads, the telegram, the national highway system, nuclear power, and the internet. As the federal government has again pivoted to Hamiltonian industrial policy as a strategy for tackling climate change via the Inflation Reduction Act, this history is a great reminder of the enduring potential of such strategies.

Yet Shapiro and Tomain compellingly move past infrastructure alone to think about how government regulation has enhanced the freedom of U.S. citizens, providing them with civil rights, clean air and water, job safety, and some provisioning of basic goods and services. I commend the authors’ refusal to draw a clean line between these developments and more infrastructurally focused ones, as each can and has contributed to widening prosperity and equality. At the same time, the authors assiduously chart the ways in which these tools have often failed marginalized communities—an important point to keep on the table as health and wealth outcomes continue to diverge by race, and as 11 million undocumented immigrants face increasing animus, violence, and risk of expulsion.

The tradeoff of Shapiro and Tomain’s capacious coverage is that they fire through history rapidly, with limited space to either theorize its development or explore its nuances. For example, readers learn about the fascinating early history of public education and its importance in cohering the nation and shaping its workforce, then skip ahead to the GI Bill, and then ahead again to modern struggles with affordability and student debt, without developing much of a sense of the intervening politics or policies. Similarly, the rise of regulated industries during the 20th century is covered in a matter of pages in which the authors bemoan how these mid-20th century experiments stifled competition, without offering any real alternatives. The authors later treat economic deregulation as a triumph, even as they express their concern about rising inequality and geographical polarization in recent years. I would have liked the authors to explore potential linkages between these phenomena, which might have tempered their positive assessment of deregulation.

Shapiro and Tomain conclude that the United States has always deployed a combination of government policy and the free market—itself, of course, shaped by government policy—to achieve what they variously refer to as a common “American dream,” “fundamental American values,” and set of “national values.” I am not as convinced as the authors are that such things exist; it might be equally productive to see our history as a long and ongoing contest over both what core American values are as well as the best means to achieve them.  Nevertheless, I very much support the authors’ sorely needed defense of government’s possibilities, at a time when the dominant political impulse appears to be debating which of the federal government’s limbs to cut off first.

Every book-writing project must come to an end, in order to be a book. Shapiro and Tomain leave theirs off at the rise of the Biden Administration. This ending point allows them a hopeful note: “Over the nation’s history, the government has taken on an increasing and successful role in ensuring prosperity, protecting people, and promoting equality.” May the longer arc of history prove that their optimism is well-founded, even as the next period of our country offers it a profound test.