Progressive Era Q & A

Teddy Roosevelt: Progressive Republican


"Unregulated competition is a bad thing."

"The chaos of the market..."

"Wall Street is a vicious, cut throat, den of vipers."

And so on.

These are but a sampling of the more common hackneyed bromides fired at the free-market system. While statements like these are far more common in Democrat circles, Republicans are not immune from falling into the trap of clichés, as in the case of the administrations of Teddy Roosevelt and, more recently, George W. Bush. (Remember how, in the twilight hours of his presidency, Bush, channeling Keynes, famously declared, "I sacrificed my free market principles in order to save the free market." to justify the disastrous stimulus package he signed into law and for which Republicans are still paying for dearly as they somewhat disingenuously offer granitic resistance to Obama's equally disastrous "stimulus" packages.) Anyway, I contacted an old economics professor with a statement made by the Attorney General under T. Roosevelt, Philander Chase Knox, regarding the government's desire at the time to break up the putative "monopoly" of railroad industries:

"Uncontrolled competition, like unregulated liberty is not really free."

"Does this follow?" I asked him. Here was the reply.

It's baloney. It was the government which set up railroad monopolies by giving monopoly grants of land for the railroads, who then charged farmers a fortune to ship their stuff to the commodities markets. The only non-monopoly railroad was the Northern Pacific, privately financed, privately built, and who never ripped people off. Teddy's statement is progressive era myth.

Remember all competition takes place within a moral/religious system and a political/legal system, both of which pre-date the particular market system. So, competition is already regulated because it takes place in an already existing society.

As an aside, Jonah Goldberg makes an interesting observation about Progressivism in the America of T. Roosevelt and W. Wilson:

Some Progressives focused on social reform (Wilson) while others were concerned with America’s greatness (T. Roosevelt.) Roosevelt reflected the masculine side of Progressivism while Wilson the maternal side.

One could make pretty much the same comparison using Bush as T. Roosevelt and Obama as Wilson.