Next Social Contract: Latest Articles

In the summer of 1968, as Soviet tanks rolled into communist Czechoslovakia to end the brief period of liberalization known as the "Prague Spring," W.H. Auden composed a poem titled "August 1968":

Picture, if you will, an America apparently like our own. A country like ours bogged down in war on two fronts and suffering from the greatest economic slump since the Great Depression of the 1930s. An America indistinguishable from ours in every respect except that when you turn on the nightly news you see the face of President John Sidney McCain ...

If the bankruptcy and restructuring of GM proceed according to the Obama administration's plan, then the U.S. government will end up owning about 60 percent of the ailing carmaker. The de facto nationalization of GM, added to the de facto nationalization of AIG and various banks and the renationalization of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, is a threat to the healthy distinction between the private sector and the public sector.