It first appeared in 1943 as the book that went against everything that the politics of the time were telling people to believe. We had been through more than a decade of the planning state, with government robbing people in order to help them. This was the period of history that prepared the way for the predatory politics that define daily life today. The experience of the New Deal prepared the way for wartime planning in ways that people today do not understand. But Paterson did.
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