How to Reshape America’s Economy

The following summary of socialist ideas for reshaping the American economy is taken from testimony that Michael Harrington, chairman of the Democratic Socialist Organizing Committee, gave before the Joint Economic Committee of the U.S. Congress last November. Harrington began with a discussion of the Hawkins-Humphrey bill (the Equal Opportunity and Full Employment Act of 1975).

The basic presuppositions of the bill before us assert a fundamental—to my mind, erroneous—Keynesian principle: that the private corporate infrastructure of the American economy is sound, so that the role of government is to supplement and facilitate its decisions with regard to what investments should be made, what kinds of jobs should be cre...