I'm delighted to be joining another TPM book club discussion, especially on such a hot topic. In Maine, in winter, hot is good. I'll add a dash of spice. In my view Eric's characterization of the New Deal and Keynes gets in the way of answering the questions he poses.

Early on, Eric misunderestimates the clarity of the New Dealer's vision. "Beyond Roosevelt's core conviction that '[n]ecessitous men are not free men,' little held the New Deal together." (Rauchway page 4) Suggesting that the commitments holding the New Deal together were "little" makes no sense.

FDR first referred to necessitous men in his 1936 address to the DNC. By 1944, he knew exactly what he meant, "We have come to a clear realization of the fact that true individual freedom cannot exist without economic security and independence." The Economic Bill of Rights followed.

Five months later the ILO adopted the Declaration of Philadelphia a document which includes these rights. Strong evidence links FDR's language of economic rights to Frances Perkins (Author's correspondence with Kirsten Downey, Perkins biographer).

Perkins and FDR first worked together on behalf of the ILO in 1919. Although the League of Nations was completely out of favor, Roosevelt (then Assistant Secretary of the Navy) helped arrange an ILO meeting that Congress refused to fund despite having extended the invitations in the first place. In 1934, FDR supported Perkins efforts to secure US membership in the ILO. Later when the Nazis pressured Switzerland to expel the ILO, Perkins had FDR send Isadore Lubin to help avert disaster. Lubin's access to FDR's inner circle resulted from his work at the Bureau of Labor Statistics. Perkins appointed him to this post.

There's nothing little about either economic rights or freedom.

In both his book and his first post, Eric quotes The Economic Consequences of the Peace to paint Keynes as a free trader. Keynes was the architect of the Bretton Woods System of fixed exchange rates and capital controls. These positions are mutually exclusive.

The Keynes I know advocated the euthanasia of the rentier class. One wishes that many more people, including Mr. Geithner, understood Keynes.