Kim Phillips-Fein's Invisible Hands

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As capitalism grew larger worldwide, greed for profit and lack of regulation became the major allies of the corporate world. The twenty and twenty-first centuries are the epitome of this phenomenon. Moreover, with the help of Kim Phillips-Fein’s Invisible Hands: The Making of the Conservative Movement from the New Deal to Reagan, one may understand the different views on the opposition to the New Deal policies and legacy; Abrahm Lustgarten’s work Run to Failure: BP and the Deepwater Horizon Disaster conveys the consequences of the ideal presented in Phillips-Fein’s literature. This work attempts to establish a relationship between the acquisition and expansion of profit –which oftentimes requires lack of regulation– and their effects on the…show more content…
According to the redactor, “the conservative movement in power had transformed the tax code, government regulation of business and relationship between the federal government and states…” (xii). This suggests that the conservatism experienced today is a repercussion of the New Deal policies and their transcendence into the twenty-first century. In a New Deal perspective: the more regulation, the better. Unfortunately, regulation is what the conservative movement opposes, it is as if the Gilded Age was being reflected nowadays. Also, the quote reflects the idea that federal government and states should have different powers, and it serves as an allegory for the gist of the Deepwater disaster: regulatory agencies should have less power than corporations. However, corporations –such as British Petroleum– do not seem to fathom that regulations are needed for “advancement of desirable economic goals” (196). The reason behind the necessity for less regulations postulated by companies is the greed for constant and aggressive profit expansion –which leads into the second literature being studied: Run to

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