What Does a True Populism Look Like? It Looks Like the New Deal
But often the response of the government has been to plead incapacity in the face of inexorable global economic realities: “We cannot tax the winners — the wealthy investors, financiers
and skilled professionals — because they are footloose and they would move to other countries.” This reinforces populists’ yearning to reassert national economic control.
But many of the Populists’ economic ideas, such as the progressive income tax, regulations on big business
and much greater government control of the economy, were absorbed by the progressive movement and became part of the political mainstream.
In other words, in its late stages, globalization looks less
and less as if it is expanding the overall economic pie and more and more as though it is simply taking money from some groups and giving it to others.
And the rules of the gold standard enforced tight money and credit conditions — what we would today call austerity policies.
By then the United States was mired in the Great Depression,
and Franklin D. Roosevelt had decided the economy needed the monetary boost that adherence to the gold standard precluded.