Hoover Institution fellow Raghuram Rajan argues that capitalism needs both top-down reforms and bottom-up policies to maintain trust in a market economy.

When Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and her allies proposed a new stimulus package to take on climate change and income inequality, they called it the Green New Deal. Their reasoning for the economic program’s name is obvious. It pays homage to the New Deal, a bundle of transformative economic reforms captained by President Franklin D. Roosevelt during the Great Depression. Like the original New Deal, the Green New Deal includes massive government intervention in the American economy through more spending, regulation, and taxes.

Harry Truman famously remarked that he wished he could find a one-armed economist since all the ones he had to deal with were constantly weasel-wording their advice with “on the one hand” and “on the other hand.” As one who routinely had to read and try to squeeze meaning out of the verbiage of White House economic advisors as a speechwriter for presidents Nixon, Ford and Reagan, I know exactly how Truman felt.