Donald R. Brand

Corporatism, the NRA, and the Oil Industry

The National Recovery Administration (NRA) of the 1930s was the most extensive corporatist experiment in American history, and its administrative history challenges widely accepted conclusions in interest group theory. The NRA exemplifies almost every characteristic of government regulation of business which interest group theory has associated with the capture of bureaucratic agencies by private interests. A broad delegation of congressional power in the National Industrial Recovery Act gave bureaucrats little guidance in identifying the public interests to be promoted by the NRA, increasing the likelihood that the New Dealers would turn to the industries they regulated for aid in defining the goals of the program. Cooptation of the NRA appeared even more likely because trade associations were formally incorporated into the administrative agency responsible for the program. Yet, surprisingly, business efforts to control the program failed. As this case study of the oil industry under the NRA demonstrates, big business was neither the interest group sponsoring the NRA nor its beneficiary. Even the independents in the industry who did benefit from the act were forced to accept benefits as favors granted by these bureaucrats, who remained firmly in control of the program. The conclusion which emerges from a study of the NRA is that of the robustness of the American state and its capacity to coopt private interests in the pursuit of its own ideologically defined goals. Support for the pluralist conclusion that political power in the United States is widely distributed has suffered steady erosion over the last decade. Even prominent pluralists of the late 1950s and early 1960s have repudiated their earlier contributions, acknowledging theoretical deficiencies in their own paradigm. Criticism of pluralism has focused on two related assumptions of the plu-

Thomas Piketty's Global Tax on Wealth

ABSTRACT Thomas Pikettys concern with growing economic inequality leads him to propose a global tax on wealth. While he recognizes that the efforts of individual nations to tax wealth will prove ineffective since wealth is mobile, he does not seriously confront the collective action problems that will impede national efforts to cooperate in more effectively taxing global wealth. To what degree are more radical forms of political integration required to overcome these collective action dilemmas? Piketty provides partial and inadequate answers for these questions with regard to European integration. To be persuasive the economic analysis of Capital in the Twenty-First Century would have to be supplemented with a political economy comparable in depth and sophistication to that provided by The Federalist Papers regarding the political and economic integration of American states at the time of the American Founding. Pikettys failure to address questions of political economy makes his project vulnerable to the charge that nothing less than a world state would suffice to impose a global tax on wealth, and thus that his project is hopelessly visionary and susceptible to misappropriation for tyrannical purposes.

The War Against the New Deal: World War II and American Democracy By Brian Waddell. DeKalb, IL: Northern Illinois University Press, 2001. 236p.

This book argues that the transition from the New Deal to a mobilized wartime economy during World War II restored corporate hegemony in collaboration with a state apparatus dominated by military elites. The purported losers in this transition were New Deal reformers committed to a planned economy and an extensive social welfare state, and groups like labor and small business whose interests were represented by reform elites. Organized chronologically, Waddells account traces the development of the military-industrial complex from the War Industries Board in World War I to what Waddell asserts is a neocorporatist pattern of governance that had become established by the late 1940s and early 1950s. For the intervening years, he devotes attention to the trade association movement of the 1920s, the National Recovery Administration in the early 1930s, the New Deal turn to Keynesian economics, Harry Truman and the Marshall Plan, and the National Security Act of 1947; but the book focuses on the three periods associated with mobilization for World War II. These three periods are prewar mobilization from September, 1939 to December, 1941; the institutionalization of wartime mobilization from early 1942 through early 1943; and the battles over postwar reconversion that began in 1943 and continued into the immediate postwar era.