Politics & Power Quote by Garet Garrett

Redistribution is doing a lot of quiet work here: it’s framed less as policy than as a moral crusade with a price tag. Garrett’s intent is to cast the New Deal not as emergency triage for a collapsing economy but as a deliberate reordering of who gets what in America. By naming “ideals of social and economic justice,” he spotlights the New Deal’s moral vocabulary and treats it as the real engine of the project, implying that once “justice” becomes the measure, limits blur and government gains a blank check.

The subtext is suspicion of righteousness. Garrett isn’t arguing numbers; he’s warning about a new legitimizing language that can make redistribution feel inevitable, even virtuous, and therefore harder to contest on constitutional or pragmatic grounds. “Was going to” has the tone of grim forecast rather than neutral description, as if the train has already left the station and the reader should be alarmed at the destination. He also collapses varied programs (relief, regulation, public works) into a single motive: income transfer. That simplification is strategic. It turns a messy set of responses to mass unemployment into an ideological pivot point.

Context sharpens the edge. Writing in the New Deal era, Garrett represented a strain of conservative journalism that saw Roosevelt’s expansion of federal power as a quiet revolution: the birth of a managerial state that would outlive the Depression. His line works because it reframes the fight. It’s not about recovery metrics; it’s about who gets to define “justice” and, once defined, how permanently that definition can reorganize the relationship between citizens, markets, and the state.