Daily Inspiration Quote by Garet Garrett

A loaded sentence dressed up as diagnosis, Garrett’s line is less a neutral description of the New Deal than an attempt to put it on trial. The key move is definitional: he doesn’t argue policy details first; he frames the battlefield by naming “free and competitive private enterprise” as “that system...we call capitalism.” By yoking capitalism to an almost civics-text ideal of freedom and fair competition, he invites readers to treat any state expansion as not merely a shift in governance but an attack on the nation’s economic identity.

“Enmity” does the heavy lifting. It implies not disagreement, not emergency improvisation, but hostility - a motive. “Fundamental” clinches it, suggesting the antagonism is structural rather than contingent: not a series of reforms in a crisis, but an ideological project. The subtext is paranoid in the classical sense: power is consolidating; the Roosevelt coalition is using hardship as cover; the administrative state is becoming permanent.

Context matters. Garrett was a prominent critic of FDR’s wartime and domestic centralization, writing in a moment when the Great Depression had cracked public faith in laissez-faire and the federal government was inventing new tools in real time. The New Deal mixed market stabilization with regulation and social insurance, but Garrett’s rhetoric refuses that hybridity. He strips the era’s complexity into a moral binary: capitalism equals liberty; the New Deal equals coercion.

As journalism, it’s also a savvy act of coalition-building. The phrase “which we call capitalism” flatters the reader into a shared “we,” turning an economic label into a cultural loyalty test. If you accept his definitions, the verdict is prewritten.