I'LL BE SHORT by Robert B. Reich.

Throughout our history the United States has periodically asserted the public's interest when market outcomes threatened social peace—curbing the power of the great trusts, establishing pure food and drug laws, implementing a progressive federal tax, imposing a forty-hour workweek, barring child labor, creating a system of social security, expanding public schooling and access to higher education, extending health care to the elderly, and so forth. We did part of this through laws, regulations, and court rulings, and part through social norms and expectations about how we wanted our people to live and work productively together. In short, this nation developed and refined a strong social contract, which gave force to the simple proposition that prosperity could include almost everyone.