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egulate or break up monopolies. The Pure Food and
Drug Act of 1906 limited the sale of certain medicines,
required labeling to be accurate, and created the federal
inspection of meat packaging operations. In the twentyfirst
century, we take regulations like these for granted,
along with professional licensure requirements for many
occupations and government regulation of many products
and businesses.
Economic historian Robert Higgs argues that this progressive
agenda came from a change in ideology in the
late 1800s, after which people wanted the government to
expand its powers to look out for their economic wellbeing
in addition to protecting their rights. 2 In the twentieth
century, the government responded to crises like wars
and economic depression by expanding its budget and
powers, ratcheting up its size as the progressive agenda
grew. The government extended its regulatory oversight
of economic activity to look out for people’s economic
well-being by supporting their incomes in addition to regulating
commerce. Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid,
food stamps, unemployment compensation, and a host
of other wealth-transfer programs are designed to protect
the economic well-being of many groups of citizens.
These programs’ existence shows the extent to which
progressivism has become a part of the accepted political
ideology in the twenty-first century. By the time of
Lyndon Johnson’s “Great Society” in the 1960s, the ideology
of liberty—the idea that the government’s role is to
protect people’s rights—had been transformed into the
ideology of democracy, the idea that the government’s
role is to carry out the will of the people. 3
The progressive ideology has been accepted even by
56 LIBERALISM AND CRONYISM