The Social Rights of Producers
Models of Civic Republican Independence?
Post 14: 8 April 2025
Today, I continue my examination of the social rights of citizenship Roosevelt outlined in his Second Bill of Rights speech with the oddest two entries on his list:
The right of farmers to raise and sell their products at a return which will give them and their families a decent living;
The right of every business man, large and small, to trade in an atmosphere of freedom from unfair competition and domination by monopolies at home or abroad;
Many of us would not recognize these as social rights at all, so we should start there. The grounding for these rights overlaps with other social rights related to income—these will get their own post—but the entrepreneurial categories also go beyond that and deserve their own deep dive.
The entry for businesspeople is the one direct reference in the Second Bill of Rights to monopoly and economic inequality. The critical word in the entry, domination, makes clear that this is about freedom. The more common term, unfair, points to bad process that fully empowered actors can resist, but domination refers to a status in a power relation that makes individual resistance more difficult.
Domination is the opposite of freedom. When someone dominates you, they prescribe your choice set. The test of real freedom, I have written elsewhere, is whether you have choices comparable to others in society and are independently able to choose among these options. Translated to the current context: monopolistic economic entities who compete with, buy from, or sell to, small businesses should not be able to dictate the choices made by small business owners. That is a direct injury to the liberty of individual businesspeople.
Roosevelt picks up his campaign against monopolies from Woodrow Wilson, who explicitly characterized the complexity and scale of large corporations as direct threats to freedom:
American industry is not free, as once it was free; American enterprise is not free; the man with only a little capital is finding it harder to get into the field, more and more impossible to compete with the big fellow. Why? Because the laws of this country do not prevent the strong from crushing the weak. That is the reason, and because the strong have crushed the weak the strong dominate the industry and the economic life of this country.1
In his 1936 convention speech,2 Franklin Roosevelt described the problem in even starker terms. “Economic royalists”, he said, created “a new problem for those who sought to remain free.” Through “concentration of control over material things”, “the whole structure of modern life was impressed into this royal service.” This “new industrial dictatorship” affects all Americans, including small businesspeople:
There was no place among this royalty for our many thousands of small business men and merchants who sought to make a worthy use of the American system of initiative and profit. They were no more free than the worker or the farmer.
We experience this as a loss of “opportunity” and “individual initiative” as “the field open for free business” closes—but this is the heart of the experience of freedom.
The political equality we once had won was meaningless in the face of economic inequality.
The “almost complete control” that the economic royalists had over ordinary people’s lives amounted to a kind of “economic slavery”. “For too many of us life was no longer free; liberty no longer real; men could no longer follow the pursuit of happiness.”
Finally,
Against economic tyranny such as this, the American citizen could appeal only to the organized power of Government.
The Political Economy of Freedom. In the 1936 and Second Bill of Rights speeches, FDR lumps small businesspeople with workers and farmers, so we could argue that he is just covering his bases. But there is more to it than that. By calling out small businesspeople and farmers, Roosevelt, like Wilson, suggests that entrepreneurship plays a special role in the American republic. Most basically, being one’s own boss is a model for the sort of personal independence at the essence of the republican conception of liberty.
Traditionally, this was about land. For Jeffersonian republicans, the recipe for republican independence was small landholding, the republic of yeomen farmers.3 This same spirit motivated the Homesteading Act of 1862. It also underpinned the call to give former slaves forty acres, which Thaddeus Stevens argued would make them “independent of their old masters.” “Nothing is so likely to make a man a good citizen,” he said, “as to make him a freeholder.”4 The special call out to farmers in Roosevelt’s list shows that the priority placed on land had not faded much by 1944. Politicians still genuflect in that direction today, at least for the year or so before each Iowa Caucus. And the symbolic connection between landholding and a personal sense of independence and freedom explains much of the appeal of the single-family home (and suburban development), even though these are now disconnected from the primary function of that land as a means of production.
Grounding independence in the land required perpetual expansion, which carried its own moral quagmires and was unrealistic in any case, especially after the frontier was closed. Business offers more pathways to independence and small business faced a broader set of challenges from monopolistic business practices, but it makes sense to lump farmers and the petite bourgeoisie together rhetorically. These struggles against monopoly—unanticipated by the Founding generation—are models for all struggles against domination and, importantly, for the role of governments in balancing these uneven scales.
There are two issues with this set-up: it is not clear where workers fit in; and it is vague about what exactly to do about monopoly. I’ll speak mostly to the first of these.
What About Workers? Implicit in this construction is an elevation of small enterprise and an implicit devaluation of wage work. These sentiments have faded over time, but never completely. Jefferson held that the political independence of wage workers was suspect because they were economically dependent on their employers. “Dependence,” he wrote, “begets subservience and venality.” “While we have land to labor then, let us never wish to see our citizens occupied at a workbench.”5 This was mainstream thinking. Aristotle wrote that “The best form of state…will not make the mechanic a citizen…”.6
Wilson paid more attention to worker rights than Jefferson but had a similar ideal. Contemporary observer Walter Lippmann summarized it this way: “Wilson seems to see the workingman merely as a possible shopkeeper.”7 Wilson paints a bleak image of modern wage workers as “servants of corporations” whose “individuality is swallowed up.”8 How different is that from Jefferson? He asks:
Are you not eager for the time when the genius and initiative of all the people shall be called into the service of business? when newcomers with new ideas, new entries with new enthusiasms, independent men, shall be welcomed? when your sons shall be able to look forward to becoming, not employees, but heads of some small, it may be, but hopeful, business, where their best energies shall be inspired by the knowledge that they are their own masters, with the paths of the world open before them?9
FDR is obviously a much greater champion for workers, but his choice to include these two entries, combined with the fact the he does NOT include the right to unionize on his list, suggests that he is unable or unwilling to drop this thread. Again, he may just be trying to be complete for political reasons, but the problem is still there. The nation of shopkeepers is only slightly less unrealistic than the nation of yeoman farmers. We have to deal with the fact that not many Americans fall into these buckets (about 10% of us do now, more like 20% when FDR was speaking).10
Even with that said, self-employment has value as an aspiration. Government’s duty to foster freedom means preserving this option for everyone. The decision to start a business is one of a set of life choices to which we all should expect access; that creates a governmental duty to protect that choice if it is threatened, which it is by monopoly. One value of this option is that starting out on one’s own can be a way to break out of an exploitative job, another way to exit a private relationship of domination. Even if we use this exit ramp rarely, it is important that it exists.
Most of us aspire to a secure middle-class status and we are very prone to describe ourselves as such, even if we are really far beyond that economically, or even if the aspiration is quite distant. This is, in my view, an echo of the original bourgeois entrepreneurial ideal, a way to reenact that idea of personal economic control and independence. This is similar to the way the ideal of independence rooted in the land is still expressed in the “American Dream” of a single-family home. Leaving aside for the moment that these two images conflict at some level, the deeper idea is that there is a universal character to these aspirations. In the end, we have to find a way for everyone, meaning wage workers, to gain the same kind of standing in the community that the shopkeeper or family farmer hold in the collective imagination. The broad desire to participate fully in the material culture of the nation is at the root of the political drive for social rights.11
So What? In these posts, I have tried to consider both the philosophical grounding for the social rights of citizenship and some of the social policies implied by the associated public duty. The philosophical ground is always related, one way or another, to our collective responsibility to foster freedom. The policy options tend to be much more diverse, however, and are rarely cleanly joined to a single purpose.
The specific right that FDR would ensure for businesspeople is protection against the predation of monopoly businesses. That means guaranteeing “equal opportunity”—a somewhat difficult goal to operationalize. One aspect of this is clear, though. Fighting monopolies, whether for Wilson, Roosevelt, or us, requires limiting the ability of corporations to exert direct influence on public policy. This political dimension, limiting the extent to which governments serve narrow private interests is a basic civic republican value, but we have lost a great deal of ground on this score in the post-New Deal years. The Citizens United12 case capped a series of myopic Supreme Court decisions that effectively make it impossible for legislatures to control the influence of money in politics—if they were so inclined—and, in 2025, the capture of the state by oligarchs is well underway.
Beyond this, the main protection against monopoly, or bigness in general, is to set limits on what any business can do. This is clear enough when we talk about employees—which I will focus on in later posts—but less so when we talk about the effects on small business. Surely, we do not mean that small businesses have a right to win the economic competition with big business, only that this competition may not be “unfair”. Defining and policing the boundaries of fairness is a major task that can only be achieved through sustained public discussion. This work must focus on identifying and reforming the political manufacture of business advantage. Large entities frequently gain competitive advantage by rigging some public process—ranging from local property tax breaks and infrastructure deals to federal tax loopholes. Often well hidden, these perks can create the illusion of an economy of scale where none really exists. The public accounts of big and small business can be equalized; if we did that, we’d go a long way toward leveling the playing field.
This still leaves a great deal of ambiguity—it takes sustained analysis to know the degree to which the competitive advantage of larger businesses is the result of real economies of scale (hence “natural”) or the reward for market and policy manipulations. Recently the YouTube channel Not Just Bikes published a very good analysis of the many ways governments help create the market advantage enjoyed by big box stores. I knew about property tax breaks and infrastructure costs, but did not know that the sorts of bulk discounts that fuel the “scale” advantage that big box stores have over traditional retail used to be illegal.13 It is not easy to unwind these structures, but the first step is to see them.
When this political dimension is absent, unfair market practices are especially difficult to define and police. Amazon built its dominance in online retail by convincing investors to take losses for nearly a decade. This transparent strategy did not violate free market principles, but independent booksellers found it difficult to compete with Amazon’s low prices. In this case, the monopoly was built artificially but with limited state complicity (as far as I know). In these cases, what can governments do other than insist that workers and customers are treated fairly?
Roosevelt’s position on farmers raises a final set of issues. He says they have a right to “sell their products at a return which will give them and their families a decent living”. He is promising a price. The Jeffersonian resonances of protecting small-scale farming, the “family farm”, make it difficult to unpack policy in this area. These are deep American symbols. This seems like a big topic demanding its own post. For today, however, I just want to make one additional connection.
The symbolic and substantive value of entrepreneurship and small-scale farming is rooted in the connection of these activities to personal, and hence political, independence. But there is a dominated form in both of these domains. For farming, the archetype of domination, at least in capitalist economies, is sharecropping. Sharecroppers are trapped in a dependent relationship with landowners; they accept most of the risk associated with farming but have a limited ability to make critical farming decisions and limited access to market rewards. We should identify and prohibit the specific contractual arrangements that place sharecroppers in a dominated position.14
Work in the modern gig economy is often a simulacrum of self-employment. “Independent contractors” are often anything but and may be as dependent on their employer/platform as sharecroppers were on landowners. This is not a small issue. McKinsey has estimated that about one-third of all workers are engaged, either full- or part-time, in the gig economy.15
The employer-employee relation has become more informal over time. This provides some potential benefits for workers who, to some extent, can be their own bosses. But it comes at a cost of most basic worker protections. Overall, the trend has mostly served the interests of large employers, who now have smaller, cheaper, and more “flexible” workforces. Recently, a Massachusetts referendum gave Lyft and Uber drivers the right to unionize.16 This move implicitly accepts the drivers’ non-employee status; given that, it is a good move, certainly the best that the drivers could do at the moment. They would be better off as employees, however.
It may be that America wants to shift in this direction; again, there are real potential benefits. But doing so will require reorganizing our whole scheme of social protections from its present employer-based to a more state-based orientation. While I believe that this would be a good thing that will help universalize our scheme of social protections, this would be a major reworking of the American welfare state. It is very unlikely that there is any collective appetite for that.
Next post: TBD (15 April 2025)
<All of the posts in On Social Citizenship connect. I recommend that readers go back and read the first entry in the series.>
Notes
* Photo: UPenn Almanac, https://almanac.upenn.edu/articles/fdr-at-franklin-field-a-rendezvous-with-destiny
Woodrow Wilson, The New Freedom (Doubleday, 1913), 15.
Franklin D. Roosevelt, Acceptance Speech for the Renomination for the Presidency, Philadelphia, Pa. Online by Gerhard Peters and John T. Woolley, The American Presidency Project https://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/node/208917
Here’s a recording of the speech (My quotations start around 5:53):
Good descriptions of the political economy of Jeffersonian republicanism are offered by Drew McCoy, The Elusive Republic (UNC Press, 1980) and Lance Banning, The Jeffersonian Persuasion: Evolution of a Party Ideology (Cornell University Press, 1980). I rely mainly on them.
Thaddeus Stevens, speech in Congress, 19 March 1870, Congressional Globe 40 Congress (1 Session) 205. This never happened. The main barrier was likely that the forty acres would be from the seized property of plantation owners. The larger (160 acre) grants to homesteaders were from public lands (seized from Native Americans), but the use of seized private property was a step too far. The proposal reflects the essence of the civic republicanism of the Radical Republicans: not only would it ensure the free standing of the former slaves, it would bust up the Southern oligarchy. Another radical, Charles Sumner, said that a state that “lodges power exclusively with an Oligarchy, Aristocracy, Caste, or Monopoly, cannot be recognized as a ‘republican form of government,’” (Charles Sumner, “The Equal Rights of All” (Speech of February 5-6, 1866) in Charles Sumner: His Complete Works (Lee and Shepard, 1900 [1874]), vol 13, 137).
Thomas Jefferson, Notes on Virginia, XIX.
Aristotle, Politics III.iv.§3. Jefferson’s vision is more democratic, to be sure. Aristotle emphasizes the need for leisure time to engage in public affairs, not dependency. In keeping with Aristotle, at the time of the founding many still believed that only “gentlemen” should deal with public affairs.
Walter Lippmann, Drift and Mastery, (University of Wisconsin Press, 1985) 168.
Wilson, New Freedom, 5-6.
Wilson, New Freedom, 270.
This number depends heavily on definitions. Here, I rely on the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics for a figure that is reasonably consistent over time. A great deal depend on whether “gig” workers and “independent contractors” are considered self-employed. The 10% figure includes those who lead incorporated businesses and pay themselves a salary (they are their own employees).
I realize that this is a big claim to just drop in. I believe it is the best way to describe the politics of expanding social rights, at least as described by TH Marshall (and myself). I will defend it in a future post.
Citizens United v. FEC, 558 U.S. 310 (2010).
Not Just Bikes, “These Ugly Big Box Stores are Literally Bankrupting Cities”, 4/6/2025, (YouTube).
The draw of industrial jobs pulled and then technological change (the tractor) pushed most sharecroppers off the land by 1970. Farmers do still work for “shares” in a kind of barter system—I have no sense of the scale of this in America today—but these relations need not be exploitative. [A typical example is a farmer haying a field owned by someone else and accepting some (or even all) of the hay as payment.]
McKinsey and Co., “What is the gig economy?”, August 2, 2023.
Eli Tan, “Ride-Hailing Drivers in Massachusetts Win Right to Unionize” New York Times, Nov. 6, 2024.