The Hammer: Power, Inequality, and the Struggle for the Soul of Labor Highlight

There has long been a sick competition among poor Southern states to offer themselves up as the place most willing to debase themselves for businesses willing to relocate there. It is an approach that harkens back to the nineteenth century, when the North was industrializing, but the South remained stubbornly wedded to free labor as its panacea. “We may be bad, but we’re cheap,” the theory goes.