From FDR to Obama – the Destruction of Our Rights

By Thersites, on May 27th, 2009

Franklin Delano Roosevelt proposed a “Second Bill of Rights” during his State of the Union Address in 1944. He noted that while “under the protection of certain inalienable rights…our nation has grown in size and stature, however—as our industrial economy expanded—these political rights proved inadequate to assure us equality in the pursuit of happiness….true individual freedom cannot exist without economic security and independence. “Necessitous men are not free men.” People who are hungry and out of a job are the stuff of which dictatorships are made.” He argued that we “cannot be content, no matter how high that general standard of living may be, if some fraction of our people—whether it be one-third or one-fifth or one-tenth—is ill-fed, ill-clothed, ill-housed, and insecure.” Under the auspices of “economic security and independence,” FDR laid out the following list of rights for the American people:

The right to a useful and remunerative job in the industries or shops or farms or mines of the nation;

The right to earn enough to provide adequate food and clothing and recreation;

The right of every farmer to raise and sell his products at a return which will give him and his family a decent living;

The right of every businessman, large and small, to trade in an atmosphere of freedom from unfair competition and domination by monopolies at home or abroad;

The right of every family to a decent home;

The right to adequate medical care and the opportunity to achieve and enjoy good health;

The right to adequate protection from the economic fears of old age, sickness, accident, and unemployment;

The right to a good education.

During and after FDR’s presidency, many programs were taken up to establish these so-called rights. The US government implemented a minimum wage with the hopes of providing people with a baseline level of income to be able to pay for life’s necessities, and created unemployment insurance so that people would have sufficient money to purchase goods when they lost their jobs. They created agricultural subsidies to protect farmers. They implemented all sorts of regulations and restrictions to stop (certain) companies from dominating their competitors. They created HUD and devised the CRA to force lenders to finance housing for those who were less well off, to ensure the “American dream of home ownership.” They provided healthcare for the old and poor. They created Social Security to allow the old to receive checks after they were retired. They expanded public education and pushed for everyone to receive a college degree. They empowered the Federal Reserve to flatten the business cycle and protect against recessions.

Today, King Obama looks to be finishing off the dirty work of the progressives of the last century. He is pushing for “fair” credit card charges, universal healthcare, onerous governmental control of business under the guise of environmental protection, government control of college loans and empathetic justices who understand the concerns of everyone who is not white, male or wealthy.

Essential to the justification for this platform is FDR’s argument that there be equality in the pursuit of happiness, and that “individual freedom cannot exist without economic security and independence.” What those like FDR and Obama mean is that there is not equality as an outcome of the pursuit of happiness, i.e. equality of condition. By economic security and independence, FDR and the King mean that people need safeguards so that they can keep their jobs, pay for products and be comfortable in retirement.

All of the ends that these progressives seek seem admirable, but the means to achieve them end up making it impossible for the ends to be obtained. Nobody wants to see masses of unemployed, sickly or uneducated people. But the government policies implemented to protect against these problems – to guarantee the “rights” listed above – end up leaving people unemployed, unhealthy and uneducated. They impoverish the citizens by destroying the inalienable rights that even FDR admits allowed the US to gain its strength as the world superpower.

It was not economic security or independence that allowed our country to thrive, but a system in which people voluntarily traded and had the opportunity to innovate and take entrepreneurial risks. Failure, not economic security, had to be a motivator because there was no safeguard against it; no notion of being too-big-to-fail. If you failed, you simply had to pick up and try again. The Federal Reserve in attempting to protect against failure ends up leaving the people economically insecure by decreasing their purchasing power and savings through inflating the money supply, and by incentivizing people to allocate resources improperly through the manipulation of money and credit which leads to the painful boom and bust cycle. The moral hazard created by providing safeguards against failing, be it in business or in one’s own life ends up weakening the people.

Economic security and independence come as a result of our rights to life, liberty and property, not the other way around. The best thing the government can do to ensure these rights, the rights that lead us to maximum wealth, the fullest employment for those who seek it, the best and cheapest medical care and the most practical and affordable education is simply to protect its citizens from attacks on their individual rights. Individual rights, not entitlements. Entitlements beget more entitlements. Entitlements breed laziness in the citizenry. Entitlements cause people to take things for granted. Freedom is the one thing that cannot be taken for granted. As Reagan put it, “Freedom is never more than one generation away from extinction. We didn’t pass it to our children in the bloodstream. It must be fought for, protected, and handed on for them to do the same.”

If you disagree with this in principle, then look at the results of the governments’ policies, those policies representing the antithesis of freedom. The US populace is probably dumber than it has been at any other time in history, even though a greater number of people are graduating from public high schools and attending colleges than ever before. Our economy teeters on the brink of collapse. Our government is larger, more intrusive and more corrupt than it has ever been. It is also effectively bankrupt minus its monopoly power to print money; interesting that it can have this monopoly power while also protecting people from “unfair business competition and domination by monopolies at home or abroad.”

Other examples of government failures abound. Amtrak is a money-loser, as is essentially all public transportation. If public transportation is not a money-loser, then I would venture to guess that it still isn’t as cheap or efficient as private alternatives. The US postal service is nowhere near as effective as FedEx. The DMV is a joke. The purchasing power of our dollar has decreased by over 95% since being under full control of the Federal Reserve, and we have had more frequent recessions than prior to the Fed’s creation. In countries with nationalized healthcare, we see that the price of better-quality, private healthcare increases, while public healthcare services leave people waiting sometimes for months on end for essential medical procedures. People flee to the US if their lives are in danger with good reason. If King Obama gets his way, they will have nowhere to flee anymore. Ironically, when it comes to almost every sector of our economy, while economists would have you believe that government corrects market failures, it appears that we would be far better if markets corrected government failures.

In the final analysis, there is not one good or service that the government provides that is cheaper and better than the equivalent one in the private sector, with the caveat that in terms of defense, only the government can coordinate the forces necessary to effectively protect us. And even then, the government outsources weapons development and certain tactical supports to private defense companies. And even then, the government screws up at times in the way it carries out its wars.

I want to reiterate that only the market can provide the people with the best goods and services at the best prices. This is the same for credit as it is for housing as it is for healthcare. If you take the market out of the equation and try to centrally plan, in the end you impoverish society and leave a nation to anarchy and revolution. Through a dictatorship, which is what the Second Bill of Rights effectively creates (a tyrannical government), you create the unemployed and the hungry that FDR speaks of.

With the burgeoning deficits at the state and national levels, the impending tsunami of inflation and the undermining of the rule of law and protection of life, liberty and property by our leaders, it looks as if in their quest to grant us the Second Bill of Rights, they have also destroyed the rights granted to us by an authority higher than that of our politicians, our natural ones.

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The 10 Worst Presidents (from a free-market perspective): Part 2

By J.D. Seagraves, on January 26th, 2009

Last week, I produced a list of the Top 10 Worst Presidents (from a free-market perspective), #s 6-10. Starting with #6, they were Richard Nixon, George Washington, George W. Bush, Ronald Reagan, and Theodore Roosevelt. Now here are the “top” 5:

5. Lyndon Johnson : In addition to the pointless death and destruction of Vietnam, Johnson’s “Great Society” also caused irreparable damage to the U.S. economy and the American family. Even his “civil rights” initiatives, for which conservatives give him begrudging praise, are condemned by libertarians. The Civil Rights Act, for example, amounted to the nationalization of private property and ushered in Affirmative Action, which arguably exacerbated racism. LBJ’s hyper spending was monetized by the Federal Reserve — according to the current head of the Dallas Fed, Johnson once physically beat a Fed chairman until he agreed to “print the money” Johnson “needed.” The huge amounts of new money created under Johnson’s reign as chief executive made the severing of the gold standard virtually inevitable, and set us on the path to monetary oblivion we’re currently on.

4. Harry Truman : The bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki killed tens of thousands of innocent women and children — and it was all unnecessary. Although we’re not taught this in our government-funded schools, Japan had already offered a conditional surrender, but the U.S. demanded unconditional surrender. The Japanese were worried that the U.S. would kill or humiliate their Emperor, a religious figure, if their surrender was “unconditional.” Truman used this as an excuse to display the U.S.’s horrible military might — and put the Soviets on notice, igniting the Cold War.

Nothing can top the immorality of mass murder, but in terms of precedent, Truman’s unilateral invasion of Korea — without congressional consent, let alone a declaration of war — ranks as his worst deed. Truman considered his power as commander in chief to be absolute, and U.N. resolutions to overrule the U.S. Constitution. Since Korea, no U.S. president has sought a formal declaration of war — it’s “anachronistic,” they say. Oh, and when steel workers threatened to strike in 1952, Truman nationalized their mills (until blocked by the Supreme Court) because the steel industry was “vital” to the nation’s defense.

3. Franklin D. Roosevelt : No executive has ever assumed more absolute power than FDR. One of his first actions as president was to dictatorially close U.S. banks. Shortly thereafter — in an episode that has been censored from our history books — he made it illegal to own gold, which then backed the U.S. dollar, and sent government agents into the homes and businesses of gold “hoarders” to confiscate the precious metal. Once all the gold had been turned in or seized, FDR revalued the dollar from 1/20 an ounce of gold, to 1/35 — an outright theft. Later, under the Bretton Woods System, this stolen gold — which is what filled Fort Knox — flowed out of the country, never to return.

We are taught in government schools that FDR “lifted us out of the Depression.” Numerous economists have shown this to be false. In fact, FDR’s New Deal policies made the Depression longer and more painful. For example: to keep food prices from dropping (as if that would have been a bad thing), FDR ordered millions of pounds of crops to be destroyed — while much of the nation went hungry. Later, unemployment did drop precipitously, but only after FDR had drafted a huge portion of the American work force into war. And, by the way, many contrarian historians believe FDR provoked Japan into bombing Pearl Harbor — and had foreknowledge of the attack.

One more thing about FDR: Today, he is celebrated as one of our greatest presidents by both the left and the right. But little is made of his internment of Japanese-American citizens in concentration camps. That he is held high as a symbol of liberalism (by the left) and war-statesmanship (by the right) is a disgrace.

2. Woodrow Wilson : “Woodrow Wilson makes George W. Bush look like a pro-bono lawyer for the ACLU,” says historian and author Bill Kauffman. And he’s right. Cindy Sheehan might have been unfairly ridiculed by Bush’s proxies in the right-wing media, but she wasn’t thrown in jail. Thousands of World War I critics, however, were. Among them, Socialist Party presidential candidate Eugene V. Debs, who gathered nearly 6 percent of the vote against Wilson (and T.R. and Taft) in 1912, and then ran for president from a jail cell — thanks to Wilson — in 1920.

Wilson, a former Klansman, re-segregated the Capitol, which had been integrated under President Grant. He gave us the Federal Reserve Act, the income tax, the direct election of senators (which entirely crushed “states’ rights”), and lied us into the completely counterproductive World War I — which led the way to the rise of Hitler and World War II. His ascension to the top of the Democratic Party ticket also, once and for all, crushed classical liberalism (Jeffersonianism) as a serious political tendency, and set up the bi-partisan monopoly of “Hamiltonianism,” leaving Americans with no real choice on Election Day.

1. Abraham Lincoln : “But didn’t Lincoln free the slaves?” No. If, in fact, the Civil War had been a crusade to free the slaves, then perhaps it would have been morally justifiable, says Real Lincoln author and Austrian economist Thomas J. DiLorenzo. But Lincoln was a white supremacist who favored a different 13th amendment — one that would have forbidden the federal government from ever interfering in slavery where it already existed. And, as the Civil War was coming to a close, he actually appropriated money for the deportation of freed blacks to Africa. Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation only applied to regions not under his control: not only were northern slave states excluded, but so were northern-controlled areas of southern states! The rest of the Western world, save for Haiti (which had a righteous slave rebellion), ended the evil practice of slavery without bloodshed. For merely the monetary expense of the Civil War, to say nothing of the hundreds of thousands of lives, the North could have purchased the freedom of every slave and given him or her 40 acres and a mule.

The real motivator behind the Civil War was economic mercantilism. Lincoln believed ardently in protectionism and corporate welfare, and the states that would comprise the Confederacy were for free trade. The system that Lincoln advocated received 75 percent of its revenue from the net-exporting South, and then spent 75 percent of that money in the North — the South was getting fleeced, and that’s why they seceded. Lincoln said that his priority was “preserving the union,” and if it meant that there would still be slavery in the South, that’d be fine — just as long as the tariff was collected.

But what makes Lincoln the worst president ever? Well, he literally destroyed the founders’ republic, which was a federation of independent states — a voluntary union. Lincoln made it an involuntary one and abolished state sovereignty. He also imposed the first income tax, conscripted men into the army and paid them with fiat money (another first), illegally suspended habeas corpus, shut down opposition newspapers, imprisoned political opponents in the North, and ultimately forced his Hamiltonian agenda — which had lost for sixty years at the ballot box — on the country via a one-party monopoly that stretched from his election to that of Democratic-Hamiltonian Woodrow Wilson.

Where will President-Elect Obama rank on this list? Hopefully nowhere. Although the parallels between Hoover and Bush (both hyper-interventionists who are mischaracterized as “free-market” ideologues that”did nothing” to avoid crisis) are stunning, and Obama seems to fit the theme as a new FDR to supplant Bush’s Hoover, it must be remembered that FDR campaigned against Hoover’s interventionism and for a return to the laissez-faire Jeffersonianism of Grover Cleveland and only flip-flopped once he was in office. Perhaps Obama, who campaigned as an FDR-style Democrat, will do the same and flip-flop to the side of limited government and free markets. We can hope, can’t we?



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