ABOUT
Many history teachers correctly teach that “Franklin Roosevelt was actually moderate given the times,” or “Compared to many of his contemporaries he was a conservative.” That may be true, however these relativistic arguments mean nothing in a world where right is right and left is left. FDR may have been less radical that others, but just because Stalin killed more people than Lenin does not mean Lenin was not a Communist.
The simple truth is that Roosevelt was a progressive. During the Roosevelt years, America’s top marginal tax rate reached 94% (here). According to Historian Burt Folsom, “In 1941, in fact, Roosevelt proposed a 99.5 percent marginal rate on all incomes over $100,000. ‘Why not?’ he said when an advisor questioned this tactic…. After that proposal failed, Roosevelt issued an executive order to tax all income over $25,000 at the astonishing rate of 100 percent.” (here)
No speech better displays the new role of government than Roosevelt’s Commonwealth Club address. As the legacy of the founders decayed, Roosevelt took initiative and issued his own bill of rights.
HISTORICAL CONTEXT
Franklin D. Roosevelt (FDR) is a nearly messianic figure today. As Washington calls for stimuli and bailouts (a page taken out of the FDR playbook), the mass media insists on referring to today’s economic meltdown as “The Greatest Economic Crisis Since the Great Depression.” In other words, this guy was a big deal: the crisis that he dealt with is remembered just as his Keynesian response is imitated. In the book Great Myths of the Great Depression, Lawrence Reed points out that “Over the four years from 1929-1933, production at the nation’s factories, mines and utilities fell by more than half. People’s real disposable incomes dropped 28 percent. Stock prices collapsed to one-tenth of their pre-crash height. The number of unemployed Americans rose from 1.6 million in 1929 to 12.8 million in 1933. One of every four workers was out of a job at the Depression’s nadir, and ugly rumors of revolt simmered for the first time since the Civil War.”
But besides the statistics, it was the human aspect that was most painful. As families starved, business fell. The reasons for living were slowly disappearing, as is seen by the jump in suicide rates.
Today the debate continues: what caused the Great Depression? Did FDR’s “New Deal” work? If not, what did get us out? No doubt the irresponsible monetary policy at the Federal Reserve (Wilson’s legacy) aggravated the problems, as did the Smoot-Hawley Tariff. Some claim that “free-markets” and “no regulation” are the reason, despite the dozens of oversight agencies that existed prior to 1929 (if you beg to differ, study the progressive era and, in particular, Woodrow Wilson). Even the New Deal itself may have contributed, as Walter Lippmann wrote, “with almost no important exception every measure [Roosevelt] has been interested in for the past five months has been to reduce or discourage the production of wealth.”
MY ANALYSIS
The “Commonwealth Club Address” affords us an opportunity to listen to FDR, his political philosophy and economic beliefs. It is a rare opportunity where he invites us “to consider with me in the large, some of the relationships of government and economic life that go deeply into our daily lives, our happiness, our future and our security.”
In order to contrast FDR’s speech with the creed of the Founders, one must understand the two concepts of liberty: positive and negative. A positive right means the right to something. A negative right implies freedom from something. In almost every case, asserting a positive right means suspending the negative right of property. Health care, a positive right, requires labor; when it is provided as a freedom (“free of charge”), you are offering it at the expense of a Doctor’s “property.”
Roosevelt’s assault on the founding fathers’ vision was conscious and intended: “The issue of government has always been whether individual men and women will have to serve some system of government or economics, or whether a system of government and economics exists to serve individual men and women… The final word belongs to no man; yet we can still believe in change and in progress.” Therefore the authority of every classical American text we have studied, from The Constitution to the Gettysburg Address, is in question. To FDR, the Founding Fathers’ belief in private and individual freedom were simply opinions, equally valid as, say, the views of Hitler, Stalin or Mao. Those eternal natural rights in the Declaration of Independence are, for FDR, replaced by change for the sake of change. Change that FDR and the progressives can believe in.
FDR then discusses an alleged economic transformation, apparently sparked by the industrial revolution. At this point, Roosevelt doggedly asserts Wilson’s thesis: corporations grew and small groups of men became too powerful. Like many demagogues, Roosevelt uses the proverbial capitalist — perhaps the most notorious and nefarious straw man of all time — to fan the flames of populism. Yes, FDR, like so many others, attacks the banks, the companies, the corporations, and the business owners as a group of nasty industrialists that actively bankrupt customers in their never-ending quest to make a quick buck; as if taking money away from people is the best way to increase market share. Nevertheless, he tells us, “all this calls for a re-appraisal of values.” Goodbye, Thomas Jefferson.
His solution is simple. “[The Government's] task now is not discovery, or exploitation of natural resources, or necessarily producing more goods. It is the soberer, less dramatic business of administering resources and plants already in hand, of seeking to reestablish foreign markets for our surplus production, of meeting the problem of under consumption, of adjusting production to consumption, of distributing wealth and products more equitably of adapting existing economic organizations to the service of the people. The day of enlightened administration has come.” Hello, Alexis de Tocqueville.
FDR did not necessarily want to own the corporations, instead “today we are modifying and controlling our economic units.” So he threw away private enterprise in favor of a system of private ownership and public control. This system is what the Italian dictator Mussolini termed state capitalism, marked with “the bureaucratization of the economic activities of the nation. (Address to the National Corporative Council).” This system was later termed Fascism.
But, the speech continues, and degenerates into a dogmatic manifesto of progressivism: consider it an economic Bill of Rights. I will list them for you:
1) “Every man has a right to life; and this means that he has also a right to make a comfortable living.” This is such an obvious perversion of the Declaration that I will not even waste the time pointing it out.
2) “Every man has a right to his own property, which means a right to be assured, to the fullest extent attainable, in the safety of his savings.” Unless, of course, he is wealthy. FDR issued an executive order for an 100% income tax on the top income earners.
And of course, if anyone threatens those two rights (one is positive, one is mendacious), “the government must be swift to enter and protect the public interest.”
“Faith in America, faith in our tradition of personal responsibilities, faith in our institutions, faith in ourselves demands that we recognize the new terms of the old social contract. We shall fulfill them, as we fulfilled the obligation of the apparent Utopia which Jefferson imagined for us in 1776, and which Jefferson, Roosevelt and Wilson sought to bring to realization.” Yes America, have faith in the institutions that FDR is preparing to irreparably damage through shining new, unconstitutional, administrative agencies. For FDR accepting the “new terms” of an apparently antiquated social compact is our patriotic duty. Besides that, sit back and let bureaucrats take care of you. But what else would you expect from a man who claims Wilson and Jefferson professed a similar view of the state?
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[...] Commonwealth Club Address [...]