The most important legacy of the New Deal, however, is a certain system of belief, the now-dominant ideology of the mixed economy, which holds that the government is an immensely useful means for achieving one’s private aspirations and that one’s resort to this reservoir of potentially appropriable benefits is perfectly legitimate. To take – indirectly if not directly – other people’s property for one’s own benefit is now considered morally impeccable, provided that the taking is effected though the medium of the government.
-Robert Higg (Crisis and Leviathan)
While Woodrow Wilson was the first President to have openly despised the Constitution (even then, academia hated it and he sprang from it), FDR was the first to truly shred it by expanding Government’s role in crowding out Civil Society’s actions. His administration, for the first time, truly saw citizens as expressions of its will in dispensing a new sense of “equality”.
And as with most governmental monkeying around, along with the Progressives’s mantra that only intentions matter and not actual results (or acknowledgement that their Governmental policies screwed up and Govt must fix what Govt broke in the first place), the Great Depression was extend around an additional seven years (until WW II rearmament).
Sidenote: And for those Progressive pacifists that yammer that violence doesn’t solve anything, I know that our “violence” in defending ourselves certainly solved a huge problem.
Bit by bit, each individual political knife slice, all in the “good graces” of “do something” politicians have led to today. In true effect, politicians, more in other States but Governor Sununu has certainly done the same (but slightly lesser in degree, but only slightly), taking away almost everything we had taken for granted.
Who ever thought that the freedom to just get a haircut (non-essential!) could put you into legal trouble? Buying a new pair of pants (non-essential!)? Sitting down to a nice meal (non-essential)? Each of us can think of LOTS of things along these same lines but they all end up in the same spot: Government taking control of even the trivial of actions under the rubric of “safety and security”.
I’m now well off-topic of the original Quote but a great example is this: Governor Sununu, under the political pressure by the Democrats, has “taken” private property (mostly wealth) from citizens:
- Emergency Order #3 – people don’t have to pay for services, thus denying monies due to the providers. So how do they, in turn, pay their bills and employees? The so called money tree that Progressives believe all busineses have? This is a form of “taking” as Sununu says nothing about the Government reimbursing said entities for their Government mandated losses.
- Emergency Order #4 – people don’t have to worry about eviction/foreclosure from non-payment of rents / mortgages. Again, back to the money tree – how do these folks pay their bills – and how are landlords supposed to pay THEIR mortgages and bills if renters can just not pay up? Again, this is Government mandated transfer of wealth (or more technical, a breaching of the legal contract that some need to pay others for contracted services and private contracts) from one group to another. This is a form of “taking” as Sununu says nothing about the Government reimbursing said entities for their Government mandated losses.
I have an idea that I’ll be talking about such stuff even more in the near term future.
(H/T: Cafe Hayek)
